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The book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake
- silent_cal 3y agoI wonder why people try to read this book when it's not really comprehensible?
- garciasn 3y agoWhy do people spend their entire lives studying the Bible looking for 'meaning'? It's the same thing: academic pursuit/something to do and, frankly, there is nothing at all wrong w/that.
- silent_cal 3y agoPeople who study the Bible that way (myself included) believe the book is inspired by God himself, so that makes sense to me. But nobody believes that about Finnegan's Wake, as far as I know.
- InCityDreams 3y agoIf you believe in God, and God made everything, it's thanks to God Finnegans Wake exists.
- silent_cal 3y agoCouldn't agree more - or at least, whatever is good and true in Finnegan's Wake is thanks to God
- techdragon 3y agoWhy do people like Gravity’s Rainbow… Sometimes art is hard to understand and sometimes it’s good art because it’s deliberately hard to understand to make you think… And other times it’s just incomprehensible garbage that someone managed to sell and everyone is too embarrassed to admit it’s terrible.
- silent_cal 3y agoYeah that's basically what I'm wondering - if it takes 30 years to understand a book can it really belong to the first category instead of the second? Hard to believe..
- hondo77 3y agoI don't remember anyone claiming they understood it when they were "done".
- sverona 3y agoGravity's Rainbow is completely understandable right up until you put the book down for a second.
- FFP999 3y agoThey're not the same. Gravity's Rainbow is downright lucid compared to Finnegan's Wake. Given Joyce was known to be something of a troll, as we would say today, I would not put it past him to have written Finnegan's Wake as a prank.
- techdragon 3y agoI’m not trying to ascribe merit or judge either Finnegan’s Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow… I’m trying to highlight the fact that the line between good art and bad art is subjective, blurry, and sometimes pointless. The fact an artist can be a bit of a troll sometimes adds to their work… just look at the partially shredded Banksy and how it was still worth lots of money since it was clearly the artist’s intention to have it shred… I’d argue that the shredded pieces would probably have retained just as much value if it had fully shredded since it would have been relatively easy to reassemble…as it’s a known artwork not unknown dense text.
- FFP999 3y agoStill, Gravity's Rainbow has at least a semblance of a plot here and there, and distinct characters with motivations that have some kind of logic to them. Finnegan's Wake, far as I can tell, does not. I also wonder if the fact that I found Gravity's Rainbow much easier going has to do with the fact that the culture I grew up in is much more like the one Pynchon grew up in (northeastern USA, mid-to-late-20th century) as opposed to Joyce's origin in early-20th-century Ireland. It's not _that_ much of a difference in terms of years, but I don't think I need to tell you that the 20th century was, as a rule, a very busy and chaotic time. It's an interesting point about trollery being part of the art--I guess you could classify it as one of the performing arts like dance or theater. Maybe its closest relative is stand-up comedy.
- _aavaa_ 3y agoI’ve heard these kinds of books (Finnegan’s Wake, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Anatomy of Melancholy) described as a “core dump” by Brian Moriarty (the Infocom game developer). They are books where the authors seemingly put together everything they have in their head into a single work.
- silent_cal 3y agoIf anyone is curious I found a website hosting a version of this book with a lot of apparatus to help you read this beast, actually seems pretty interesting... https://finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm https://finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm
- xjwm 3y agoI've never been able to approach this book in text. I did listen to an abridged audiobook performance of Finnegan's Wake, and enjoyed it in the same way I suppose I would enjoy listening to a foreign language poetry recital.
- ismokedoinks 3y agoImagine spending years of your life wading through something offensively unreadable written by somebody who left nothing to explain it. But enough about our codebase, cool article!
- rekabis 3y agoAt least they read the book. I know book clubs all over the planet that have been stuck on the same book for thousands of years, and most of them haven’t made any serious effort to actually READ that book - they just cherry-pick the parts that support or can be twisted to support their own worldview.