Can anyone recommend a way to appreciate Finnegans Wake?
I'm a lit buff, high-IQ by and standard (among those whose IQs are measurable at least) and have found this book impenetrable. Yet I feel drawn to it.
I'm a lit buff, high-IQ by and standard (among those whose IQs are measurable at least) and have found this book impenetrable. Yet I feel drawn to it.
Definitely not required reading for your moral (or even literary) education, though. It's a madman's backflip of a novel; something you'd write for a lark once you knew you had nothing to prove.
But what the hell does it do?
As best as I can tell it's just random sounds and words. It was probably fun to write, but there's no reason to try to read it.
You've never heard kids making sound just for fun? To hear the sound of their own voice? It's lots of fun to do, and even join in, but there's nothing there to actually try to study.
I read those laudatory praises people have for it, and it's very obvious they are just trying to make themselves seem important and "in the know", when actually it's just nonsense. The Emperor has no clothes. Have we learned nothing from that fable?
Dr Seuss was also very good at poking fun of literary twits.
It isn’t "random sounds and words". While Joyce chose to make the surface of the book a constant stream of puns and other wordplay by drawing on a large number of languages, Finnegans Wake has a character, story, setting, etc. like any other novel. I personally find the Wake tiresome – who was the contemporary of Joyce’s who called the book something like an “electrified punning machine”? – but "Emperor’s new clothes” it definitely isn’t.
I understand the words. hoarish means hairy, and sethulose is an obvious misspelling of cellulose. Good. Lots of wordplay as you say.
But the actual sentence doesn't make any sense. That's the issue. Growing hair has nothing to do with cellulose, and humans don't make cellulose anyway. Plants make cellulose out of sugar - but why specify "cane"? Because it sounded cool to him, but not because it actually makes any sense.
You are finding "character, story, setting" only because you are ignoring any parts that don't make sense, then finding meaning in the rest. It's a form of pareidolia.
The fact that someone made pareidolia in written form? Pretty cool. But don't think there is anything there to study, other than wordplay and sounds. There isn't. And that's why it's the "Emperor’s new clothes”.
Extracting a single line out of a book that (like human communication in general) depends on the wider context of the diction, and then attacking the whole book as nonsense, is fallacious. Come on, l'arbitraire du signe has been well-known for a century now.
> You are finding "character, story, setting" only because you are ignoring any parts that don't make sense, then finding meaning in the rest. It's a form of pareidolia.
A number of commentators on the Wake reached the same agreement on the book’s character and general plot independently of each other in the years immediately following its publication.
In any event, even if the Wake were merely “inventing sounds” (which it isn’t), that still wouldn’t make it “Emperor’s new clothes”. Nonsense poetry has been an established literary genre since the mid-19th century, well before the era of modernism. That ranges from work that obeys the general syntax of the language even if certain words are nonsense, to poems that are outright written in what might as well be a foreign language unintelligible to the reader but attractive because of the words’ inherent musical quality to speakers of the poet’s language. Some of these poems, like Lewis Carroll’s "Jabberwocky" [1] or Sándor Weöres's "Kínai templom" [2] are practically part of their countries’ respective literary canons and commonly read in schools.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
[2] http://www.okm.gov.hu/letolt/retorika/ab/szoveg/komm/kinai.h...
I actually forced myself to read Finnegans wake (which as we all understand is easily translatable) in a language that isn't my own (english). I did it for two reasons. The less important one is that I can actually say I have read it without giving up. Giving up is very much in my character, so it was about proving myself to myself.
The second reason is very childish. Sometimes you meet literary posers. You know them when you meet them. They never left the teenage phase of identifying with geniouses just by being able to namedrop them. It has given me great pleasure about 3 or 4 times to be able to say "Ulysses is a nice book, but it is but a mere warming up for a greater piece. Which of the interpretations do you find most in line with your own".
Childish. I know.
I read the whole thing like that over 2 to 3 months and there were quite a few occasions where the beauty of the language sent shivers down my spine (and also quite a few laughs, because there are some quite amusing wordplays). I haven't read it again since then but I have returned to my favourite parts.
there some audio on YouTube of the man himself reading a short passage that helps get an idea of how some of the words sound https://youtu.be/M8kFqiv8Vww
the mckenna video above was my introduction to the wake and its well worth a listen.
i jumped into the deep end with the wake a few years back without ever reading his earlier work but im listening to a podcast now by frank delaney where he goes through ulysses line by line and christ is that book dense. there are so many references that in some episodes he only gets through a single line! I'm thinking now that maybe ulysses is the deep end and the wake is one of those huge sink holes that collapse and swallow whole buildings.