
What to Make of Finnegans Wake? (2012) - samclemens
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/07/12/what-make-finnegans-wake/
======
bshepard
"If Ulysses is the Algebra of literature then Finnegans Wake is the partial
differential equation." \- Terrence McKenna, from "Surfing the Wake", a talk
given at Esalen Institute in 1995.

Audio:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpeq91hK1Gk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpeq91hK1Gk)

Text: [http://dominatorculture.com/post/78408036619/surfing-
finnega...](http://dominatorculture.com/post/78408036619/surfing-finnegans-
wake-part-1)

~~~
bshepard
"People say that the psychedelic experience is hard to remember, that dreams
are hard to remember but harder to remember than either of those is simply
ordinary experience. You lie in the baths and you close your eyes for thirty
seconds and empires fall, dynastic families unfold themselves, power changes
hands, princes are beheaded, a pope is disgraced and then somebody drops
something and you wake up and fifteen seconds have passed. That’s the reality
of life but we suppress this chaotic irrational side. The genius of Joyce and
to some degree although in a more controlled form, Proust - and there were
other practitioners, Faulkner certainly – what they called stream of
consciousness but what it was, was an ability to really listen to the
associating mind without trimming, pruning, judging or denying. One of the
great puzzles to me is the great antagonism between Jung and Joyce because you
would have thought they would have been comrades in arms but Joyce loathed
psychoanalysis. He thought that to use all this material to elucidate imagined
pathologies was very uncreative use of it and it should all be fabricated into
literature. " McKenna, from "Surfing the Wake" above.

~~~
zoul
Woolf also does this in a beautiful way. To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway.

------
avip
Just listen to the song instead - it's way shorter, and let's face it -
objectively better.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6CHq9mXkJ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6CHq9mXkJ8)

------
dubeye
There are multiple ways to read the book. You can go deep, geek out on the
references and annotations. Or you can read more casually and recreationally,
and just let the words flow over you, treat it almost like music. Know there
is underlying meaning but don't attempt to dig it out, enjoy the surface
impression.

Both are valid, an academic does more of the former, a serious student
probably does a bit of both. Most general readers do the latter.

------
hawktheslayer
I do enjoy the fact that the first line is incorporated in the last line of
the book, making it an infinite loop of sorts.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
And then, a few decades later, Stephen King recycles the twist.

------
krylon
[https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/joyce](https://www.smbc-
comics.com/comic/joyce)

SCNR!

------
user2994cb
The audiobook by Jim Norton (aka Bishop Brennan) is a good way in to FW:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAc901X7gK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAc901X7gK0)

------
oceanghost
Can anyone recommend a way to appreciate Finnegans Wake?

I'm a lit buff, high-IQ by and standard (among those whose IQs are measurable
at least) and have found this book impenetrable. Yet I feel drawn to it.

~~~
ars
What makes you think there is anything there to appreciate?

As best as I can tell it's just random sounds and words. It was probably fun
to write, but there's no reason to try to read it.

You've never heard kids making sound just for fun? To hear the sound of their
own voice? It's lots of fun to do, and even join in, but there's nothing there
to actually try to study.

I read those laudatory praises people have for it, and it's very obvious they
are just trying to make themselves seem important and "in the know", when
actually it's just nonsense. The Emperor has no clothes. Have we learned
nothing from that fable?

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> What makes you think there is anything there to appreciate? As best as I can
> tell it's just random sounds and words.

It isn’t "random sounds and words". While Joyce chose to make the surface of
the book a constant stream of puns and other wordplay by drawing on a large
number of languages, _Finnegans Wake_ has a character, story, setting, etc.
like any other novel. I personally find the _Wake_ tiresome – who was the
contemporary of Joyce’s who called the book something like an “electrified
punning machine”? – but "Emperor’s new clothes” it definitely isn’t.

~~~
ars
Take a look at this line: "growing hoarish under his turban and changing cane
sugar into sethulose starch".

I understand the words. hoarish means hairy, and sethulose is an obvious
misspelling of cellulose. Good. Lots of wordplay as you say.

But the actual sentence doesn't make any sense. That's the issue. Growing hair
has nothing to do with cellulose, and humans don't make cellulose anyway.
Plants make cellulose out of sugar - but why specify "cane"? Because it
sounded cool to him, but not because it actually makes any sense.

You are finding "character, story, setting" only because you are ignoring any
parts that don't make sense, then finding meaning in the rest. It's a form of
pareidolia.

The fact that someone made pareidolia in written form? Pretty cool. But don't
think there is anything there to study, other than wordplay and sounds. There
isn't. And that's why it's the "Emperor’s new clothes”.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Take a look at this line

Extracting a single line out of a book that (like human communication in
general) depends on the wider context of the diction, and then attacking the
whole book as nonsense, is fallacious. Come on, l'arbitraire du signe has been
well-known for a century now.

> You are finding "character, story, setting" only because you are ignoring
> any parts that don't make sense, then finding meaning in the rest. It's a
> form of pareidolia.

A number of commentators on the _Wake_ reached the same agreement on the
book’s character and general plot _independently of each other_ in the years
immediately following its publication.

In any event, even _if_ the _Wake_ were merely “inventing sounds” (which it
isn’t), that still wouldn’t make it “Emperor’s new clothes”. Nonsense poetry
has been an established literary genre since the mid-19th century, well before
the era of modernism. That ranges from work that obeys the general syntax of
the language even if certain words are nonsense, to poems that are outright
written in what might as well be a foreign language unintelligible to the
reader but attractive because of the words’ inherent musical quality to
speakers of the poet’s language. Some of these poems, like Lewis Carroll’s
"Jabberwocky" [1] or Sándor Weöres's "Kínai templom" [2] are practically part
of their countries’ respective literary canons and commonly read in schools.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky)

[2]
[http://www.okm.gov.hu/letolt/retorika/ab/szoveg/komm/kinai.h...](http://www.okm.gov.hu/letolt/retorika/ab/szoveg/komm/kinai.htm)

