8 ms·

Finnegans Wake: the book the web was invented for

90 points by Petiver 12y ago

mbubb 12y ago
Yes - took 2 Joyce seminars back in college and never got through more than excerpts of FW. Funny process - at first you think Ulysses is hard, and it is, but you get used to that world. FW is dense. Another work which always seemed made for the Internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project there is even a precursor to the hyperlink in the way that links to other topics jump around the work and imply multiple connections. Things like https://mannahatta2409.org/ https://mannahatta2409.org/ remind me of what Benjamin did in a way.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  I took a Joyce class in college. We spent most of the quarter on Ulysses, a chapter at a time. We spent one class period on the first page of Finnegan's Wake. As you mentioned, you adapt fairly quickly to Ulysses, but Finnegan's Wake is a whole other universe. I found it helped with both works to mentally read them in an absurdly exaggerated Irish accent. Especially FW.
- abruzzi 12y ago
  Part of the reason it stops readers quickly is the opening chapter is much harder than later chapters (that not to say that later chapters are easy, just nowhere near as dense ad the beginning). In that way is kind of like Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" in which part one is by far the hardest to read, since it is written, stream of consciousness, in the mind of a mentally disabled person. Later parts are easier to follow.
- JadeNB 12y ago
  > Another work which always seemed made for the Internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project If we're throwing out ideas, I'd love to see a web version of Rayuela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch_(Julio_Cortázar_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch_(Julio_Cortázar_nove... ).
  - mbubb 12y ago
    I remember reading that. At the time my absolute favorite novel. Its beautiful. He's a great great writer. The short stories. "A Certain Lucas"; "Around the day in 80 worlds" but nothing quite like Hopscotch. Jumping to film - I always thought that a lecture/ essay on Blowup Blowout and ) a bit of a stretch) The Conversation all descended from Cortazar's short story would make a great study.
    - sogen 12y ago
      yeah, Cortazar stuff is great, wow, another Lucas fan!
    - JadeNB 12y ago
      I dunno—I was introduced to the short stories first, and none of the novels compare for me (not even Hopscotch, much as I enjoy it). Cronopios and Famas, We Love Glenda So Much, House Taken Over—he has hilarious, chilling, and beautiful short stories.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    I had the hardest time following Cortazar surrealism.
- ctogden 12y ago
  > Another work which always seemed made for the Internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project I think http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/arcades.html http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/arca... would appeal to you then. It looks like Eric Meltzer, Max Fenton, and some others may be working on another project based on The Arcades Project.
- gcv 12y ago
  Ulysses is definitely doable, but it marks a point when high-brow literature stopped being something every reasonable, intelligent, and educated person enjoys reading. It's a chore (less so than FW, of course), and of questionable value — yeah, it's cool to get all the references to Homer, etc., but I don't think anyone puts down Ulysses with anything other than a sense of relief of having scaled it as an obstacle. (Yes, I studied Ulysses. Voluntarily and on my own time. I don't mean to belittle Joyce's talent. Ulysses is obviously a huge accomplishment, beyond nearly all writers.) Compare that with, say, Dickens. People would drop what they were doing to read the next installment of Little Dorrit.
fallinghawks 12y ago
I managed to get about halfway through FW before calling defeat, even with a guidebook that explained, paragraph by paragraph, what the heck was going on :)
- wldcordeiro 12y ago
  I'm still working through Ulysses and it's definitely tough but manageable. Finnegan's Wake though just seems too difficult right now. I'll need to take a break from Joyce and return later to attempt it.
narrator 12y ago
Pynchon is kind of like this. He layers so much symbolism and allusion layered into every sentence.
- orbat 12y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Gravity's Rainbow could really benefit from a more, uh, "hypermedia" approach.
  - brightsize 12y ago
    When I was in college there was a course called "Finishing Gravity's Rainbow". I didn't take it but I did have a (failed) go at the book at one point a very long time ago. It still seems like something for the bucket list but I honestly have no idea if the reward would be worth the effort. Some of Pynchon's other, more approachable books have been interesting but not, for me, "wow that was truly incredible" interesting.
kens 12y ago
The article points out that the new versions of Finnegans Wake, the web annotations, graphic novel, twitter version, and so forth are all possible because the book has gone out of EU copyright. This is a good example of why limited-duration copyrights are a good thing, and why arbitrary extensions of copyright harm society. Going back to the book, has anyone read it and found it worthwhile? I never managed to get through more than a few pages and suspect that it's not worth the time and effort to me. I found Ulysses was worth the effort, but I'm not so sure about Finnegans Wake - any dissenting views?
- ansible 12y ago
  I gave it a go back in college, but didn't get far, even with the help of a skeleton key. I tried it because it was reputed to be "hard". But making a bunch of references to things / people / places I never had a hope of knowing about makes it more "obscure" than "hard" in my book.
  - bdr 12y ago
    Why is "hard" a good thing?
    - beeworker 12y ago
      People enjoy overcoming challenges. (People also like to brag.)
    - sanderjd 12y ago
      Sometimes (but not always), "hard" when applied to literature means thought-provoking and perspective-expanding. Those are good things. Never read this one though, so I'm not sure whether it's "hard" in that sense.
  - e12e 12y ago
    I'd be curious to hear how either "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake" compare to Samuel Delany's "Dhalgren". I've yet to read anything by Joyce, but thanks to the University of Adelaide[1] and European (and Australian) copyright terms, I now have both in epub-format, and in my reading queue. [1] https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/ https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/
jl6 12y ago
See also the web work of Jorn Barger (coiner of the word blog), predating all of these examples, such as http://web.archive.org/web/20130409060532/http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/fwake/shortwake.html http://web.archive.org/web/20130409060532/http://www.robotwi... (original website seemingly now defunct), and his attempts at linking Joyce with AI.
devindotcom 12y ago
I dunno, Moby Dick is like a whaling blog by a philosophy major complete with "links" to such things as the definition of whiteness and lists of whale types. Also Tristram Shandy is like the LiveJournal of someone popping dexedrine. And of course Inquire Within Upon Everything is pretty much literally what the title describes.
clay_to_n 12y ago
This is really cool. I've heard good things about reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on tablets, because all of the footnotes are hyperlinks - easier than using two bookmarks as you read the book. There also was an internet forum for people who would read it each summer, following along and discussing to clarify confusion (called Infinite Summer, I think it's now defunct).
christudor 12y ago
Personally, I think the biggest benefit that the internet can confer to FW is someone reading it out, rather than providing easier access to annotations. I suspect FW is best enjoyed when done at pace, letting the poetry of the thing wash over you, rather than sitting down and assiduously looking up every single word, which I can only imagine gets incredibly boring very quickly. What struck me about Joyce's reading of FW is (a) how quickly he makes his way through it, and (b) how this novel/poem is written for an Irish accent. Compare Eliot's reading of the Waste Land: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqvhMeZ2PlY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqvhMeZ2PlY
mactitan 12y ago
It opens with: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle & Environs." and ends: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun,” and in between: bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnth unntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk! I’ve been waiting for a good translation. maybe burgess??
AnimalMuppet 12y ago
I've just got this nagging suspicion that, for a non-English-major type, FW is not going to repay the enormous investment of time it would take to get anything out of it. Therefore, I have never bothered, and almost certainly never will.
metaobject 12y ago
Reading Finnegan's Wake is like reading an optimized Perl script. It's extremely dense and I give up after 10-20 minutes.
rumcajz 12y ago
Milorad Pavic's Khazar Dictionary is another book with hypertext-like structure. You can start reading from any point in the book and it still works OK.

90 points by Petiver 12y ago

mbubb 12y ago

Yes - took 2 Joyce seminars back in college and never got through more than excerpts of FW. Funny process - at first you think Ulysses is hard, and it is, but you get used to that world. FW is dense. Another work which always seemed made for the Internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project there is even a precursor to the hyperlink in the way that links to other topics jump around the work and imply multiple connections. Things like https://mannahatta2409.org/ https://mannahatta2409.org/ remind me of what Benjamin did in a way.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
I took a Joyce class in college. We spent most of the quarter on Ulysses, a chapter at a time. We spent one class period on the first page of Finnegan's Wake. As you mentioned, you adapt fairly quickly to Ulysses, but Finnegan's Wake is a whole other universe. I found it helped with both works to mentally read them in an absurdly exaggerated Irish accent. Especially FW.
abruzzi 12y ago
Part of the reason it stops readers quickly is the opening chapter is much harder than later chapters (that not to say that later chapters are easy, just nowhere near as dense ad the beginning). In that way is kind of like Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" in which part one is by far the hardest to read, since it is written, stream of consciousness, in the mind of a mentally disabled person. Later parts are easier to follow.
JadeNB 12y ago
> Another work which always seemed made for the Internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project If we're throwing out ideas, I'd love to see a web version of Rayuela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch_(Julio_Cortázar_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch_(Julio_Cortázar_nove... ).
- mbubb 12y ago
  I remember reading that. At the time my absolute favorite novel. Its beautiful. He's a great great writer. The short stories. "A Certain Lucas"; "Around the day in 80 worlds" but nothing quite like Hopscotch. Jumping to film - I always thought that a lecture/ essay on Blowup Blowout and ) a bit of a stretch) The Conversation all descended from Cortazar's short story would make a great study.
  - sogen 12y ago
    yeah, Cortazar stuff is great, wow, another Lucas fan!
  - JadeNB 12y ago
    I dunno—I was introduced to the short stories first, and none of the novels compare for me (not even Hopscotch, much as I enjoy it). Cronopios and Famas, We Love Glenda So Much, House Taken Over—he has hilarious, chilling, and beautiful short stories.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  I had the hardest time following Cortazar surrealism.
ctogden 12y ago
> Another work which always seemed made for the Internet is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project I think http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/arcades.html http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/arca... would appeal to you then. It looks like Eric Meltzer, Max Fenton, and some others may be working on another project based on The Arcades Project.
gcv 12y ago
Ulysses is definitely doable, but it marks a point when high-brow literature stopped being something every reasonable, intelligent, and educated person enjoys reading. It's a chore (less so than FW, of course), and of questionable value — yeah, it's cool to get all the references to Homer, etc., but I don't think anyone puts down Ulysses with anything other than a sense of relief of having scaled it as an obstacle. (Yes, I studied Ulysses. Voluntarily and on my own time. I don't mean to belittle Joyce's talent. Ulysses is obviously a huge accomplishment, beyond nearly all writers.) Compare that with, say, Dickens. People would drop what they were doing to read the next installment of Little Dorrit.

fallinghawks 12y ago

I managed to get about halfway through FW before calling defeat, even with a guidebook that explained, paragraph by paragraph, what the heck was going on :)

wldcordeiro 12y ago
I'm still working through Ulysses and it's definitely tough but manageable. Finnegan's Wake though just seems too difficult right now. I'll need to take a break from Joyce and return later to attempt it.

narrator 12y ago

Pynchon is kind of like this. He layers so much symbolism and allusion layered into every sentence.

orbat 12y ago
My thoughts exactly. Gravity's Rainbow could really benefit from a more, uh, "hypermedia" approach.
- brightsize 12y ago
  When I was in college there was a course called "Finishing Gravity's Rainbow". I didn't take it but I did have a (failed) go at the book at one point a very long time ago. It still seems like something for the bucket list but I honestly have no idea if the reward would be worth the effort. Some of Pynchon's other, more approachable books have been interesting but not, for me, "wow that was truly incredible" interesting.

kens 12y ago

The article points out that the new versions of Finnegans Wake, the web annotations, graphic novel, twitter version, and so forth are all possible because the book has gone out of EU copyright. This is a good example of why limited-duration copyrights are a good thing, and why arbitrary extensions of copyright harm society. Going back to the book, has anyone read it and found it worthwhile? I never managed to get through more than a few pages and suspect that it's not worth the time and effort to me. I found Ulysses was worth the effort, but I'm not so sure about Finnegans Wake - any dissenting views?

ansible 12y ago
I gave it a go back in college, but didn't get far, even with the help of a skeleton key. I tried it because it was reputed to be "hard". But making a bunch of references to things / people / places I never had a hope of knowing about makes it more "obscure" than "hard" in my book.
- bdr 12y ago
  Why is "hard" a good thing?
  - beeworker 12y ago
    People enjoy overcoming challenges. (People also like to brag.)
  - sanderjd 12y ago
    Sometimes (but not always), "hard" when applied to literature means thought-provoking and perspective-expanding. Those are good things. Never read this one though, so I'm not sure whether it's "hard" in that sense.
- e12e 12y ago
  I'd be curious to hear how either "Ulysses" or "Finnegan's Wake" compare to Samuel Delany's "Dhalgren". I've yet to read anything by Joyce, but thanks to the University of Adelaide[1] and European (and Australian) copyright terms, I now have both in epub-format, and in my reading queue. [1] https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/ https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/

jl6 12y ago

See also the web work of Jorn Barger (coiner of the word blog), predating all of these examples, such as http://web.archive.org/web/20130409060532/http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/fwake/shortwake.html http://web.archive.org/web/20130409060532/http://www.robotwi... (original website seemingly now defunct), and his attempts at linking Joyce with AI.

devindotcom 12y ago

I dunno, Moby Dick is like a whaling blog by a philosophy major complete with "links" to such things as the definition of whiteness and lists of whale types. Also Tristram Shandy is like the LiveJournal of someone popping dexedrine. And of course Inquire Within Upon Everything is pretty much literally what the title describes.

clay_to_n 12y ago

This is really cool. I've heard good things about reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on tablets, because all of the footnotes are hyperlinks - easier than using two bookmarks as you read the book. There also was an internet forum for people who would read it each summer, following along and discussing to clarify confusion (called Infinite Summer, I think it's now defunct).

christudor 12y ago

Personally, I think the biggest benefit that the internet can confer to FW is someone reading it out, rather than providing easier access to annotations. I suspect FW is best enjoyed when done at pace, letting the poetry of the thing wash over you, rather than sitting down and assiduously looking up every single word, which I can only imagine gets incredibly boring very quickly. What struck me about Joyce's reading of FW is (a) how quickly he makes his way through it, and (b) how this novel/poem is written for an Irish accent. Compare Eliot's reading of the Waste Land: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqvhMeZ2PlY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqvhMeZ2PlY

mactitan 12y ago

It opens with: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle & Environs." and ends: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun,” and in between: bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnth unntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk! I’ve been waiting for a good translation. maybe burgess??

AnimalMuppet 12y ago

I've just got this nagging suspicion that, for a non-English-major type, FW is not going to repay the enormous investment of time it would take to get anything out of it. Therefore, I have never bothered, and almost certainly never will.

metaobject 12y ago

Reading Finnegan's Wake is like reading an optimized Perl script. It's extremely dense and I give up after 10-20 minutes.

rumcajz 12y ago

Milorad Pavic's Khazar Dictionary is another book with hypertext-like structure. You can start reading from any point in the book and it still works OK.