religion scoffs pathetic
I remember trying to read Ulysses, getting about 200 pages in, and thinking “I remember understanding one sentence of this book. What am I doing here?” and putting it down forever.
I respect their commitment to the bit though.
r/nottheonion
Wow, so it’s finally time for them to read something new!
I suggest “The Subspace Emissary’s Worlds Conquest”
There’s a lovely annotated edition which explains all the collected puns!! http://finwake.com
A vague fourth place to Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.
But yeah, if you are one of the three people in the world who has completed Finnegans Wake, really? Get yourself a real life.
I have to wonder, since they are looping back to the beginning after 28 years, how they feel their view of those first few pages has changed.
Do they even remember what they discussed 28 years ago
Imagine the incredonly strange and esoteric deja by these people will experience
Lmao I’ve tried to crack that nut before. Made it about 3 pages in before I gave up.
Joyce made almost every word a double-entendre or a pun, often across multiple languages. There are also countless Biblical and literary allusions. So unless you’re a polyglot, extremely well-read and brilliant on almost a savant-type level, it’s going to be a slog.
I think that’s why it works for a reading club, you can use all the mindpower together!
Didn’t Nabokov hate it as well? He actually fulfills a lot of that criteria, can actually appreciate the multi-lingual puns with an added poetic resonance, and I believe was already a fan of Joyce’s other works, but still abhored it.
Here is what Nabokov had to say on his views of Finnegans Wake in comparison to Ulysses:
You have granted that Pierre Delalande influenced you, and I would readily admit that influence-mongering can be reductive and deeply offensive if it tries to deny a writer’s originality. But in the instance of yourself and Joyce, it seems to me that you’ve consciously profited from Joyce’s example without imitating him-- that you’ve realized the implications in Ulysses without having had recourse to obviously “Joycean” devices (stream-of-consciousness, the “callage” effects created out of the vast flotsam and jetsam of everyday life). Would you comment on what Joyce ! has meant to you as a writer, his importance in regard to his liberation and expansion of the novel form?
My first real contact with Ulysses, after a leering glimpse in the early twenties, was in the thirties at a time when I was definitely formed as a writer and immune to any literary influence. I studied Ulysses seriously only much later, m the fifties, when preparing my Cornell courses. That was the best part of the education I received at Cornell. Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce’s writings, and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac! I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake’s facade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.
Ulysses towers over the rest of Joyce’s writings, and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate Finnegans Wake is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac! I am. Moreover, I always detested regional literature full of quaint old-timers and imitated pronunciation. Finnegans Wake’s facade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement.
Source: http://www.kulichki.com/moshkow/NABOKOW/Inter06.txt
EDIT: Garbage formatting on reddit took me an age to make it not double-spaced.
Wow, that question truly rings with the voice of a pompous jagoff
Shit, have you read Finnegans Wake? Sounds like a douchebag trying to impress ladies with the random language snippets he learned while on vacation in Europe.
Joyce was a genius and a polyglot. Not some random dude.
It screams mental psychosis or drugs honestly I can’t believe people think it actually makes any sense 🤣
So it is just pedantry.
So unless you’re a polyglot, extremely well-read and brilliant on almost a savant-type level,
Yes! No… Definitely not.
learning about this article is the highlight of my year.
Shocked it only took 28 years. Great article.
That’s my entire lifetime. Bunch of maniacs.
People make the mistake (understandbly) that the Wake should be read like a typical novel. The book, because it ends and begin in midsentence really doesn’t have a “beginning.”
There was a letter Joyce wrote where he talked about 12 or so meanings for a single sentence. The Wake is best understood as a “reference” book where you open it up to a section, read a few sentences, like poetry, think about the allusions and references and then put back down. It’s a body of text to Access instead of Read, if that makes sense.
Ulysses is much closer to a novel (even in the phantastical parts) than the Wake is. Ulysses is best served when read traditionally.
EDIT: Ebert had a great bit about the movie “Finding Forrester” when the camera pans down upon the stack of books upon the main character’s stand and noticing that of all the titles, Finnegans Wake was the only one with the spine unbent or unopened.
I’ve also struggled with Joyce.
Her autobiography “Joyce DeWitt: She’s Company” is… dense.
This article sounds like those readers are going through a trip
As an aside, it’s bewildering and absurd that Ulysses is being banned in school libraries in the US due to sexual content.
If some kid is reading and understanding James Joyce, just give them a pizza party and a full scholarship.
Funny enough that’s essentially the argument that persuaded the US supreme court to lift the obscenity ban on Ulysses. They figured that anyone reading the book would have to think hard enough to get at the actual sexual content that there’d be no way they could be getting their rocks off at the same time.
Must be why Gravity’s Rainbow never came up either. Anyone interested in banning books probably didn’t make it through the first page lol.
I thought it was that the content was taboo, but not meant to titillate, and thus not obscene.