How many here have actually read this?

How many here have actually read this?

Did you get anything from it at all?

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you can't actually be a part of this board until you read it

I've asked some of the weird genius eccentric dudes that I've been lucky enough to know whether they've ever read it, and while a few have said that it is fun to pick up and puzzle out the language games Joyce is doing, and that the associative playfulness thing is kind of a neat take on dream states or the unconscious or whatever, they all said it's not really enjoyable to them. Mostly impenetrable, not worth the effort. These are, like, middle-aged scholars of Shakespeare and Heidegger's poetics, who are so well-read it scares me.

The general consensus has been apathy about it, I would say. Most of them are more interested in reading more serious or traditional literature. Even the guy who loves Pynchon didn't really care.

Most of them said similar things about Ulysses as well.

They sound like plebs.

Yeah, I actually read the whole thing because I had to. I was entering a prestigious PhD program and focusing on Joyce because I loved Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses. To my shame, though, I'd never read the Wake. I'd never even tried, as hard as that was to admit. It was this huge blind spot and area of vulnerability for me. Whenever it'd come up with my colleagues I'd just smile and nod, smile and nod, hoping they wouldn't ask me anything specific about it. "The musicality of it," somebody would say, and I'd say, "Oh God, yes, it's like Beethoven." Finally, though, I had to dive into it, and let me tell you it was tough going. Joseph Campbell's guide helped a lot. Reading it out loud helped. I listened to other people read it, read online commentaries. Eventually it started to make some sort of sense. It was like I was learning to read for the first time again, and in a way this was enjoyable. I got better at reading the book. Soon I was reading entire paragraphs without trouble, getting the puns, laughing at the jokes. I could sort of follow the story, it was like a blurry picture resolving into clarity, or like I was drunk and I was sobering up, I could actually understand it. As I became more and more adept at reading the Wake, I began putting myself to the test, initiating conversations with my colleagues about it, but specific passages this time, specific parts of the book. You can probably guess what happened. After a number of these conversations it became blindingly obvious that I understood the book a lot better than they did, they who I thought were the experts. It eventually became sort of embarrassing for them and I stopped trying to talk about it. And at the end of the day I would pack my things, catch the bus home, and settle into my apartment to read the Wake. It had surpassed all of Joyce's other works in my estimation. Ulysses, the book months earlier I would've named as my favorite of all time, the best book ever written, was now #2 to the Wake. So majestic, so ambitious, so wide-ranging, erudite, glorious, incredible was it that I couldn't believe that it was the work of one man. Best of all, the heart of it isn't complicated at all. What did I get from the Wake, what are its lessons? First of all, be yourself. Second of all, put one foot in front of the other. And lastly, just do it for crying out loud, time's a wastin'!

I'm not criticizing, but is this pasta?

>Best of all, the heart of it isn't complicated at all. What did I get from the Wake, what are its lessons? First of all, be yourself. Second of all, put one foot in front of the other. And lastly, just do it for crying out loud, time's a wastin'!

I wouldn't worry too much about the well read. Like to get all the (known) references you'd have to have read ridiculously widely.

It's fair to say speaking 2 or more European languages is useful tho

>well read

>must be a genius

thank you jesus. i will never forget this

saving it for last

I tried until realizing life's too short. It's a pile of shite he wrote for himself that shouldn't have been published. I liked Ulysses but I'm Irish so it's more accessible.

How do I become you?

Enjoying the wake is like you would enjoy sex with a vicky secret model while only being able to watch an endoscope of the penetration during it.

I feel like reading it with annotations takes away the point of the esoteric nature of the vocab and jokes.

It is a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.

vlad pls

>Most of them said similar things about Ulysses as well.

This sounds like BS to me

I read ONE book every few months, I was going to read the one about which this thread was made!

but I stumbled upon this video (my /x/ friend is a huge fan of this guy (RED FLAG!))

Turns out James Joyce is all into occult bullshit and FWake is probably some sort of cryptic illuminati inside joke,

I'll probably read the Illiad instead.

(He's talking about JJ around 50 minutes in, PEOPLE!)

youtube.com/watch?v=pK1th-9X0cc

>"Oh God, yes, it's like Beethoven."

>Most of them said similar things about Ulysses as well.

and this is the part where your made up story fell apart

I am a complete baby in the world of literature, I do not consider myself a smart or wise person, I am a slow reader, and I have not read many books. However, I am reading this now and I am thoroughly enjoying it. The language is so absurdly fun to read out loud to myself and it feels so good to dissect certain lines:

"Macool, macool, orra whyi deed ye diie?"

Stuff like that you have you sub-vocalize to hear that it's actually just a normal sentence with a drunk Irish speaker and things like:

"There was plumbs and grumes and cheriffs and citherers and raiders and cinemen too."

Is simultaneously describing the types of men at the wake and the food/fruit they had there.

The book is exactly as deep as you need it to be, you can read it for the sound of the words at surface level or dive deep into it when you feel like it and tear each word apart.

This is fucking glorious.

>conventional
Fucking dropped. Cornfather confirmed for pseud.

>Macool, macool
As a good citizen of Eire that name has a certain meaning, what is it that you read it as?

To me it sounded like a sad moan or lament, but I understand it may be an Irish term of endearment?

What does it mean to you? I am most likely wrong

Fionn Maccumhaill is pronounced "Fin Macool", the champion of Ireland who sleeps until Ireland is in need of him again. So Finnegans Wake can be read as Fionn waking up, so that line can be a reference to Fionn waking up again to defend Ireland. Or on the other hand like Christ asking the Lord "Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani", God God why have you forsaken me? Or Fionn asking himself why has let himself become dead etc etc.

I like the level of it being a term of endearment as well, like a soothing coo.

That's amazing, thanks user!

See this is why the book is so fun

You should try meeting people who read books in real life and not just for class.

Nice double trips.

>this damage control

It's a really amazing book, Joyce really was like a genius to see that potential in language and storytelling.

I know what you're getting at, but the people I've known that were one way or another coerced into reading Ulysses for class were not the ones going anywhere near FW. They were the ones to aggressively push Harry Potter for some reason and bullshit a lot.

After reading Prometheus Rising I really want to get into it at some point. The things he has to say about the book and how it relates to states of consciousness are pretty fascinating.

this man knows

>"There was plumbs and grumes and cheriffs and citherers and raiders and cinemen too."

Although I didn't realize it until you just posted it, this is the refrain to another old Irish song.

youtube.com/watch?v=hzdKDXGIues

The absolute madman.

I did.

No, I didn't. It's not worth the effort.

To someone planning to read the Wake one day, what techniques would recommend to learn how to read it like you did?

Oh my God, I chortled.Hahaha

I've been meaning to read it for the last 5 years now. I'll get around to it.

It's not a book you read in a traditional manner, it asks more of its audience than most are capable of, and for that it is an incredible and lasting piece of lit.

I was somewhat hyped for joyce until I read a Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and I felt like I wanted my 2$ back plus reparations for making me like literature a bit less. Are his other books any better?

Don't even try. You're obviously not cut out for good literature. Go back to GRRM

Sham alive. I'm going to have to read this now just for the references

What are the last five books you have read?

Fuck off. He's not even that good with language and more often than not sacrifices a good bit of text to prove you he's a cultured man. That's like a slightly smarter version of GRRM's endless descriptions without any rhythm or form.

lol listen to this monkey

No, you're actually a pleb.

Dangling man, the satanic verses, the battle (patrick rimbaud), man on the high castle and 1001 nights book 3.

It's these sorts of excessively twee songs that were meant to contain secret messages. Much like an Irish "underground railroad" song.

I guess FW is actually like the ultimate conclusion to that tradition.

sorry holmes, you're an illiterate.

you might want to calibrate your perception of "weird genius eccentric dudes" then, because James Joyce was the most weird genius eccentric of them all.

Finnegans Wake is the most important work of art a man has commited on his own.

I could explain it to you, but I won't.

Enlightenment is not for all.

I was reading Ulysses in a Cuban bakery at 1 AM and an old man in a faded Doors t-shirt who claimed to have "once gone with a chick who screwed Jim Morrison" waltzed over and began rambling about how Finnegan's Wake made perfect sense to him after he spent a weekend listening to Bob Dylan records and smoking tea alone in the dark.

Huge eireaboo here, do you think it's possible to learn irish without actually going to Ireland? I don't have the money and I assume there's already enough brazilians as it is in Ireland right now, but I just think it sounds so beautiful

ireland is a sad fart of a country and no one gives a fuck about gaelic

be very careful about learning a language that you can basically never practice and that has maybe 5 things worth reading in it

Well mate, I'll start my tupi classes next month and there's literally zero things worth reading in it, since there's no written language, and while it looks difficult to go to Ireland any time in the future, there's pretty much a 0% chance of me ever fucking off to a native tribe where people can't communicate in portuguese, so, I want to learn it more for stuff like understanding FW better than anything else

>and I'd say, "Oh God, yes, it's like Beethoven."
>First of all, be yourself. Second of all, put one foot in front of the other. And lastly, just do it for crying out loud, time's a wastin'!

Someone must turn it to meme

A lot of people in Ireland learn Gaelic in a similar way to a dead language like Latin anyway, so yes absolutely. There are places where it's spoken on a day to day basis, especially on the west coast, and obviously this is different to the formal Irish but it's similar to the difference between normal French and what their ministry of Language says French should be, so not much. I know as well there are some areas in Canada and Australia that have Gaelic speakers, and I'd be surprised if there aren't any in S. America at all. How close they're to you is another matter.
>there's already enough brazilians as it is in Ireland right now
One of my ancestral relations exported a lot of Irish to Brazil so probably quite a few are coming back home.

FUCK OFF Kevin smokes...

As my grandfather from Dublin says, "Life's too short to spend a minute of it decoding the literary riddles of an Irish fartsniffer."

You've not read it have you

This is now copypasta. Ha ha.

why would a dub say "Irish fartsniffer" - would he not just say fartsniffer?

It's Irish humour. You're clearly not from Ireland.

Because he's a secretly English Jackeen.

Actually more often than not it's because Irish people are very proud, perhaps also in part because of having the culture oppressed by different people at different times, so there's a tendency to point out that someone or something is Irish at any given opportunity

i think itd be fun to look at, aesthetically, and play with the sounds of the words, not much more.

its pure wankery and why joyce wrote it. to give critics something to waste time on for years.

You clearly haven't read it

There's an obvious plot and even an average reader can see it

I'm currently reading Prometheus Rising and I've been intrigued by all the Joyce references. I will be attempting Finnegan's Wake at some point in the near future

I guarantee most of the people gassing up FW are people who read like the first bit and stopped from intimidation, and are now reading bunch of shit to "get ready" for it.

The more you read and the better a reader you become the more you realize that the best and most powerful literature is deceptively simple and dosent play silly games.

do tell us more please

Best post I've seen on Veeky Forums

...

> that fucking apostrophe
I am honest to god so angry right now

While as was at my library I saw an essay which was an anarchist (with an emphasis on Stirner) analysis of the work

>the best and most powerful literature is deceptively simple and dosent play silly games.

Examples?

That's a popular opinion in some circles, that he can be linked in to anarchy. I think in one of those cheap penguin editions of Dubliners they have an essay describing him as an anarcho cosmopolitan or something.

Kahlil Gibran