Should I study this or the Bible...

>hidden meanings

you mean the practice of reading tea leaves? Because it's about the same. I'm convinced that Joyce had a rough outline then said "Fuck it, I'm a genius so I can write literally anything and my cuck fanboys will eat this shit up, writing is for fags I'm gonna spend these late years of my life huffing all of the feminine farts I can find"

You must think I'm saying that FW secretly contains the meaning of life or something. I'm just talking about the words themselves.

I think it basically all comes down to the latter. The Bible isn't even a very good piece of literature. It could use sme serious editing. The whole saga about Samson being a certifiable retard. Chuck it. I mean it has its moments but it is if anything, turgid, redundant and discursive

I own a copy of FW. I've never read it.

The Philistines were the stupid ones

>lets let Samson's hair grow back so he can fuck our shit up

Yes everyone in that story was a bronze age cretin. I wonder why that might be

PRO-TIP: If you're going to read Finnegan's Wake you must either read it completely wasted or pretend you're completely wasted. Also do your best Irish accent. Pronounce everything out loud. That's how it was written, that's how it needs to be read.

Don't be so hasty. These are lifetime endeavors. You'll get most immediate use out of The Bible and in fact there are so many biblical allusions in FW that you shouldn't go in without having read the Bible.
But, (and this all depends on how much religious sentiment towards the bible you have), I think FW is far more of a joy to go through and find things in. And it's much easier to take not understanding things in stride, because you're going in expecting gibberish and instead getting gold nuggets here and there. And with the Bible I feel after you read everything, there are only a handful of books you want to focus on, whereas FW is structured to where analyzing any part is analyzing the whole.

I did this with some friends and we leared nothing but it was some damn fun

you can understand the inflections without being a dipshit about it

>you can understand the inflections without being a dipshit about it
Where's the fun in that?

youtube.com/watch?v=M8kFqiv8Vww

My God that was terrifying

To add, my point is, a lot of Joyce's stuff in Finnegan's Wake is spelled differently simply because of the pronunciation. Other people here are right that he was fucking around and messing with people.

Also to add, it's a lot of drunk Irish slang. Remember it's called Finnegan's Wake. Do you know what happens at an Irish funeral or wake? I mean working class, deep Dublin? They get drunk. And this is supposed to be a part surreal dream, as well. I'm telling you, once you approach it like a drunk Irishman at your own wake, you begin to understand it a bit better. Don't get me wrong, you'll never understand it completely and I don't either, but it helps.

Sorry but it's literally the culmination of all literature.

>it's called Finnegan's Wake

but it's not tho, if u took one second to look at ops pic u can clearly see it's Finnegans Wake as it's a bunch of Finnegan ass niggas gettin woke u feel me duke

Kek

I think its close to that. Whatever he wrote has esoteric personal meaning but anyone who says they understand it is full of shit besides maybe the most dedicated Joyce Scholar.

B-but GoodReads told me Joyce was a hack!

fuck I always add the apostrophe like a fuckface.

I'm gonna go kill myself now.

That way you're not missing literally everything else because you're pushing yourself too hard on an aspect of it you can handle after 40 pages anyway. There's a lot more going on than the immediate wordplay. Also reading anything drunk is a bad idea.

>Also reading anything drunk is a bad idea.
speak for yourself there guy.

I'm kidding. Listen, no one's gonna get anything on one time through. Whether it's the Bible, Finnegans Wake, Harry Potter, or fuckin' Nancy Drew. All I'm sayin' is it helped me to pretend I was a wasted Irishman. And I linked the video because, when I first saw it and heard him doing the pronunciation, is when I first realized it and started reading it more in that way. Just tryin' to help. No one needs to take my advice.

To add, I once recorded a drunk night with my friends and I, and then I went back and transcribed it based solely on pronunciation alone and it was both hilariously and looked almost like gibberish, but I could understand it because that's how my friends and I talk.

Harry potter was influenced by the bible.

Don't you listen to the great JP?

it's the classic
>i can't appreciate it so i'll strawman those who can
get good my friend

When considering both literary and philosophical value, FW will lose to the Bible. Joyce was a prose master, but he had nothing philosophically valuable to say, and nobody I know has ever learned anything of existential value from Finnegans Wake.

there's lots of fun at finnegans wake

go with scripture if you want to bore yourself to tears

You can read finnwake 50 times over and still discover more every time, feel more, intuit more, piece together more

its estimated that joyce knew about 14 languages, between those: Norwegian, German, Old English, Latin, Italian, French and Polish. also he was very well fucking read.

so
>you mean the practice of reading tea leaves
yea, hardly. every single word he wrote in finnegans wake has a genius, beautiful meaning that was thought of behind it.

>I'm convinced that Joyce had a rough outline then said "Fuck it, I'm a genius so I can write literally anything and my cuck fanboys will eat this shit up
he is a genius, and he had that sort of mind, however we don't eat his shit up for no reason.

here are some quotes

>"If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."

>The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

and his last words
>"Does nobody understand?"
fucking genius

> Studying a cuckold meme excuse of a trash book instead of the foundation of civilization.
Really, user? Are you trolling us?

You could read a beautiful amalgamation of different legends, myths, parables, and timeless archetypes recognizable throughout all of Western culture for the past 2,000 years, if not more, woven into one coherent aesthetic and ideological whole, a book which probes into the very foundations of the Western consciousness, of Western morality, of all our psychology and literature, or you could just read the Bible instead.

Confirmed for never having read it

But HCE is the one cucking his wife in FW

No I wasn't trolling, I heard this audio of Terrence McKenna talking of finnegans wake as if it was a wise book. Other anons have convinced me to read the bible instead.

>Terence Mckenna
if you listened to what he was saying in that awful lecture, you could tell that Mckenna was full of shit. Just another example of McKenna's drug-addled idiocy

Wise as in it has a lot of meaning that will transform your life I guess. Like if I am gonna study a book seriously I want to get something out of it

i recall finding a site for ulysses or FW, and it the main text, but with annotations if you hovered over almost any word. i can't find it.

it's lonely at the top. my one regret is that i am not a genius of equal or greater stature, not for my own purposes, which would be fine either way, but so that Joyce would have had a companion, someone one could speak to, truly.

finwake.com/1024chapter1/fw01.htm

This one?