Arkapravo Bhaumik
asked:
Why read Finnegans Wake, when I know I will not understand anything? I ask those have read this literary behemoth, what was your motivation, and what did you finally grasp?
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Alper Yılmaz
Accepting that you won't understand anything relating to a story is the first step to enjoying this book. Just lose yourself in the play of words, the atmosphere - sometimes vivid enough for a painting - they establish, and let loose. A tip that helped me endlessly in enjoying it is to read it out loud when you're by yourself. It'll take forever if you intend to finish it, but I found this book worthwhile. (One neat trick the book pulls, if you read it out loud, is forcing you to read most of it in an Irish accent through its bizarre, Irish-ized spelling of certain words!)
Kiraspectrum
I found it funny and dense and horribly difficult to get. All at the same time. It was fun, I didn't read all of it, but wherever I opened the page, I always found an allusion to something that made sense to me.
Tim
The Wake is a master course in understanding how dreams work. I know nothing better. Not Jung, not Freud. Jung and Freud tell you about dreams, Joyce SHOWS you how a dream works. https://www.facebook.com/groups/32460...
Reece
I think it's best to have a secondary reading on hand when you are absolutely lost as all hell and feel frustrated about it, but try to read it on your own as you can because the satisfaction of exploring Finnegans Wake and getting something in it is too good to pass up. My motivation was Ulysses was my favorite book ever and I loved how Joyce stretched language to push his ideas, and I heard FW did that on steroids, so I said to myself, "sounds like my kinda thing." And it is my kinda thing. If the idea of this very difficult book doesn't excite you, you may not find yourself enjoying it and that's perfectly fine too. It's inaccessible, but it is also very rewarding as you do begin to understand what's happening and figure out the overarching ideas at play. It's also dialectical, so rereading the book means you encounter something significant that you could not have noticed earlier in the book because you were not introduced to something that happens later. This kind of occurrence is EVERYWHERE in FW, which is another reason it is so difficult, but it also makes the book more rewarding to revisit. If you're looking for a novel that will last you a lifetime, this one is a pretty solid choice. But maybe that's not your thing. I still think anyone can come to love the book if they push themselves to just reading it, so while it is very inaccessible and challenging, at least you can say that you tried it :)
Tommy Potts
love a Joke motivation
a technique with which to parse the wake
for the production and perpetuity of Joy
a technique with which to parse the wake
for the production and perpetuity of Joy
Popvoid
My advice (as someone who read it the first time without knowing anything about it) is to get a hold of some of the books about Finnegans Wake. The Skeleton Key is a good one, but there are others worth reading. Anthony Burgess wrote a good book about all of Joyce's work called Re Joyce. The first thing you'll discover is that no two scholars agree on everything about the book, but that's part of the fun. Joyce was trying to create the experience of someone dreaming, mixing the events of the previous day and personal anxieties with the history of the world. The fact that he succeeded in any way is pretty astounding. If you decide you don't like it, you'll be in good company.
phoebe
is there any art that anyone understands
you could read it like a series of riddles flowing into each other
you could read it like you would read a jackson pollock painting
you could shred the book and assemble the fragments to perform divination
you could interrogate people who have read it as performance art
it's something that exists in the world and you can do whatever you want with that fact
you could read it like a series of riddles flowing into each other
you could read it like you would read a jackson pollock painting
you could shred the book and assemble the fragments to perform divination
you could interrogate people who have read it as performance art
it's something that exists in the world and you can do whatever you want with that fact
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