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Can anyone recommend a way to appreciate Finnegans Wake? I'm a lit buff, high-IQ by and standard (among those whose IQs are measurable at least) and have found

Can anyone recommend a way to appreciate Finnegans Wake? I'm a lit buff, high-IQ by and standard (among those whose IQs are measurable at least) and have found this book impenetrable. Yet I feel drawn to it.

grzm 9y ago
Pick up a copy of annotations, such as Roland McHugh’s. I found it interesting on an intellectual level, but in the end it felt more like decoding than enjoying literature. Of course, tastes do vary! Give it a shot. I expect 2000 words submitted by next Friday.
- twoWhlsGud 9y ago
  Those help, as does the realization that FW is the encoded file for some sort of advanced hypermedia (words + sounds) document system where the executable was only ever in James Joyce's head...
anguswithgusto 9y ago
It's enjoyable to listen to (audiobook-wise) after a tall glass of scotch. Not unlike, say, Gertrude Stein. The euphony and cadence of sentences, the unlikely word pairings, the stark impenetrability of it—it gives it the pleasure you'd get from an abstract painting. Certainly not everybody's glass of prune juice, but in those strange moods you can get yourself into, it can sometimes hit the spot. Definitely not required reading for your moral (or even literary) education, though. It's a madman's backflip of a novel; something you'd write for a lark once you knew you had nothing to prove.
- anguswithgusto 9y ago
  Just imagine writing a program with the most perfect, functional, well-documented code.... but obfuscated and self-referential to the point of total unreadability. That's what Joyce did with FW.
  - noonespecial 9y ago
    You can read it. It compiles without so much as a warning. You can even run it right from the command line. But what the hell does it do?
firegrind 9y ago
Try the annotations at finwake.com to get a feel for the hypertext-like layers and connections in the language. Or just acknowledge that it's not going to all make sense in one go and let the text wash around you as you keep reading.
ars 9y ago
What makes you think there is anything there to appreciate? As best as I can tell it's just random sounds and words. It was probably fun to write, but there's no reason to try to read it. You've never heard kids making sound just for fun? To hear the sound of their own voice? It's lots of fun to do, and even join in, but there's nothing there to actually try to study. I read those laudatory praises people have for it, and it's very obvious they are just trying to make themselves seem important and "in the know", when actually it's just nonsense. The Emperor has no clothes. Have we learned nothing from that fable?
- AmVess 9y ago
  It's an execution of literary critics and snobs of that era. Read it a few times once you have gotten used to the dialect, and a few things become readily apparent. Dr Seuss was also very good at poking fun of literary twits.
- lfischer 9y ago
  I doubt that’s true. Even I could make sense of the sentences. Of course it takes some time, but I found it quite clear most of the words are based on either French, Latin, English, German or Italian, and if you know these languages and you think a little bit about them, you can start making out a meaning and I doubt it’s random. There’s even a plot of sorts.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  > What makes you think there is anything there to appreciate? As best as I can tell it's just random sounds and words. It isn’t "random sounds and words". While Joyce chose to make the surface of the book a constant stream of puns and other wordplay by drawing on a large number of languages, Finnegans Wake has a character, story, setting, etc. like any other novel. I personally find the Wake tiresome – who was the contemporary of Joyce’s who called the book something like an “electrified punning machine”? – but "Emperor’s new clothes” it definitely isn’t.
  - ars 9y ago
    Take a look at this line: "growing hoarish under his turban and changing cane sugar into sethulose starch". I understand the words. hoarish means hairy, and sethulose is an obvious misspelling of cellulose. Good. Lots of wordplay as you say. But the actual sentence doesn't make any sense. That's the issue. Growing hair has nothing to do with cellulose, and humans don't make cellulose anyway. Plants make cellulose out of sugar - but why specify "cane"? Because it sounded cool to him, but not because it actually makes any sense. You are finding "character, story, setting" only because you are ignoring any parts that don't make sense, then finding meaning in the rest. It's a form of pareidolia. The fact that someone made pareidolia in written form? Pretty cool. But don't think there is anything there to study, other than wordplay and sounds. There isn't. And that's why it's the "Emperor’s new clothes”.
Baeocystin 9y ago
It is the literary equivalent of nerd sniping with a grid array of infinite resistors. Take it as such, and it can be enjoyable to dip your toes in here and there. Expect a train of thought longer than a few cars long and you will be disappointed. But individual elements occasionally delight.
psyc 9y ago
It's something that has been done to death in painting and music composition. It was inevitable that someone would attempt it with literature, and that someone else would praise it.
jamesblonde 9y ago
Write a good LSTM to generate new chapters in it, would be a good way to start, like this one: https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/5/24/writing-finnegans-wake-with-a-recurrent-neural-net https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/5/24/writing-finnegan...
pymai 9y ago
ive found that I enjoy reading about the wake more than reading the text itself. there's plenty of books around that walk you through the text but I've never got around to reading any of them. most of the things I've picked up have just been tidbits here and there online there some audio on YouTube of the man himself reading a short passage that helps get an idea of how some of the words sound https://youtu.be/M8kFqiv8Vww https://youtu.be/M8kFqiv8Vww the mckenna video above was my introduction to the wake and its well worth a listen. i jumped into the deep end with the wake a few years back without ever reading his earlier work but im listening to a podcast now by frank delaney where he goes through ulysses line by line and christ is that book dense. there are so many references that in some episodes he only gets through a single line! I'm thinking now that maybe ulysses is the deep end and the wake is one of those huge sink holes that collapse and swallow whole buildings.
vixen99 9y ago
FW - 17 years in the writing. You might try the great critic Harold Bloom as a guide. "The end of Finnegans Wake, the monologue of the dying Anna Livia-mother, wife, and river-is frequently and rightly esteemed by critics as the most beautiful passage in all of Joyce."— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: Joyce's Agon with Shakespeare.
oska 9y ago
Read it out loud to yourself. Don't try to puzzle out the meaning. Just enjoy the play of language. I read the whole thing like that over 2 to 3 months and there were quite a few occasions where the beauty of the language sent shivers down my spine (and also quite a few laughs, because there are some quite amusing wordplays). I haven't read it again since then but I have returned to my favourite parts.
bjoli 9y ago
I appreciate it in a very simple way. I am very much average IQ (the absolute top of the bell curve!). I read a lot. For a while, I read 120 books per year. Now, with a daughter and a full time job, I read maybe 2 books a month. Once in a while you will meet someone that will say Ulysses is their most favourite book. About half the time, that is literary posing. I actually forced myself to read Finnegans wake (which as we all understand is easily translatable) in a language that isn't my own (english). I did it for two reasons. The less important one is that I can actually say I have read it without giving up. Giving up is very much in my character, so it was about proving myself to myself. The second reason is very childish. Sometimes you meet literary posers. You know them when you meet them. They never left the teenage phase of identifying with geniouses just by being able to namedrop them. It has given me great pleasure about 3 or 4 times to be able to say "Ulysses is a nice book, but it is but a mere warming up for a greater piece. Which of the interpretations do you find most in line with your own". Childish. I know.
pymai 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1dNTUu2MLg&t=892 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1dNTUu2MLg&t=892

grzm 9y ago

Pick up a copy of annotations, such as Roland McHugh’s. I found it interesting on an intellectual level, but in the end it felt more like decoding than enjoying literature. Of course, tastes do vary! Give it a shot. I expect 2000 words submitted by next Friday.

twoWhlsGud 9y ago
Those help, as does the realization that FW is the encoded file for some sort of advanced hypermedia (words + sounds) document system where the executable was only ever in James Joyce's head...

anguswithgusto 9y ago

It's enjoyable to listen to (audiobook-wise) after a tall glass of scotch. Not unlike, say, Gertrude Stein. The euphony and cadence of sentences, the unlikely word pairings, the stark impenetrability of it—it gives it the pleasure you'd get from an abstract painting. Certainly not everybody's glass of prune juice, but in those strange moods you can get yourself into, it can sometimes hit the spot. Definitely not required reading for your moral (or even literary) education, though. It's a madman's backflip of a novel; something you'd write for a lark once you knew you had nothing to prove.

anguswithgusto 9y ago
Just imagine writing a program with the most perfect, functional, well-documented code.... but obfuscated and self-referential to the point of total unreadability. That's what Joyce did with FW.
- noonespecial 9y ago
  You can read it. It compiles without so much as a warning. You can even run it right from the command line. But what the hell does it do?

firegrind 9y ago

Try the annotations at finwake.com to get a feel for the hypertext-like layers and connections in the language. Or just acknowledge that it's not going to all make sense in one go and let the text wash around you as you keep reading.

ars 9y ago

What makes you think there is anything there to appreciate? As best as I can tell it's just random sounds and words. It was probably fun to write, but there's no reason to try to read it. You've never heard kids making sound just for fun? To hear the sound of their own voice? It's lots of fun to do, and even join in, but there's nothing there to actually try to study. I read those laudatory praises people have for it, and it's very obvious they are just trying to make themselves seem important and "in the know", when actually it's just nonsense. The Emperor has no clothes. Have we learned nothing from that fable?

AmVess 9y ago
It's an execution of literary critics and snobs of that era. Read it a few times once you have gotten used to the dialect, and a few things become readily apparent. Dr Seuss was also very good at poking fun of literary twits.
lfischer 9y ago
I doubt that’s true. Even I could make sense of the sentences. Of course it takes some time, but I found it quite clear most of the words are based on either French, Latin, English, German or Italian, and if you know these languages and you think a little bit about them, you can start making out a meaning and I doubt it’s random. There’s even a plot of sorts.
Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> What makes you think there is anything there to appreciate? As best as I can tell it's just random sounds and words. It isn’t "random sounds and words". While Joyce chose to make the surface of the book a constant stream of puns and other wordplay by drawing on a large number of languages, Finnegans Wake has a character, story, setting, etc. like any other novel. I personally find the Wake tiresome – who was the contemporary of Joyce’s who called the book something like an “electrified punning machine”? – but "Emperor’s new clothes” it definitely isn’t.
- ars 9y ago
  Take a look at this line: "growing hoarish under his turban and changing cane sugar into sethulose starch". I understand the words. hoarish means hairy, and sethulose is an obvious misspelling of cellulose. Good. Lots of wordplay as you say. But the actual sentence doesn't make any sense. That's the issue. Growing hair has nothing to do with cellulose, and humans don't make cellulose anyway. Plants make cellulose out of sugar - but why specify "cane"? Because it sounded cool to him, but not because it actually makes any sense. You are finding "character, story, setting" only because you are ignoring any parts that don't make sense, then finding meaning in the rest. It's a form of pareidolia. The fact that someone made pareidolia in written form? Pretty cool. But don't think there is anything there to study, other than wordplay and sounds. There isn't. And that's why it's the "Emperor’s new clothes”.

Baeocystin 9y ago

It is the literary equivalent of nerd sniping with a grid array of infinite resistors. Take it as such, and it can be enjoyable to dip your toes in here and there. Expect a train of thought longer than a few cars long and you will be disappointed. But individual elements occasionally delight.

psyc 9y ago

It's something that has been done to death in painting and music composition. It was inevitable that someone would attempt it with literature, and that someone else would praise it.

jamesblonde 9y ago

Write a good LSTM to generate new chapters in it, would be a good way to start, like this one: https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/5/24/writing-finnegans-wake-with-a-recurrent-neural-net https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/5/24/writing-finnegan...

pymai 9y ago

ive found that I enjoy reading about the wake more than reading the text itself. there's plenty of books around that walk you through the text but I've never got around to reading any of them. most of the things I've picked up have just been tidbits here and there online there some audio on YouTube of the man himself reading a short passage that helps get an idea of how some of the words sound https://youtu.be/M8kFqiv8Vww https://youtu.be/M8kFqiv8Vww the mckenna video above was my introduction to the wake and its well worth a listen. i jumped into the deep end with the wake a few years back without ever reading his earlier work but im listening to a podcast now by frank delaney where he goes through ulysses line by line and christ is that book dense. there are so many references that in some episodes he only gets through a single line! I'm thinking now that maybe ulysses is the deep end and the wake is one of those huge sink holes that collapse and swallow whole buildings.

vixen99 9y ago

FW - 17 years in the writing. You might try the great critic Harold Bloom as a guide. "The end of Finnegans Wake, the monologue of the dying Anna Livia-mother, wife, and river-is frequently and rightly esteemed by critics as the most beautiful passage in all of Joyce."— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: Joyce's Agon with Shakespeare.

oska 9y ago

Read it out loud to yourself. Don't try to puzzle out the meaning. Just enjoy the play of language. I read the whole thing like that over 2 to 3 months and there were quite a few occasions where the beauty of the language sent shivers down my spine (and also quite a few laughs, because there are some quite amusing wordplays). I haven't read it again since then but I have returned to my favourite parts.

bjoli 9y ago

I appreciate it in a very simple way. I am very much average IQ (the absolute top of the bell curve!). I read a lot. For a while, I read 120 books per year. Now, with a daughter and a full time job, I read maybe 2 books a month. Once in a while you will meet someone that will say Ulysses is their most favourite book. About half the time, that is literary posing. I actually forced myself to read Finnegans wake (which as we all understand is easily translatable) in a language that isn't my own (english). I did it for two reasons. The less important one is that I can actually say I have read it without giving up. Giving up is very much in my character, so it was about proving myself to myself. The second reason is very childish. Sometimes you meet literary posers. You know them when you meet them. They never left the teenage phase of identifying with geniouses just by being able to namedrop them. It has given me great pleasure about 3 or 4 times to be able to say "Ulysses is a nice book, but it is but a mere warming up for a greater piece. Which of the interpretations do you find most in line with your own". Childish. I know.

pymai 9y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1dNTUu2MLg&t=892 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1dNTUu2MLg&t=892