Finnegans Wake.

[Anonymous No.22787688]

Be honest. Can any of you understand what the fuck this means without googling it or are you all just pretending?

[Anonymous No.22787692]

>he doesn't know

[Anonymous No.22787720]

>>22787688
Obviously taking things out of context will make less sense.

[Anonymous No.22787799]

>>22787688
It's meant to be an exploratory wank in line with Jabberwock (The frumious Bandersnatch!), albeit to the nth degree. All in all he wrote to piss on the reader's faces with complexity for its own sake more than anything else. Your time is better spent elsewhere desu

[Anonymous No.22787808]

the second one obv a reference to aristophanes

[Anonymous No.22787828]

>>22787720
That's just the first page

[Anonymous No.22787839]

>>22787799
>for its own sake
ni**as who use this phrase or "art for art's sake" are fucking cooked

>>22787692
aligned

>> It is very late, it is always too late with Joyce, I shall say only two words. I do not yet know in what language, I do not know in how many languages. How many languages can be lodged in two words by Joyce, lodged or inscribed, kept or burned, celebrated or violated?

>> HEWAR

[Anonymous No.22787846]

these are random sentences out of context but even so you can get things out of it relatively easily.
the second one for example is a description of a primordial conflict. "wills against wonts" is obvious. "oyster gods and fishy gods" is intuitively interesting imagery even if you don't catch the ostrogoths/visigoths pun or the oyster/fish pagan/christian thing. "brekkekkekekek", even if you don't look into what these come from (I think it's Aristophanes) is just good fun onomatopoeia that you might hear in such a conflict.
the third one seems really obvious aside from the long word in brackets, "the fall of a once well-straight old man/father(pere)/au pair is recounted" etc. then the long word in brackets looks like another onomatopoeia of what his fall sounded like, yes? nothing too crazy.
first and last ones are harder because you've cut out the start of the sentences, but you get the idea.
you'll never understand every single word, but I think it's easier to follow along with than people usually say it is.

[Anonymous No.22787854]

>>22787839
>ni**as
>fucking cooked
Zoomer detected. Opinion discarded.

[Anonymous No.22787873]

>>22787688
Trying to fully understand finnegan’s wake is a sucker’s game and the book is a decisive middle-finger to academics who think they can decipher it. The point is not to examine it under a specific lens of interpretation but immerse yourself in the turbulent flow of its language (which is already several), not a singular language that monopolises all others (English) but an absolute language that cannot be exhausted in translation (whether into different languages, interpretative framings, mediums, etc.). If you’re well-read enough, have an aptitude for several languages (including ancient ones) and a polymath attention to a range of different fields, then you might be in a position where you can actually know what the fuck is going on in this book. But that’s unimportant. Real OGs know that true satisfaction comes from reading the book out loud.

[Anonymous No.22787988]

>>22787688
Uhh, something about mudslimes?

[Anonymous No.22788602]

>>22787854
Your loss glossing over the Derrida that makes up the second half of my post, retard! :P

[Anonymous No.22789124]

Understanding of the book comes from becoming a deep thinker yourself, reading the Bible and any other ancient literature, reading English literature besides Shakespeare, reading Tolstoy past Anna Karenina, coming to conclusions Joyce came to. Annotations will get you nowhere.
TS Eliot was right to say that future readers need to be educated to appreciate Joyce. Reading annotations from contemporaries is not being educated in the way Eliot meant.

[Anonymous No.22789212]

>>22787688
I can understand it, but I can't explain it in plain English, much like explaining advanced mathematics without specialized terminology.

[Anonymous No.22789224]

>>22789124
>readers need—
>Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh!
>. . . to be educated to apprecia—
>BABABADALGHARAGHTAKAMMINARRONNKONNBRODENENTHURNUK!
>Joyce . .

[Anonymous No.22789606]

>>22789224
it takes awhile to appreciate simplicity

[Anonymous No.22789614]

>>22787688
It's meant to be an artistic way to express that the narrator is currently having a stroke, setting the theme of the rest of the book.

[Anonymous No.22789667]

>>22787688
Kék suck my Kóax

[Anonymous No.22789734]

>Finnegans Wake, as great a literary white elephant as Faust, is a very humorous book, once you've learned to read it, but it abounds in Joycean good faith. Devote an inordinate part of your lifetime to Finnegans Wake, and it will reward your labors; that is its design.
>A study of the Western Canon that organizes itself by Vico's cycles could hardly neglect Finnegans Wake, which relies upon Vico for some of its structural principles. Since the Wake, more than Ulysses, is the only authentic rival our century has produced for Proust's In Search of Lost Time, it takes a place here as well. The movement misnamed "multiculturalism," which is altogether anti-intellectual and anti-literary, is removing from the curriculum most works that present imaginative and cognitive difficulties, which means most of the canonical books. Finnegans Wake, Joyce's masterpiece, presents so many initial difficulties that one has to be anxious about its survival.
>Finnegans Wake, all critics agree, begins where Ulysses ends: Poldy goes to sleep, Molly broods magnificently, and then a larger Everyman dreams the book of the night. This new Everyman, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, is too huge to have a personality, any more than Albion, the Primordial Man of Blake's epics, is a human character. That is always my only sadness in turning from Ulysses to the Wake; the Wake is richer, but I lose Poldy though I gain what Joyce called a "history of the world." It is a very peculiar and powerful history, including literary history, and takes all of literature as its model, unlike Ulysses, which founded itself upon a curious amalgam of Hamlet and The Odyssey.

[Anonymous No.22789862]

I think I understand what he is trying to do: he not convey all the information expositorily—maybe because it would be too boring or regurgitating from his perspective—but expression-intrinsic-ly ie the words or phrases express more than the concept they represent eg chaise or chare instead of chair. They could say something about the narrator, Joyce himself, someone or thing he alludes to, . . . or be simply jokes (which do make a statement only by its presence)

[Anonymous No.22790510]

>>22787688
>blackguardise
that's a good one

[Anonymous No.22790580]

>>22787688
People's takes on Finnegans Wake are sometimes so frustrating. The most superficial ones tend to be on the lines of disclaiming meaning: eg. the book is nonsense, Jabberwocky-esque (>>22787799), b) the book is merely an endless academic prank (>>22787873). These are not wrong takes, both are important aspects of the book, but they are very lazy takes. Finnegans Wake has the peculiar distinction of being a book more written about than read, because many people like writing these kind of takes to convince themselves they don't have to read it.
>>22787846 is much more grounded on the exegetical work of actually reading the book rather than merely writing about it, and therefore in my opinion the best take by an anon in the thread.
Bloom's take (>>22789734) is of course also very good. He doesn't say much about the text itself in The Western Canon so much as the relationships between it and other texts, but he at least shows that he has probably read it as well as what other critics say about it.
My question to you OP is why anyone should have to understand the references without googling, and furthermore what makes you think that simply aggregating the references would amount to an understanding of the book? I don't agree with "annotations will get you nowhere" as >>22789124 says, because it's inherently interesting and important to discover the sources of the letters on the page, but I will say that annotations of course cannot get you all the way. Meaning is derived holistically and contextually, and it's also never final or "finished", never static and dead, locked up in reference books, but rather a constant process of reading and discovery. The first word of the book is "riverrun": think of reading the book like Heraclitus' river. Have fun with looking for sources and reference books and discover what the Wake has to offer you.

[Anonymous No.22790790]

>>22790580
>riverrun
What is riverrun? Is it "river run"? Like "The river runs . . .", meaning "Leaving Adam and Eve's behind, the river flows from . . ."

I guess it means something more eg it is in lower case