> Take a look at this line
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...