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Finnegans Wake
    #6715765 -

Anyone here ever read Finnegans Wake? I am right now, really enjoying it. Its so multi dimensional in how it is written, the wordplay is amazing, and it brings the writing up to new levels of meaning i never thought could be possible.

Its so mentally taxing to read because, for me at least, I have to pay so much attention to the wordplay to actually understand what Joyce was trying to say. I've tried reading it sober before to no avail, I seem to only be able to achieve the concentration necessary to re4ad it when I'm high, (its fun to read shrooming too, just not on any intellectual level.)

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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: xFrockx]
    #6716058 -

I've read the first 50 pages about 15 times and skimmed the rest. It's a book that I plan on reading my entire life. It really is amazing and IMO is the most immense novel ever written.

The problem with reading it though, is that it makes reading anything else incredibly difficult and I find myself beginning to think and talk in the punny language the book is written it.

Joseph Campbell, the famous mythologist, said he eventually had to quit reading it because he saw all past, present and future events already taking place in it. That's nuts.

I began reading it because all the biggest intellectuals of our time always mention it. Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Joseph Campbell and Marshal McLuhan to name a few, have been obsessed with it.


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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: Penguarky Tunguin]
    #6717595 -

I am just beginning to see how deep it is, its just wild. I almost feel like I enter a new way of thinking when I read it.

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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: xFrockx]
    #6718427 -

Honestly it seems like the kind of book written by someone who wanted to prove his cock size in literary knowledge. I liked Ulysses a lot more

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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: TheCow]
    #6718578 -

I think it was something much different, to me, it seems like Joyce wrote this solely to push the limits of the English language, not necessarily for ego, but for himself.

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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: xFrockx]
    #6719300 -

Exactly. He had exhausted all literary techniques in Ulysses and had to create a new technique. Finnegans Wake is it.


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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: xFrockx]
    #6723784 -

I like the folk song. Is it about a guy that dies? Then when the family gets in a fight and breaks a bottle of whisky over the coffin, does he wake up again? Or is the song different then the book?

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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: Corporal Kielbasa]
    #6723896 -

That folk song is woven into the book deeply, along with everything else.


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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: chunder]
    #6724479 -

Joyce mentions a few other songs too, cant recall titles at the moment

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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: xFrockx]
    #6724484 -

I must admit, I've tried to read this book in the past.

I think I would have to devote several months of my life to reading this, and for someone who reads a book a day, thats a big commitment.

Maybe sometime when I have a *TON* of free time...


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After one comes, through contact with it's administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action.  If you cannot throw it at least you can always drink out of it.  - Ernest Hemingway

If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it.  In the law courts, in business, in government.  There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.    -Cormac MacCarthy

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.  - Aeschylus

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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: Madtowntripper]
    #6725735 -

Joseph Campbell read the book every night for 40+ years.  He tells a story of how he would go to sleep with his wife in one arm and Finnegans Wake in the other.  :laugh:


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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: Penguarky Tunguin]
    #6729594 -

I think I've weighed in on Joyce with you guys before. I am a serious student of serious literature but I found Joyce utterly impenetrable. The Irish vernacular he slathers himself in is basically impenetrable to an American, and maybe a Brit as well, without a guide. Like reading the Aeneid in Latin.


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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: zappaisgod]
    #6731576 -

zappaisgod said:
without a guide.


Read some of the guides then. There are some excellent ones.


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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: Penguarky Tunguin]
    #6731930 -

The most "penetratable" book of Joyce is "Portrait of the artist as a young man".

I enjoyed Ulysses, but Finnigans wake is too much for me. I've seen an edition with on the left page the original text and on the right page the translation into my language. It absolutely made no sense at all and I wondered how much headache this must have caused the translators :smile:


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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: zappaisgod]
    #6732771 -

zappaisgod said:
I think I've weighed in on Joyce with you guys before. I am a serious student of serious literature but I found Joyce utterly impenetrable. The Irish vernacular he slathers himself in is basically impenetrable to an American, and maybe a Brit as well, without a guide. Like reading the Aeneid in Latin.


I couldn't disagree more. He lays it on pretty thick sometimes, but for me at least, a freshman in college, I can understand about 2/3 of it with some difficulty, but it's by no means impenetrable. The hard part is opening all of your subconscious knowledge while you read it, and allow that to translate all of his symbolism. It's almost like it takes a whole other reading strategy than any other book.

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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: xFrockx]
    #6733917 -

I cant imagine how anyone can understand it without understanding an incredible amount of past literature and myths, celtic/norse legends, and whatever else he decided to throw in there. I skimmed through a guide to the book at some point and to make sense of the book it seemed to me one had to know a vast array of history

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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: TheCow]
    #6734454 -

Here's what Joyce said about reading Finnegans Wake:

"You are not Irish... and the meaning of some passages will perhaps escape you. But you are Catholic, so you will recognize this and that allusion. You don't play cricket; this word may mean nothing to you. But you are a musician, so you will feel at ease in this passage. When my Irish friends come to visit me in Paris, it is not the philosophical subtleties of the book that amuse them, but my recollection of O'Connell's top hat."

That's why people read this book for 40+ years. The more times you gether knowledge and the more times you re-read this book, the more you're gonna get from it.


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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: Penguarky Tunguin]
    #6734576 -

its the only book worth reading. The most amazing creation of a last few centuries.
it cannot be read in any number of years, for it has no end. Its an experience not a book.
With guides and patience, something of it can be read. And regardless, its so easy to enjoy it. My current fav is the rivers chapter (8).

Memorising parts of that book is also wery fun. Reading it aloud is great. Hearing readings of it as well.
Guides are absolutely necessary. Though one can count on them being insufficient, it will probably take centuries before its explored enough to be understood in all details.

And however one reads it, have you noticed how it has an 'overflow' characteristic, where one simply cant help laughing reading it, for no particular statement, just the overabundance of individually brilliant puns?
Ive fantacized many times of finding a reading group for the wake, but it seems unlikely Ill find it here..

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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: aryah]
    #6734889 -

:yesnod:


Where is "here" for you?


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Re: Finnegans Wake [Re: aryah]
    #6735510 -

aryah said:
its the only book worth reading.



Noxiously absurd.

Now that we have gotten rid of the nonsense let me respond to what Joyce said. I am not Irish, I am not Catholic and I do not play cricket. Further, the 2/3rds threshold of understandable English is not high enough. I can do better with Chaucer. If he wrote this book strictly for cricket playing papist mickeys I'm sure it's a work of absolute genius. To them. Not to mention it's historical context, the loss of which rather degrades Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver's Travels, Vanity Fair and all of Dickens as well. Sorry, I am not quite willing to prostrate myself before the altar of the ultimate Irish poseur.


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