What to Make of Finnegans Wake? (2012)
nybooks.com
nybooks.com
I recommend reading a couple pages [1] to get a feeling for Finnegans Wake - it's amazing the density of concepts Joyce crams into words, with multiple meanings in almost every word. I kept thinking the book would make more sense if I kept reading, but no, it's like this the whole way through. A few things get better, for instance, the initials HCE constantly appear, so in the first sentence you should get an aha feeling from "Howth Castle and Environs". But that's a pretty small payoff.
If you enjoyed the book and found it hilarious, more power to you. But as someone who likes challenging books and put a lot of time into Finnegans Wake, the book didn't do it for me.
[1] Finnegans Wake is online at http://finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm along with detailed notes, but unlike Shakespeare, looking up mystery words doesn't make things any clearer.
Can imagine Joyce chuckling to himself as he imagined generation of literary critics and bedevilled students trying to make sense from its fractured dreamscape.
I love the book, though. It's words come closest to capturing in words what it is like to dream. Glimpsed fragments of meaning, locations and people and ideas that shift and stir in and out of existence. A lingering sense that there was some kind of narrative there, but there's no way you could ever describe in words what it was.
(g) The reliable readiness of critics, doctoral candidates, and know-it-alls to enshrine difficulty for its own sake, to rise to the bait of erudite obscurity that Joyce laid for us in this, the greatest literary prank ever played (outside of revealed religion).
This is how I feel about the two books by J.M. Coetzee[1] I've read, Disgrace and The Childhood of Jesus, minus the 'elaborate' part, they're simply practical jokes, and wholly unremarkable. A bit like Jean Micheal Basquiat's art. That's not art, it's a fucking joke. Coetzee must be having a good chuckle when he sees the critics write "a masterpiece" and "richly enigmatic".
That's just my opinion, of course.
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
Agreed that cognitive dissonance could be a part of the part of propaganda that is hatefacts.
edit: typo
"Everyone ought to read whatever books they fucking want" isn't that useful as an intellectual opinion. Yes, fine, but what kind of books should we want to read if we want to lead our lives the best way possible? Why read at all?
That addresses the "where does it come from?" but not the "why", which I would generalize as entertainment distracts from the pursuit of a better way of living.
So where did it originally come from? Who did it or said it first? I have absolutely no idea, nor do I care. So, yeah, you're on your own. :-)
"An example of a natural but non-necessary desire is the desire for luxury food. Although food is needed for survival, one does not need a particular type of food to survive. Thus, despite his hedonism, Epicurus advocates a surprisingly ascetic way of life. Although one shouldn't spurn extravagant foods if they happen to be available, becoming dependent on such goods ultimately leads to unhappiness."
" "Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up. "
That is, if you're the kind of person who thinks deeply about things, looks for insights and connections, questions how things work, etc., you're going to draw some insight from a James Patterson book, or Stephen King or whatever.
OTOH, if you're not that kind of person, you can force yourself to grind through mechanically reading the words of Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow, or Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake or whatever, and wind up no better off at the end than if you'd read from a random word generator for the same period of time.
What's more, it's deceptive, because it sounds sage and insightful and worth pondering, particularly because it's well-worded and comes from a famous author, but in point of fact it's just another guy saying "Read what I deem to be of quality, not what you enjoy reading." His own skill as an author does not change that.
There's something of value to be found in most written works, one way or another, and they all have different purposes.
What's pretentious is taking such strong issue with a statement that starts with "I think we ought...". I think you ought to get over yourself, as Kafka was expressing an opinion, one with which you're free to disagree. Argue your dissent, even if it's just "Kafka? Yeah, fuck that guy.", but stamping your foot because you perceived it as some dead guy telling you what to do is just silly, IMO.
As to the topic at hand, I like me some entertainment fiction on occasion, but I'll never make the claim that Stephen King's latest changed my life.
Would you say the same thing about an excellent coder recommending elegant code they didn't write?
Those who interpret words in such a narrow and literalistic way, though, would probably be best off skipping his works.
Notice I didn't pronounce a judgement on Kafka: I pronounced a judgement on the quote's implied meaning when presented in isolation as it was.
But frankly I would not be surprised if he did mean it literally and exactly. After all, it does seem to be in line with Kafka's work, doesn't it? Avoid happiness, court misery and grief? That could be a tagline to a Kafka biopic.
But it's just his opinion. Some people like happy endings. And to imply that a feel-good story isn't worth reading is the true narrow opinion. As though Pixar's films were not sufficiently profound for lack of tragedy. Good god, imagine if Kafka was the creative director at Pixar! "Finding Nemo" would be an endless and fruitless search probably resulting in the father descending to madness and wondering if he ever had a son at all.
I read for entertainment or to learn new things about stuff that interests me.
I may be in the minority, but when I read someone's thoughts on Joyce I don't particularly want to decipher a new metaphor or two per sentence. If that was my intention I would just pick up the original.
At some point in the course of that year, my younger son and his classmates wrote poems about their parents, immortalizing their most salient aspects and traits, and in my son’s poem I am depicted, arrested for an instant in the midst of the eternity it must have seemed to him, “reading Finnegans Wake.” If in his poem he erected a kind of statue to his father, then Finnegans Wake was the pigeon that had come to roost on my hat.
“What’s it about?” the same boy asked me, not long after the omnipresent bird had first alighted on the paternal tricorne.
p.s. I didn't look at the article's author until I finished it, and I cannot believe he is the writer of something as good as "Kavalier & Clay"... Maybe Chabon wrote in an obnoxious way to mirror the obnoxiousness of FW.
(I personally very much enjoyed Portrait... and Ulysses - the latter is very difficult in places, but on the whole an astonishing achievement. I'm saving Finnegans Wake for my retirement.)
genius.com has an annotated Ulysses, [0] and it might be even better to listen and read at the same time.
First, Frank Delaney is doing a wonderful podcast, "Re: Joyce"[1], unpacking the novel in short segments. The original episodes cover just a few sentences each; lately the format has expanded to a whole page, in the hope that he'll finish before 2040! Currently, he's just started in on "Scylla and Charybdis", the ninth chapter. His enthusiasm for Joyce and Ulysses is deep and delightful.
Second, in 1982, the Irish radio station RTE produced an essentially unabridged dramatic reading of the novel. Besides being a terrific way to experience the book, it nicely counters one of the major difficulties for newcomers to Ulysses: Distinguishing dialog and internal monologue from narration, and deciding who, exactly, is saying what! It's available for free on archive.org[2].
I also read 'A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man' and didn't think much of it. I made it through Ulysses, but frankly half the time I could barely understand WTF was going on. I started on Finnegan's Wake and gave up after realizing that the prose wasn't going to get any less crazy.
Dubliners though is quite accessible and a very nice read.
But Finnegan's Wake, yeah. Too much for me. There are moments in Ulysses that touch that, but then reign back into focus, but Wake is just beyond me.
Do others also find this article very hard to read? (Esp sentences like the one above)