>80 pages into Finnigans Wake
>there is no plot
>it's literally Joyce describing shit in his goofy fucking half made up language
> muh rhyming meters
>muh classical references
What the fuck is the point of reading a book where each paragraph is wild inane rambling with nothing to ground the reader. There is NO plot. Not even a loose one. None!
Looks like you haven't started with the Greeks
It's literally written in an Irish dialect, if you haven't picked that up and looked past it yet there's no hope.
Correct
No shit, that is wildly obvious. That doesn't take away from the fact that it is page after page of describing things. NO STORY
No one is going anywhere, no one is talking to anyone. Any action is vague third persom about having gone to a bar.
I have read Ulysses, THERE IS AT LEAST DIALOGUE.
There is nothing here.
git gd
Top notch conversation there.
So no one can refute my claim?
Not really, Finnegans Wake is a meme.
Maybe I can help you out, OP. Two years ago 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'!
It's a book James Joyce wrote for his daughter who had a mental illness. I forgot which mental illness she had, I thought she was a schizoid. Of course it is fucking retarded and you would become insane trying to decipher it.