Finnegans Wake: the book the web was invented for | Hacker News Reader

Finnegans Wake: the book the web was invented for

theguardian.com

90 pointsPetiver35 comments

The article points out that the new versions of Finnegans Wake, the web annotations, graphic novel, twitter version, and so forth are all possible because the book has gone out of EU copyright. This is a good example of why limited-duration copyrights are a good thing, and why arbitrary extensions of copyright harm society.

Going back to the book, has anyone read it and found it worthwhile? I never managed to get through more than a few pages and suspect that it's not worth the time and effort to me. I found Ulysses was worth the effort, but I'm not so sure about Finnegans Wake - any dissenting views?

I've held off commenting because I didn't want to look like I was boasting but since you expressly ask, yes, I have read it.

I did it when I was going through a bit of a difficult time and I read the whole thing out loud to myself over about two to three months. The key is to reading it out loud; that's when the magic happens. I didn't try to understand the text and I didn't read any keys to the text; I read it simply for the language experience. There are many (multi-lingual) puns in the text and in this book Joyce elevated punning to a high art.

I found it a very rewarding thing to do and I still return to some of my favourite sections. Many times during my first reading I felt shivers down my spine from the beauty of the language. And that peculiar 'front-lobe' excitement you get when perceiving just plain cleverness.

So yes, I would recommend it, but not as something to master or to 'conquer'. Try reading a few pages out loud and see how that feels. If you like it, read on. If you don't, don't. I've never persevered with books I didn't like; I don't see the point.

I gave it a go back in college, but didn't get far, even with the help of a skeleton key. I tried it because it was reputed to be "hard". But making a bunch of references to things / people / places I never had a hope of knowing about makes it more "obscure" than "hard" in my book.

I remember reading the first few chapters of Ulysses in a high school English class. Our teacher explained that there are entire Masters-level classes on just this book.

When we dug into the text, though, the difficulty was, as you said, just a ton of things we hadn't heard of. Compared to philosophy courses or some CS algorithms — or even wrapping my head around pointers for the first time — the concepts were pretty straight-forward.

I'd be curious to hear how either "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake" compare to Samuel Delany's "Dhalgren". I've yet to read anything by Joyce, but thanks to the University of Adelaide[1] and European (and Australian) copyright terms, I now have both in epub-format, and in my reading queue.

[1] https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/

"Dhalgren" -- what? Why? What do you think are the links between such vastly different works, produced in vastly different eras by authors who could hardly be more unlike each other? Seriously, I'd love to know how you'd relate them.

Others have commented on a description of the literal style/structure of "Dhalgren" that "it sounds a bit like 'Ulysses'". I suppose I'll know once I finish the books by Joyce :-)

There are structural similarities between Finnegan's Wake and Dhalgren because both are circular stories where the end joins up with the beginning.

Why is "hard" a good thing?

Sometimes (but not always), "hard" when applied to literature means thought-provoking and perspective-expanding. Those are good things. Never read this one though, so I'm not sure whether it's "hard" in that sense.

People enjoy overcoming challenges. (People also like to brag.)

I don't think it's possible to understand FW unless you're Irish, to the point of knowing different regional accents and so on. For me it's almost unmanageable on the page, i have to read it out loud and then I can make phonetic inferences, but even with that I feel like I'm missing a good deal because of how times have changed since it was written.

Yes - took 2 Joyce seminars back in college and never got through more than excerpts of FW. Funny process - at first you think Ulysses is hard, and it is, but you get used to that world. FW is dense.

Another work which always seemed made for the Internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project

there is even a precursor to the hyperlink in the way that links to other topics jump around the work and imply multiple connections.

Things like https://mannahatta2409.org/ remind me of what Benjamin did in a way.

> Another work which always seemed made for the Internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project

If we're throwing out ideas, I'd love to see a web version of Rayuela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch_(Julio_Cortázar_nove... ).

I remember reading that. At the time my absolute favorite novel. Its beautiful. He's a great great writer. The short stories. "A Certain Lucas"; "Around the day in 80 worlds" but nothing quite like Hopscotch.

Jumping to film - I always thought that a lecture/ essay on Blowup Blowout and ) a bit of a stretch) The Conversation

all descended from Cortazar's short story would make a great study.

I dunno—I was introduced to the short stories first, and none of the novels compare for me (not even Hopscotch, much as I enjoy it). Cronopios and Famas, We Love Glenda So Much, House Taken Over—he has hilarious, chilling, and beautiful short stories.

yeah, Cortazar stuff is great,

wow, another Lucas fan!

I had the hardest time following Cortazar surrealism.

Part of the reason it stops readers quickly is the opening chapter is much harder than later chapters (that not to say that later chapters are easy, just nowhere near as dense ad the beginning). In that way is kind of like Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" in which part one is by far the hardest to read, since it is written, stream of consciousness, in the mind of a mentally disabled person. Later parts are easier to follow.

Ulysses is definitely doable, but it marks a point when high-brow literature stopped being something every reasonable, intelligent, and educated person enjoys reading. It's a chore (less so than FW, of course), and of questionable value — yeah, it's cool to get all the references to Homer, etc., but I don't think anyone puts down Ulysses with anything other than a sense of relief of having scaled it as an obstacle. (Yes, I studied Ulysses. Voluntarily and on my own time. I don't mean to belittle Joyce's talent. Ulysses is obviously a huge accomplishment, beyond nearly all writers.)

Compare that with, say, Dickens. People would drop what they were doing to read the next installment of Little Dorrit.

> Another work which always seemed made for the Internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project

I think http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/arca... would appeal to you then.

It looks like Eric Meltzer, Max Fenton, and some others may be working on another project based on The Arcades Project.

I took a Joyce class in college. We spent most of the quarter on Ulysses, a chapter at a time. We spent one class period on the first page of Finnegan's Wake.

As you mentioned, you adapt fairly quickly to Ulysses, but Finnegan's Wake is a whole other universe.

I found it helped with both works to mentally read them in an absurdly exaggerated Irish accent. Especially FW.

Personally, I think the biggest benefit that the internet can confer to FW is someone reading it out, rather than providing easier access to annotations.

I suspect FW is best enjoyed when done at pace, letting the poetry of the thing wash over you, rather than sitting down and assiduously looking up every single word, which I can only imagine gets incredibly boring very quickly.

What struck me about Joyce's reading of FW is (a) how quickly he makes his way through it, and (b) how this novel/poem is written for an Irish accent.

Compare Eliot's reading of the Waste Land: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqvhMeZ2PlY

I dunno, Moby Dick is like a whaling blog by a philosophy major complete with "links" to such things as the definition of whiteness and lists of whale types.

Also Tristram Shandy is like the LiveJournal of someone popping dexedrine.

And of course Inquire Within Upon Everything is pretty much literally what the title describes.

This is really cool. I've heard good things about reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on tablets, because all of the footnotes are hyperlinks - easier than using two bookmarks as you read the book. There also was an internet forum for people who would read it each summer, following along and discussing to clarify confusion (called Infinite Summer, I think it's now defunct).

See also the web work of Jorn Barger (coiner of the word blog), predating all of these examples, such as http://web.archive.org/web/20130409060532/http://www.robotwi... (original website seemingly now defunct), and his attempts at linking Joyce with AI.

I managed to get about halfway through FW before calling defeat, even with a guidebook that explained, paragraph by paragraph, what the heck was going on :)

I'm still working through Ulysses and it's definitely tough but manageable. Finnegan's Wake though just seems too difficult right now. I'll need to take a break from Joyce and return later to attempt it.

It opens with: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle & Environs."

and ends:

"A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun,”

and in between: bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnth unntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!

I’ve been waiting for a good translation. maybe burgess??

Pynchon is kind of like this. He layers so much symbolism and allusion layered into every sentence.

My thoughts exactly. Gravity's Rainbow could really benefit from a more, uh, "hypermedia" approach.

When I was in college there was a course called "Finishing Gravity's Rainbow". I didn't take it but I did have a (failed) go at the book at one point a very long time ago. It still seems like something for the bucket list but I honestly have no idea if the reward would be worth the effort. Some of Pynchon's other, more approachable books have been interesting but not, for me, "wow that was truly incredible" interesting.

I've just got this nagging suspicion that, for a non-English-major type, FW is not going to repay the enormous investment of time it would take to get anything out of it. Therefore, I have never bothered, and almost certainly never will.

Milorad Pavic's Khazar Dictionary is another book with hypertext-like structure. You can start reading from any point in the book and it still works OK.

Reading Finnegan's Wake is like reading an optimized Perl script. It's extremely dense and I give up after 10-20 minutes.

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