8 ms·
What to Make of Finnegans Wake? (2012)
- barking 10y agoI'd recommend John Huston's film 'The Dead' to anyone who would like experience something by Joyce. I did read a bit of 'A portrait of the artist as a young man'. He really got into the head of a small boy who was being bullied in one part. I never finished it though, I can't remember why. I don't think that I could ever read Ulysses, I did listen to a reading of it on the BBC's book at bedtime many years ago and liked parts of it. Finnegan's Wake would drive me insane, I'm certain.
- MissLila 10y agoWords of wisdom from @barking, watch "The Dead"!
- barking 10y agoGlad you found it amusing. Re: 'The Dead', I got a copy of it as a present last christmas after boring people for years about what a good film it is, though I hadn't seen it in years. AFAIK it was John Huston's last film and a labour of love (his daughter Angelica is in it). It's a bit dated now (made in the 80s) and low budget but it still holds up imo. The main character has some long thoughts to himself about life, death and how little we really know those closest to us, that are very moving imo.
- bshimmin 10y agoThe Dead is a good film, undeniably, but its basis is the final short story of Dubliners, which is Joyce's most approachable work; everything afterwards was increasingly avant-garde, but Dubliners is at least written according to conventional rules of both English grammar and literature (though there's a lot going on behind the scenes). (I personally very much enjoyed Portrait... and Ulysses - the latter is very difficult in places, but on the whole an astonishing achievement. I'm saving Finnegans Wake for my retirement.)
- barking 10y agoIf I try Ulysses again it will probably be an audiobook, I could never make any headway with it in text. I might try getting hold of Dubliners in book form.
- sago 10y agoJames Norton's audio book of Ulysses is superb, he really captures the beauty of the language. I'd recommend it more as an audiobook that written, at least at first, just as I'd recommend listening to Shakespeare rather than reading the text. genius.com has an annotated Ulysses, [0] and it might be even better to listen and read at the same time. [0]: http://genius.com/albums/James-joyce/Ulysses http://genius.com/albums/James-joyce/Ulysses
- twoodfin 10y agoIf you want to try tackling Ulysses again, I have two recommendations: First, Frank Delaney is doing a wonderful podcast, "Re: Joyce"[1], unpacking the novel in short segments. The original episodes cover just a few sentences each; lately the format has expanded to a whole page, in the hope that he'll finish before 2040! Currently, he's just started in on "Scylla and Charybdis", the ninth chapter. His enthusiasm for Joyce and Ulysses is deep and delightful. Second, in 1982, the Irish radio station RTE produced an essentially unabridged dramatic reading of the novel. Besides being a terrific way to experience the book, it nicely counters one of the major difficulties for newcomers to Ulysses: Distinguishing dialog and internal monologue from narration, and deciding who, exactly, is saying what! It's available for free on archive.org[2]. [1] http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/ http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/ [2] https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook
- barking 10y agoThat's an amazing resource. I remember frank delaney from bbc radio years ago, I had no idea he was still around, looks like he's moved to america and reinvented himself. Thanks for the info.
- loudmax 10y agoJoyce's Dubliners is a collection of short stories, one of which is 'The Dead'. It's quite accessible, and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to read something by James Joyce. I also read 'A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man' and didn't think much of it. I made it through Ulysses, but frankly half the time I could barely understand WTF was going on. I started on Finnegan's Wake and gave up after realizing that the prose wasn't going to get any less crazy. Dubliners though is quite accessible and a very nice read.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- f_allwein 10y agoCame across this nice quote by Kafka recently, which seems relevant: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
- barking 10y agoI don't know how that would apply to books but I can very much relate to it with newspapers. People read papers that agree with their viewpoints, it's unpleasant reading political opinions that go against one's own. It's cognitive dissonance I suppose.
- VLM 10y agoUnless you intentionally want to convert yourself, the propaganda user experience is generally pretty unpleasant. Agreed that cognitive dissonance could be a part of the part of propaganda that is hatefacts.
- lintiness 10y agoi think everyone ought to read whatever books they fucking want. what's with pretentious assholes always telling everybody what they should and shouldn't do?
- keithpeter 10y agoKafka was himself an author. I think authors like to believe that their work changes people, that books and other writing are not simply content to be tailored for specific demographics. His use of 'we' in the quote sort of suggests that he might be speaking mainly for himself. Perhaps he was just trying to explain his particular kind of want.
- user51442 10y agoThere is a rather fine (abridged) audio book of Finnegans Wake by Jim Norton (Bishop Brennan in Father Ted), some of which is on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ks60VrtJ4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ks60VrtJ4Y
- grabcocque 10y agoI like to think that Finnehans Wake was an elaborate practical joke aimed at the literary establishment. Can imagine Joyce chuckling to himself as he imagined generation of literary critics and bedevilled students trying to make sense from its fractured dreamscape. I love the book, though. It's words come closest to capturing in words what it is like to dream. Glimpsed fragments of meaning, locations and people and ideas that shift and stir in and out of existence. A lingering sense that there was some kind of narrative there, but there's no way you could ever describe in words what it was.
- sanderjd 10y agoI've been reading the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman recently, and this is exactly how I feel about them (especially the one I'm currently on: volume 9 "The Kindly Ones").
- zzalpha 10y agoSo you'd subscribe to (g) in his list of possible interpretations: (g) The reliable readiness of critics, doctoral candidates, and know-it-alls to enshrine difficulty for its own sake, to rise to the bait of erudite obscurity that Joyce laid for us in this, the greatest literary prank ever played (outside of revealed religion).
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago> I like to think that Finnehans Wake was an elaborate practical joke aimed at the literary establishment. This is how I feel about the two books by J.M. Coetzee[1] I've read, Disgrace and The Childhood of Jesus, minus the 'elaborate' part, they're simply practical jokes, and wholly unremarkable. A bit like Jean Micheal Basquiat's art. That's not art, it's a fucking joke. Coetzee must be having a good chuckle when he sees the critics write "a masterpiece" and "richly enigmatic". That's just my opinion, of course. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._Coetzee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._Coetzee
- sago 10y agoUlysses is one of, if not my absolute, favourite books. And I don't share the post's dislike of Portrait, either. But Finnegan's Wake, yeah. Too much for me. There are moments in Ulysses that touch that, but then reign back into focus, but Wake is just beyond me.
- HenryTheHorse 10y ago"Portrait" is a little masterpiece. There are sentences and passages in it that make me want to stand up and applaud the genius that is Joyce.
- fhood 10y ago"At times the book would wash up on the beach of my life and I would hear the bottled voice of its djinn, promising everlasting bliss to puzzle hermits, inexhaustible cred to know-it-alls. I always forebore." I may be in the minority, but when I read someone's thoughts on Joyce I don't particularly want to decipher a new metaphor or two per sentence. If that was my intention I would just pick up the original.
- jasim 10y agoFor me it was a supremely enjoyable sentence. The article itself is complex, and what it had to say it could've said in simpler words. But brevity need always not be the soul of wit; at least for some, these flourishes, this showmanship of language, they are a gift to savour.
- ilzmastr 10y ago"Delusions of grandeur" come to mind: At some point in the course of that year, my younger son and his classmates wrote poems about their parents, immortalizing their most salient aspects and traits, and in my son’s poem I am depicted, arrested for an instant in the midst of the eternity it must have seemed to him, “reading Finnegans Wake.” If in his poem he erected a kind of statue to his father, then Finnegans Wake was the pigeon that had come to roost on my hat. “What’s it about?” the same boy asked me, not long after the omnipresent bird had first alighted on the paternal tricorne. p.s. I didn't look at the article's author until I finished it, and I cannot believe he is the writer of something as good as "Kavalier & Clay"... Maybe Chabon wrote in an obnoxious way to mirror the obnoxiousness of FW.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- shams93 10y agoits actually the kind of novel you can generate from ai, the methods he used created a result that reminds me of neural network generated text.
- guybrushT 10y ago"Dubliners there was the unlovable A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which starts well, charting bold, clear routes, like “Araby,” through the trackless waters of childhood, then fouls its rotors in a dense kelpy snarl of cathected horniness, late-Victorian aesthetics, and the Jesuitical cleverness that, even in Ulysses, wearies the most true-hearted lover of Joyce." Do others also find this article very hard to read? (Esp sentences like the one above)
- leephillips 10y agoI found the writing beautiful. I enjoyed the essay very much, including the sentence you quote.
- csanch4 10y ago"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk" Oh the sweet sound of lightning that only Joyce could've understood. Finnegans Wake's concept is great in terms of challenging language and structure, but the unfinished result is a disaster. If anyone dedicates time to analyze FW, then they misspent years trying to understand gibberish.
- DavidTNcl 10y agoNobody cares.
- kens 10y agoAfter an earlier HN discussion extolling Finnegans Wake, I read the book (and read several guide books, and listened to it on several versions of audio), and I have to say that for me it was an epic waste of time. I hate to brand myself a philistine, but want to provide a counterpoint to people who say the book is so funny and a grand experience. I recommend reading a couple pages [1] to get a feeling for Finnegans Wake - it's amazing the density of concepts Joyce crams into words, with multiple meanings in almost every word. I kept thinking the book would make more sense if I kept reading, but no, it's like this the whole way through. A few things get better, for instance, the initials HCE constantly appear, so in the first sentence you should get an aha feeling from "Howth Castle and Environs". But that's a pretty small payoff. If you enjoyed the book and found it hilarious, more power to you. But as someone who likes challenging books and put a lot of time into Finnegans Wake, the book didn't do it for me. [1] Finnegans Wake is online at http://finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm http://finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm along with detailed notes, but unlike Shakespeare, looking up mystery words doesn't make things any clearer.
- spacecop 10y agoThere's always something on Earth to remind me that I'm an idiot. The first page of this is a disaster.