Finnegans Wake

What in the actual fuck is this babble? What is the bloody point? An excerpt from the first page:
>The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoord-enenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.

All Joyce did was write down a paragraph of incomprehensible gibberish each night, then he published it and modern """critics""" drool over it. They praise as a 'masterpiece' something that is quite literally the definition of shitposting.

Why is academia today so retarded? Is it the leftists?
Discuss.

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My take on it is that the words themselves are almost meaningless.
Youre supposed to read it fast and the ideas and feelings you remember are the real value.
He's experimenting with the medium.
You might not understand as the whole concept seems kinda stale now.

>I don't understand this book, is everybody except me retarded?

Just stop.

faggot, im not even OP but dont pretend you "understand" that.
I'm this guy:
and i think youre a lying phony faggot.
in fact, i know it.

I can see how some could say that, but the only thing it does for me is make me laugh at how much effort Joyce put into literally nothing. Page after page of nonsense.
Okay, cupcake, what is the fucking point?

> 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 and Environs.

This is essentially the equivalent of a panning shot in a movie, out "camera" is following a river past the Adam and Eve church in Dublin, around, and to Howth Castle and the environment around, i.e. Dublin. Also, HCE

>Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war:

This character is coming back to Ireland from America to fight in the Peninsular War (or a war similar) while also feeling or being isolated

>nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time:

The rocks and pebbles by the Oconee stream (in Georgia) have not appeared more important or grander to the 'gorgios' (one who gorges his or herself?, also "Georgia") but Lauren County. Doublin is doubling/Dublin

>nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick:

Nor a voice from a fire below/bellowed... the rest is nonsense that is fun to say outloud to me, although thwarting Patrick seems to be mentioned

>not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac:

Very soon after his rearrival (also Venison) a rascally child hit an "isaac" (sacrificial person) with the buttend of a stick or gun or fist or bottom.

I can keep going if you'd like, I'm not claiming to be able to fit every single word or sentence into the plot but overall it makes clear sense to me. This is an introduction to a character returning from Georgia, USA to fight an internal or external war in Ireland.

he was old and probably enamored with his legacy at this point.
He knew people would "try", and that was enough motivation to push the limit.
Still kinda stale now, but there are nuggets of gold in there too.

why did you bring up a different and much more easily decipherable passage to defend a point?
You still dont "get" more than 50% of this book and the OP's point still stands.

Except if you actually try and you have a mind for wordplay, you can understand ~70% of the book, even if you only know English. It's really not that hard, you just have to think about the text in the right way. It's a series of many short vignettes with various overarching themes and characters, on occasion

>He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur.

One of my favorite sentences in the whole book. "He had a little wifey and he hugged the little creature." "Annie" is both his wife's name and phonetically acts as "and he" to continue the sentence. I also know "craythur" is an Irish term for whiskey (used in the ballad, Finnegan's Wake) which addresses Finnegan's alcoholism with an image of him holding a bottle

>Wither hayre in honds tuck up your part inher.

"With her hair in hands, tuck up your part in her." Switching to second-person, implying a connection between the reader and Finnegan, it describes him roughly making love to his wife, also making use of the word "wither" to imply something dying or failing. "inher" could be a pun on "inherent."

> Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed,

I believe this is simultaneously talking about her clothing and her breasts or ass under them, and how he "habitucularly" (habitually + particularly) "fondseed" (fancied + fond + seed (semen)) them.

>like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicab-les the alltitude and malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin 'twas born,

This is more cryptic but after another HCE reference, I believe it's referencing his lewd thoughts about his wife's body which were multiplied by his drinking of liquor.

>nuggets of gold
Well, yeah, but it has the same effect as Drumpfposting for me. It's funny because they're just retarded non-sequiturs, and he can get pretty creative with them.

again, different passages you're using to defend yourself from the fact that youre kinda being played by a narcissistic old man, but okay yeah, it's meaningful at times. Still too experimental to be called good objectively.

Find me a fucking paragraph, any one at all, and I will do my best. Some of them do elude me but that's a minority

Of course Joyce had to create his lunacy with some substrate, but there's no real reason for any of it as a whole to exist. You are describing specific parts, which he probably started as normal text along the lines of your translations, then he just obfuscates them to the point of being near-unintelligible.
How the hell does the 'narrative' make any sense over the whole book?

you are wrong. it is true that one can get a general feeling by skimming over the text but you are totally wrong.
The words are not meaningless, they are blended and shuffled together so that they are multiple words at the same time, and so that each of the words' meanings and forms overlay and create a hallucinatory drunken dream texture.

you need to be tuned into the basic meanings associated with basic sounds in different languages in order to understand that aspect of it

like "humptyhillhead of humself prumptly" the U sound is reinforcing the roundness of the man and the reference to humpty-dumpty - "the great fall of the offwall"

mckenna actually has a great lecture on the book
youtube.com/watch?v=0QrWfbYFtNk
forgive his identification of joyce as british, everyone misspeaks now and then

How about you try mine in the OP

why dont you actually do the OP's quote?
you're on defense right now it's very clear, come at the issue directly.

> the U sound is reinforcing the roundness of the man
How can anyone take themselves seriously while saying this?

i kinda think you just said what i said.
Maybe i didn't say it right.
subliminals and all.

"ugged" is one of those hallucinatory drunken-slur collage words that is actually "hugged" "loved" and "fugged" all in one

>he thinks art must always be taken seriously
go fuck yourself bloom

You don't read much do you? Is this the first "difficult" book you've ever picked up? By "difficult" I mean experimental or not traditionally written. It's pretty obvious to realize that the book is written semi-phonetically with mashed up words and made up slang.

It's like you've only ever read advertisements before.

>if I don't get it on first read it's pretentious nonsense

this is the fucking /pol/ pleb reddit genre fiction trash we allowed into here

jfc literally kys faggot there are countless guides to it already

>Is it the leftists?

>hurr i want every book to be shallow and to be able to understand everything in a book immediately so i never have to rereead it
cancer

maybe because one of the most well-known guides to this book spends pages upon pages on just the first ten pages of this book to illustrate how deep it is and you would know this if you weren't just shitposting plebs

Never use /pol/ and plebbit in the same sentence again.
And generally speaking, if you are creating a literary work, it should be understandable to someone fluent in the language. The thing would be brilliant if it was used for cryptography, but it wasn't.
(((guides)))

kys retard
/pol/ is literally redddit and youtube celeb comments sections

You can find new things in a book even if you understand its plot the first time. Finnegans Wake has no plot, and nothing to discover but the depths of one's own ego in claiming to see what doesn't exist.

dumbfuck.
Reading ten pages of a book guide is the opposite of proletariat behavior and on top of that, the point is that the book is more than just ten pages, at least 30% of the book is, for all intents and purposes, garble.

It is not reddit. r/t_d needs to leave.

>Finnegans Wake has no plot
The whole plot is literally given to you in the first two chapters you dumbfuck.
>hurr literature exists in a vaccum

>It is not reddit

>The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoord-enenthurnuk!)
To be fair, I only know this because I looked it up, but this word is an amalgamation of somewhere around sixty words for "thunder" all from different languages. This passage describe's Finnegan's accident and death, when he drunkenly fell from a ladder as he laid bricks. Thunder is a dramatic metaphor for the fall.

>of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.
The fall of this man (oldparr comes from "parr," a young salmon before it becomes a smolt. not sure what was meant), once straight against the wall that was being built before falling, has been retold in story for a long time through songs and tales among the Christian society of Ireland (and it has; this is the plot of the ballad, Finnegan's Wake)

>The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan,
Finnegan's fall was so sudden and of such surprise to him he couldn't save himself (I assume "pftjschute" comes from "parachute," meaning his way of breaking his fall, but I could be wrong)

>erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:
Finnegan was a solid and good man. His head ("humpthillhead" referencing Humpty Dumpty who also fell form a wall) on the ground would make one look to see his toes. This could mean he was decapitated, or that he died in a position with his toes next to his head. I'm not sure.

>and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.
Not sure what the connection to the rest of the sentence is, but a turnpike runs over a park in which oranges have been falling from trees to the grass since the devil first seduced Eve (echoing back to "Eve and Adam's" earlier on that page). The turnpike may have been what Finnegan was laying his bricks fto build, come to think of it

What a bunch of faggots. I don't claim to understand it at all, but I love it.
I advise you to take a different tack.

Lmao, no wonder this board's poetry discussion is so bad. FW, the greatest poetic work since fucking Dante falls on deaf hands.
Kill yourselves

Thanks for following through. But my point is this:
>Not sure what the connection to the rest of the sentence is
That sums up the book pretty well. It's incoherent.

OP ass is being blasted into oblivion assuming he isn't only baiting

>some people can't find in meaning in certain places therefore nobody can
retard

ok i'm not going to go super hard on this but check me out

>The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.
this is clearly a reference to humpty-dumpty, and through that a reference to the fall of humanity in general (if you don't understand the connection of what i mean by this you need to read more comparative religion/mythology texts, i don't have time for you)

also if you don't know that Finnegans Wake is based off the folk song Finnegan's Wake wherein Finnegan is a drunk who falls off a ladder and breaks his skull then you seriously need to shut the fuck up and read moar.
>ptfjschute
this seeming nonsense word makes sense if you analyze it phoenetically. It sounds like falling. It starts high and constricted in sound and stretches low, it sounds like slipping and falling. Also I think I remember reading somewhere that it's a swedish word.

I think I made the connection while writing though. Check the last sentence.

You said I couldn't understand 50% of the book and if I claimed otherwise I was lying. I've proven myself to understand at some level every passage I've posted, including the one you chose, and showed you how you can too. Why are you still claiming it's incoherent? You're just not thinking hard enough about what you're reading to see it

>deaf hands

>again, different passages
>stop demonstrating I'm wrong!

You just sound like a contratrian. If you don't want to read it or understand it, don't, but clearly a lot of people on this thread have fun reading it and figuring out the word play. I'm a lit newfag and I even I can tell that

>of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy

has got something to do with a character waking up and/or getting old. At least I think?

That sentence is about the ballad and story itself, and how it's been told for a long time

>another idiot getting all bipartisan/political about it.

it's also a play on "ministry"
by replacing it with "minstrelsy" he's implying that life is a kind of act, or exaggerated show meant for entertainment.

> the greatest poetic work since fucking Dante
>making up gobbledygook is equal in merit to an actual technical and literary masterpiece
The only thing I'll give Joyce credit for is his endurance in writing the thing.
It's only a reflection of what people want to see. The book itself has no inherent meaning.

I'm the OP. You are translating out the made up words, but it says nothing about a narrative. It's just a bunch of loosely related thoughts at best, even assuming they are interpreted correctly.
>everything is a symbol

>upturnpikepointandplace
An old road sign, pointing in a direction.
It could be shortened to "direction."

As well,
>a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy
would be something along the lines of "an old tapestry, the message of which was retold through the centuries among the Christian ministries"

The stuff in brackets appears to be either a conlang or an attempt to phonetically recall a word, as in the case of a child attempting to overcome a state of lethologica. Perhaps the reason for leaving those sorts in the book was "fuck it, it adds depth/intrigue" or the possibility (as with the rest of the damned thing) it's a huge, old-timey book of proto-memes that were lost on many -- and academics, being arrogant, refused to admit they weren't certain what the clusterfuck was supposed to mean, so they out-circle-jerked each other's interpretations until it became hailed as "Amazing Literature."

Honestly, if you objectively look at the shit we post, any from a time even 50-100 years after us, now, will have a hard time figuring out exactly what the fuck we mean by half the shit we type.

How many people on this planet, right now, do you think comprehend the English term "circle-jerk," especially when applied to academics? It goes from a pedantic sexual joke to commentary on the behaviour of scholars.

It's no wonder we're all
>humptyhillhead
A state of daftness or silliness, as retaled in the likes of HumptyDumpty.

>"Muh interpretation"
>It's not that difficult.

Even more blatantly, "minstrel" means a medieval musician/singer, specifically one that recited lyrical and heroic poetry

>It's only a reflection of what people want to see.
>muh authorial intent
literally plebbit

Aaaaand it's bait. I'm an idiot for not realizing earlier

It's not bait, OP has never read anything that wasn't genre fiction and he is now sperging out

you are an irredeemable pleb if you can't see that the transposition of "minstrelsy" for "ministry" there is supposed to serve an artistic purpose

>let me write something with no purpose whatsoever

Everything is bait. Nothing is bait.
I wanted to discuss something, and I gave it a spin to attract attention. I succeeded on both counts.

>It's only a reflection of what people want to see
Literature is hard :(

>You are translating out the made up words, but it says nothing about a narrative

>its all gobbity gook
>stop trying make sense of it!

You're terrible at this. Lurk another year and apply yourself

i fucking knew this was devilsadvocate posting

killyourself trollbait, learn to have an actual conversation

>literature is hard
It's intentionally clouded nowadays to create cushy jobs for English majors. Many things require background knowledge to understand, obviously, but it's just silly to pretend that everything has a 'hidden meaning' put there for the 'smart people.'
>disageeing means he's trolling
No. These are not arguments against my original point.

K Y S
Y
S

disregard my posts I suck cocks

Also not an argument.
You're not me. Sucking cocks is degenerate; you can only lick them.

>implying we didn't come to the thread knowing OP is a massive faggot
Give us some credit. Everybody online is a faggot. Would we be here, otherwise?

Stop samefagging

I would love nothing more than to emerge from your mother's stretched anus as a thick turd as it slides down your throat. ;)

Joyce, is that you?

nou

look at this crazy retard talking to himself

I-I'm not crazy... b-baka!

Hi its me Joyce

*farts at u*

Wow i dint no asns had black nexus as virginias
>goodugle gamickey
>errrn fgt
>still better than joyce

I'd love that too, Apoo.

>thread successfully derailed
>finnelager's rent confirmed faggot-tree
>leaves

It's still a shitty book.

Nigger the fuck i jus say
>the exact same thing
>we been agreeing the whole thread
Fuck Joyce and fuck devilfaggotgangbanger, too.
>and fuck chez frufru, cause that niggerjew rhymes too

>Hieronymous Lex, rolling out

>post a thread with a shitty troll as OP
>crows about the thread being de-railed

great job

idgaf ghat you guys say. This has been one of the most supreme threads I have seen in a while.

I learned how to say it and quoted it to my brother, how cringe am i?

Don't dismiss it so easily. Bababadalgharaghta is a transliteration of Hindi/urdu which means "the cloud is thundering". I believe there is someranong behind it. It took Joyce 17 years to write - I think he expects the readers to invest even more time into this. The ultimate post modern puzzle.

Just wanted to add that "devlinsfirst loved livvy" refers to Dublin and the river Liffey (Ei: "An Life") which runs through it. The Liffey is sometimes referred to as a woman, Anna Liffey (cf Anna Livia the character).

I don't think (real) life itself is an act, but the lives in the book definitley exist just for our entertainment.

>just joined thread to laugh at derail
>schlomo shekelstein and his kooky conspiracies
What the fuck drugs are you stuffing up your ass faggot

>books
>entertainment
No shit, Sherlock

youtube.com/watch?v=Rpeq91hK1Gk
Here you go, OP.

it might not be difficult, but that doesn't mean it's interesting or thought provoking to a lot of people

goddamn it. everytime i read an excerpt, i just start howling with laughter.

"He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur."

Such a brilliant sentence. I could never write something as witty and intelligent as this. He definitely plays with some really interesting sounds in this one. He is experimenting and simple plebs just don't realize this. This is classic, timeless and my favorite sentence in the whole book! Poetry guys!!!

"He had a little wifey and he hugged the little creature." "Annie" is both his wife's name and phonetically acts as "and he" to continue the sentence. I also know "craythur" is an Irish term for whiskey (used in the ballad, Finnegan's Wake) which addresses Finnegan's alcoholism with an image of him holding a bottle

yes and that is incredibly innovative. How do you fit so much meaning in one sentence?

Place your head in a bucket of wet cement and keep it there please

I subscribe to the notion that most of Finnegans Wake is a literary joke

I subscribe to the theory that you need a fucking knuckle sandwich, pal

I am sorry i did not enjoy the sentence.

Thanks for the excerpt OP, I actually might have read this

It's niche Irish dialect. Read it aloud and it allows you to speak with an instant Irish accent, as well as having a consistent rhythm. There is a narrative there but it's buried under so much heavy dialect and transcendental wordplay.

leave and never come back

"ugged" isn't "hugged" it's "loved' and "fucked"

It really clearly stems from "hugged," dumbass

wordplay in ALP's name?
Anna Livia Pluribelle
Non-Living-Everywoman?

except that doesn't make sense in context, he's not describing a series of actions he's describing his attitude towards her

There's no fucking difference grammatically between "hugged" and "fucked " or "loved." You don't know what you're talking about. Hugging implies physical and emotional contact. It's really blatant, I'm not sure how you're managing to overlook this