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wjbc t1_jdimrtp wrote

My Irish Literature professor, whom I respected a lot and who taught me to appreciate Joyce’s Ulysses, assured us that Finnegan’s Wake is a work of genius, but he didn’t try to assign it to undergraduates. It seems to be designed for Ph.D. dissertations, but that means it’s quite hard for ordinary readers to understand. Wikipedia has a detailed chapter-by-chapter summary as well as a collection of scholarly opinions about what it all means, if you are interested. But when reading the article you can see that the Wikipedia authors struggled to create a typical synopsis.

Wikipedia quotes Joyce himself comparing the book to a dream, but that doesn’t really clarify much. Yet Joyce insisted that every word had a purpose, if not several purposes, and that there’s a reason it took him so long to write the book. Having studied Ulysses, I believe him, the man was a genius. But I’m this case he was so devious that very few people can fully appreciate his genius.

That said, I feel sure there are now many resources for decoding every line of Finnegan’s Wake on the internet. I’ve always wanted to tackle it by reading and listening to an audio version at the same time, then turning to the internet for enlightenment. But it does seem like a big commitment, and there are always easier books to read.

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Grim-Avatar t1_jdkgvay wrote

I have a faint feeling Joyce’s trolling us with this book …

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That-Soup3492 t1_jdl2ssc wrote

Yes, I've always thought this since I struggled my way through it one summer back in college.

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bravetailor t1_jdkhwm0 wrote

I can honestly believe it. Reading about him, he seems like he would be mischievous enough to do this.

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SuspendedSentence1 t1_jdmnthb wrote

The only thing is that Joyce spent 17 years on the book and alienated many of his supporters by continuing to work on it (and, in their estimation, waste his talent on what seems like gibberish).

It’s certainly been suggested that the book is a joke, but it’s doubtful that he would devote so much time and energy to a joke.

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MowTin t1_jdkh4x8 wrote

I believe there is a kind of art that attempts to be obscure and opaque just so that those who manage to make sense of it can claim to be superior. Yet in reality, no one has made any sense of it because it's nonsense. It's like the modern works of art where the artist splashes paint on a wall and critics and pretentious people praise its deep metaphorical meaning. Or have you ever known the kind of person who just throws out french phrases just to impress people?

I acknowledge that I could be completely wrong. Maybe if I got a Ph.D. in literature and spent a few years studying Joyce that my eyes would be opened to how brilliant Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are.

"Simplicity of language is not only reputable but perhaps even sacred." -- Kurt Vonnegut

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MarcusXL t1_jdkwji1 wrote

Plenty of people have made sense of it. It's not literature in the traditional sense, it's meant to have shifting meanings. It's not a traditional narrative. You're supposed to 'read' by getting impressions of the words, because their amalgamations of other words, it's like a psychedelic trip or a fever-dream. It's like a fractal, in that you can dive into single 'words' or phrases and find varieties of ideas and meanings in several languages and eras.

You supposed to lose track of characters, settings, events. That's all deliberate. There's a method to the madness. If you don't like it, that's perfectly legitimate. But it's not nonsense. It's a work of art, a brilliant one, but Joyce is like a comedian with an extremely specific and absurd sense of humour who doesn't care if anyone else gets the joke.

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redlion145 t1_jdl713e wrote

>It's a work of art, a brilliant one, but Joyce is like a comedian with an extremely specific and absurd sense of humour who doesn't care if anyone else gets the joke.

I like that, that tracks with my take on him. He's certainly a genius, but quite possibly mad as well. Reminds me of Danielewski's House of Leaves in the scope and innovativeness, but also in it's convolution and opacity.

I wouldn't deny anyone the enjoyment of slogging through any of these books if that's your thing, but I don't personally enjoy struggling that much with a leisure activity. I mostly read for fun.

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MarcusXL t1_jdl8y51 wrote

People who like Joyce get a huge amount of fun from reading him, but the Wake in particular is like learning a new language-- or, more accurately, it's like regressing to a more primitive form of language, where words and sounds intuitively invoke feelings and images.

You can "snap into" the language of the Wake, and you find that you're "getting it", getting the meanings that Joyce was intending, without "reading" the words like you normally would. It's emphatically not some kind of high-brow intellectual thing, like reading Continental philosophy, Hegel or Kant or whatever. It's more like a those "magic eye" pictures that were big in the 90s. If you cross your eyes the right way, the image snaps into focus-- until you look away for a second and then it's all a fuzzy mess again.

It's really an amazing achievement in writing, but it's so weird and impenetrable that many people can't make heads or tails of it, and it just seems like nonsense. That's not because the reader is less intelligent or clever. There's just a perceptual 'trick' to it.

Joyce intended it to be an amalgamation of the whole history of European society and literature, but the chronology and the logical/narrative structure is blended, stretched, fractaled, and loops back on itself. It has "the logic of a dream". Look at something, it's one thing. Look away for a second and look back, it's another. You slip through the layers of history, of words/ideas/events/people without any sign-posts or a stable point of view. One character, or object, or event bleeds back into others of the same kind-- or of their opposites.

This is why people find it so frustrating. You can't stop and regain your bearings, you either slip into the stream of consciousness and flow with it, or you're just spun around into you're dizzy and you catch nothing of it.

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Hortonamos t1_jdkv3w4 wrote

That last quote is funny, though, because Vonnegut liked Joyce. Hell, he even praises Joyce in the very same essay that this quote comes from.

It took me like 3 times to read Ulysses, but when I did, I genuinely loved it. That has nothing to do with feeling superior. I loved it enough that I ended up writing my undergrad thesis about it.

Finnegan’s Wake, though, I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I gave up after a couple dozen pages. That doesn’t make it nonsense. But it also didn’t pull me in in a way that made it seem worth the effort. Nobody I’ve ever spoken to has made it seem worth the effort.

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somedudeonline93 t1_jdpowqz wrote

It is a work of genius, but it’s one that’s completely inaccessible to most people. A lot of its words and phrases are puns that span several languages, or allusions to the Bible and other literature. That means to get the best possible understanding without the help of cliff notes, you need to understand multiple languages and have an ocean of knowledge of other literature to draw on.

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Designer_Minimum691 t1_jdnyl37 wrote

>I believe him, the man was a genius. But I’m this case he was so devious that very few people can fully appreciate his genius.

The thing is that a genius writing a book to let the world know how much of a genius he is doesn't do much good to anyone other than their ego.

Hugo, Dickens, Twain, the russians, they were all geniuses.

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wjbc t1_jdnzefm wrote

I really don’t think that was Joyce’s motivation. He was just having fun. And in fact Finnegan’s Wake did not initially earn good reviews, even from critics who loved Ulysses.

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