Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

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>He sold a copy of “Finnegans Wake” to Johnny Depp

This is one of the most fascinating books that I know of. I'm pretty well convinced that the world population of people who have read more than the very beginning and very end probably numbers roughly the count of my fingers and toes combined. Although I think many people

I also think the the only person who ever really understood the book was James Joyce himself. Fluency in multiple languages down to idiomatic expressions and deep etymology seem like strict requirements if you have never occupied the meatspace between Joyce's ears.

Any small portion seems somewhat comprehensible in its highly local environment, and a bit funny or witty in how it's written. But then it breaks down when attempting to connect that piece to the wider whole. And it all makes me feel like I'm reading extremely familiar words whose meaning I can't quite remember.

In refreshing my memory about it before commenting here it made me laugh to see that even the best Wikipedia can say about what goes on in the book is that readers have mostly reach a consensus (but only a consensus!) about normally trivial matter of fact such as the cast of characters, a little less so the plot, but that many other important details amount to poorly mapped terrain.

And because I was born with the usual amount of fingers andntoes, if I met a random person in passing, and they claimed to have read the book completely, I would look at them with as much belief as if they had said "I'm a very powerful leader of one of the G20 nations". Actually I might believe the G20 claim a bit more because I would consider it less likely for someone to make a claim like that when it could so easily be proven false if it was not true.

If I had not encountered the book long ago then I might believe it to be the output of an extremely oddly trained gpt-3 model. I don't mean that to be an insult to the book, it's just the best comparison I can think of to characterize it's contents in modern terms.

This is how fascinating Finnegan's Wake is as a literary work.

Reading Joyce is like listening to Prisencolinensinainciusol. It seems like you should be understanding and comprehending it. All the bits are there. You know what the words/syllables respectively are, but you just can't quite seem to grok any meaning out of it.

I took a Joyce class in college. We spent most of the time going through Ulysses chapter by chapter, but then the last week was devoted entirely to just the first page of Finnegan's Wake.

I can't claim to have read more than maybe 50 pages total, most of them toward the beginning. One thing that helps a lot is to read it aloud, at least softly. And do so with an over-the-top Irish accent. It does make a bit more sense then.

>an over-the-top Irish accent

Hah! I just went through the first page like that and the cadence of an Irish lilt and pronunciation and it did in fact help. I've been through the first page enough times, though none too recently, that doing this really made things click together in my head a bit more.

As I said, it's a fascinating book. As a linguistic accomplishment I cannot quickly think of a rival.

I have this book laying around here. Read the first page and did not understand anything.

Quarks are named after a line in this book so I thought: well give it a try.

Do you have any idea how to tackle this?

I'm making my way through and haven't had any problems besides slowness (which I chose at the beginning not to treat as a problem). I did a little research before starting (for one I listened to the first season of The Cosmic Library podcast) and do a bit more when something strikes my interest (the last little dive was based on the Mookse and Gripes story: https://originalpositions.home.blog/2013/12/27/finnegans-wak...). I read it out loud to my wife some nights as she goes to sleep. It's fun and every so often intelligible; So far it seems worth it to simply press on and not try to comprehend much. I'm a rather dissatisfied monoglot and Joyce has just about managed to put me in love with English.

Also: I had a childhood habit of reading the last page of a novel before starting the book. The Wake is quite possibly the best book ever written to try that on.

It's like abstract art in book form, or trying to interpret a dream that someone else is telling you about. There are glosses of the book out there that give more context to the words and references. Having one of those can fill you in, but it's still going to be a slog.

Maybe I'm unkind, but I've never been a fan of the Wake. It's always seemed to me to be the sort of thing academics in English literature departments and lovers of abstract art really go for, but few other people can appreciate. (Nothing against literature academics or abstract artists -- it's just that their tastes are informed by things that don't inform most people's!)

If you want to appreciate Joyce as a more approachable author, 'Dubliners' is a great collection of short stories and not experimental.

I recommend "Mythic Worlds, Modern Words" by Joseph W. Campbell as a good introduction to the Wake, especially its decryption of the first few paragraphs, which are especially dense -- and not just because they're at the beginning and the reader isn't comfortable yet with the style.

I've read it all the way through three times. (I'm old.) It's worth the time, if you're willing to spend it.

I'm personally trying to read Ulysses, after picking up a book which said that Ulysses was not meant to be super-challenging to read, in fact it was meant for ordinary Irish. What I'm doing is trying to read it, and if I don't understand something, just carrying on.

Finnegan's Wake is another kettle of fish though! I wouldn't know where to start with that.

Yes, Ulysses was much more approachable & comprehensible, and I can see the appeal of the story, but something didn't click for it with me so I ended up reading the bare minimum to get a good grade on it in a college course that covered modern & post modern arts/literature etc.

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