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MowTin t1_jdkh4x8 wrote

Reply to comment by wjbc in I read Finnegan's Wake so you don't have to by machobiscuit

I believe there is a kind of art that attempts to be obscure and opaque just so that those who manage to make sense of it can claim to be superior. Yet in reality, no one has made any sense of it because it's nonsense. It's like the modern works of art where the artist splashes paint on a wall and critics and pretentious people praise its deep metaphorical meaning. Or have you ever known the kind of person who just throws out french phrases just to impress people?

I acknowledge that I could be completely wrong. Maybe if I got a Ph.D. in literature and spent a few years studying Joyce that my eyes would be opened to how brilliant Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are.

"Simplicity of language is not only reputable but perhaps even sacred." -- Kurt Vonnegut

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MarcusXL t1_jdkwji1 wrote

Plenty of people have made sense of it. It's not literature in the traditional sense, it's meant to have shifting meanings. It's not a traditional narrative. You're supposed to 'read' by getting impressions of the words, because their amalgamations of other words, it's like a psychedelic trip or a fever-dream. It's like a fractal, in that you can dive into single 'words' or phrases and find varieties of ideas and meanings in several languages and eras.

You supposed to lose track of characters, settings, events. That's all deliberate. There's a method to the madness. If you don't like it, that's perfectly legitimate. But it's not nonsense. It's a work of art, a brilliant one, but Joyce is like a comedian with an extremely specific and absurd sense of humour who doesn't care if anyone else gets the joke.

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redlion145 t1_jdl713e wrote

>It's a work of art, a brilliant one, but Joyce is like a comedian with an extremely specific and absurd sense of humour who doesn't care if anyone else gets the joke.

I like that, that tracks with my take on him. He's certainly a genius, but quite possibly mad as well. Reminds me of Danielewski's House of Leaves in the scope and innovativeness, but also in it's convolution and opacity.

I wouldn't deny anyone the enjoyment of slogging through any of these books if that's your thing, but I don't personally enjoy struggling that much with a leisure activity. I mostly read for fun.

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MarcusXL t1_jdl8y51 wrote

People who like Joyce get a huge amount of fun from reading him, but the Wake in particular is like learning a new language-- or, more accurately, it's like regressing to a more primitive form of language, where words and sounds intuitively invoke feelings and images.

You can "snap into" the language of the Wake, and you find that you're "getting it", getting the meanings that Joyce was intending, without "reading" the words like you normally would. It's emphatically not some kind of high-brow intellectual thing, like reading Continental philosophy, Hegel or Kant or whatever. It's more like a those "magic eye" pictures that were big in the 90s. If you cross your eyes the right way, the image snaps into focus-- until you look away for a second and then it's all a fuzzy mess again.

It's really an amazing achievement in writing, but it's so weird and impenetrable that many people can't make heads or tails of it, and it just seems like nonsense. That's not because the reader is less intelligent or clever. There's just a perceptual 'trick' to it.

Joyce intended it to be an amalgamation of the whole history of European society and literature, but the chronology and the logical/narrative structure is blended, stretched, fractaled, and loops back on itself. It has "the logic of a dream". Look at something, it's one thing. Look away for a second and look back, it's another. You slip through the layers of history, of words/ideas/events/people without any sign-posts or a stable point of view. One character, or object, or event bleeds back into others of the same kind-- or of their opposites.

This is why people find it so frustrating. You can't stop and regain your bearings, you either slip into the stream of consciousness and flow with it, or you're just spun around into you're dizzy and you catch nothing of it.

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Hortonamos t1_jdkv3w4 wrote

That last quote is funny, though, because Vonnegut liked Joyce. Hell, he even praises Joyce in the very same essay that this quote comes from.

It took me like 3 times to read Ulysses, but when I did, I genuinely loved it. That has nothing to do with feeling superior. I loved it enough that I ended up writing my undergrad thesis about it.

Finnegan’s Wake, though, I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I gave up after a couple dozen pages. That doesn’t make it nonsense. But it also didn’t pull me in in a way that made it seem worth the effort. Nobody I’ve ever spoken to has made it seem worth the effort.

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