Finnegans Wake

[Foxbat]

Recently, I've been busy reading novels that I'd always meant to read but never got around to. A loss of power for five hours last night (an explosion in a local link-box - whatever that is) led me to pick up Finnegans Wake....and promptly put it down again about an hour later.

For anybody that's never read this book - let a poor philistine explain - think of dipping your head into a bucket of treacle and opening yours eyes. Imagine the literary equivelant of being smashed in the face with a brick. Ponder the artistic message behind a pair of kippers nailed to a wall and winning the Turner Prize.

The blurb says: this astonishing book amounts to a powerfully resonant cultural critique -a unique kind of miscommunication which, far from stabilising the world in meaning, constructs a universe radically unfixed by a wild diversity of possibilities and potentials.

Sounds great. The only problem is - I can't read the damn thing!

Anybody else tried? Anybody here succeeded? Was it worth the work?

Are there any other 'literary classics' that left you feeling stupid because you just didn't get it?

 

[dask]

My humanities professor told us to go over to the bookstore and open the book to any page and try to read a sentence or two. Read the book? I don't see the point. The payoff doesn't seem to justify effort. Spend a summer trying to figure what a paragraph means? There are Jack Vance books I haven't got to yet.

 

[Foxbat]

Read the book? I don't see the point.

That's exactly how I feel after trying.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I've listened to an audio performance of it and it was quite good. Still couldn't make head nor tail of it but the language and cadence was fantastic. From memory, it was written to be read aloud.

 

[Foxbat]

I've listened to an audio performance of it and it was quite good. Still couldn't make head nor tail of it but the language and cadence was fantastic. From memory, it was written to be read aloud.

I did try reading it aloud and it certainly made much more sense to do that - but I just can't be bothered to do that for a six hundred page book.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Having just read an extract, I think I might side with DH Lawrence, HG Wells, Ezra Pound, and Nabokov, on the issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake#Literary_significance_and_criticism

You can read it online here:
http://www.finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm

 

[Ursa major]

I did try reading it aloud and it certainly made much more sense to do that - but I just can't be bothered to do that for a six hundred page book.

If its "meaning" is (predominantly) in how it sounds, not in what its words say on the page, why not treat it like a form of unsung verbal music (by getting an audiobook of it)?

 

[Foxbat]

If its "meaning" is (predominantly) in how it sounds, not in what its words say on the page, why not treat it like a form of unsung verbal music (by getting an audiobook of it)?

Yeah, that's an idea. I'll maybe have a look around and see what I can find (and let somebody else do the hard work)

 

[BAYLOR]

I tried reading it and failed .

 

[GOLLUM]

It's certainly seen as a challenging book. I haven't read it yet and am waiting to source a lifelong annotation someone has done (forgotten the title of this) before attempting it. Ulysses is also challenging but I'm anticipating not as difficult a work to access as Finnegans Wake. I've read Ulysses albeit it was an annotated version and that I found highly enjoyable.

Just a point on the title itself and that seemingly recalcitrant apostrophe. This has been a point of speculation for some time among academics and whether it refers to a single Finnegan or a multiplicity of Finnegans (in terms of a collective consciousnesses) or whether the lack of an apostrophe may in fact indicate a hidden comma immediately preceding the term Finnegans etc as well as it potentially referring to one of several specific events within the book itself and I also believe Joyce may have provided his own reason for this which in itself has been the cause of speculation ...and that's not even proceeding to page 1 yet..

The posters before me may have a point then.....

 

[GOLLUM]

Recently, I've been busy reading novels that I'd always meant to read but never got around to. A loss of power for five hours last night (an explosion in a local link-box - whatever that is) led me to pick up Finnegans Wake....and promptly put it down again about an hour later.

I would be very interested in knowing which novels you are referring to and which remain on your list to read. Ta.

 

[Cathbad]

Dang... now I just have to read it!

 

[Foxbat]

I would be very interested in knowing which novels you are referring to and which remain on your list to read. Ta.

Recently read Huckleberry Finn, The Trial, and Naked Lunch (really didn't get into this one at all).

Still meaning to get to War And Peace (started it but never finished it), Anna Karenina, most of Dickens' work, stuff by Thomas Hardy (my brother's a fan and keeps going on about how I should read some), some stuff by Sir Walter Scott - Waverley, Heart Of Midlothian, The Bride Of Lammermoor (this one mainly because its setting is not far from where I live)....and many more.

About to start (not a novel) John Muir's Wilderness Discovery books.

 

[Extollager]

Foxbat, I've just finished my seventh reading of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's insight into human beings is uncanny. I love War and Peace and have read it several times. Bravo to you for being open to Sir Walter Scott -- and those are all excellent choices for a first Scott, though my rule of thumb is to start with the second chapter!

 

[Foxbat]

Bravo to you for being open to Sir Walter Scott -- and those are all excellent choices for a first Scott, though my rule of thumb is to start with the second chapter!

Interestingly, I had a quick thumb through Waverley recently and I believe you give sound advice

 

[Extollager]

...I should have said six readings of Anna Karenina, not seven. But the point is that it's so good; possibly the greatest 19th-century novel, especially if one defines "novel" in terms of realism, focus on the individual in society, etc.

 

[Dan Jones]

Back to Finnegan's Wake... I tried to read it at university and like everyone else, failed to get past the first couple of pages.

I tried again a few years later and failed again.

I'm currently trying again, but I'm not reading it in isolation; I've got some Joe Abercrombie on standby as a light tonic to eas emy melting brain, and I'm also reading a non-fiction book on fighting in writing (hey, that rhymes!). The other thing I'm trying to do with this reading of FW is to simply read the text and not pore over the meaning of each word and sentence, but to simply let the text flow - rereading every word and sentence simply traps oneself in the treacle I think. Reading it this way means most if it doesn't stick, but occasinally some of it does, like catching a scent on the breeze before it drifts away again, beyond your ability to keep up.

I've made it further than I have in previous attempts, but only have the merest faint glimmer of an understanding of it, and even then my understanding is so subjective that it might be completely different to another reader's. It's almost like reading something written by an alien.

And I still haven't worked out whether Joyce was, alongside Shakespeare, the greatets literary genius who ever lived, or simply a charlatan with too much time on his hands who disappeared up his own backside. The fact he wrote Dubliner's Portrait and Ulysses demands the former, but FW? Dear me.

~

This is interesting
Scientists find evidence of mathematical structures in classic bookshttp://www.theguardian.com/books/20...actal-structure-of-finnegans-wake-james-joyce

 

[GOLLUM]

Hats off to you DG Jones for giving it another go.

As I said I'm going to read it using the liife-long study of another. It might be helpful for me to post a review on it after that. It may save some people the trouble/pain of reading it...