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Smoking Crow posted:(This is the only major work by Joyce not on Project Gutenburg, so be sure to check it out from your public library, since they will definitely have a copy) Actually the whole book has been online forever complete with links to each line. http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/fw-3.htm Admittedly it's a very 90's web experience but it works.
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Oct 20, 2014 22:22
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I'm not really sure if this is a sincere thread or not and I'm not going to waste any time trying to defend FW to those people who think it's just random nonsense or "brain vomit", but for anyone actually interested in reading the book I strongly suggest reading it with a guide. In particular I recommend A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, which is in fact a pretty great read just in itself.
Earwicker fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Oct 20, 2014 |
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Oct 20, 2014 23:27
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Smoking Crow posted:Of course this thread is sincere. I love Joyce brain vomit and all. You can't tell me that the stream-of-consciousness style of writing doesn't attempt to be exactly what I said it was. Well the way you phrased it implied randomness. The words in the book are of course mostly not real English words but they aren't just random letters thrown together either, they are generally combinations of multiple words that sometimes come from languages and sometimes are onomatopoeia
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Oct 20, 2014 23:34
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While we are on that first sentence, one of the first things to look at is the fact that it's actually a continuation of the last sentence. So the book is a sort of loop. "A way a lone a last a loved a long the rivverun, past Eve and Adam's, etc" This loop connects to the idea that history consists of recurring cycles.
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Oct 24, 2014 20:17
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While much of the fun of reading the book is its puzzle-like nature, I really don't think you need to get every single reference in any particular sentence when reading the book through the first time. It's the kind of book that is great for multiple reads, so you can always dive deeper when reading it again, and when you are first approaching it I think it is good to sort of maintain a balance where you are using a guide to get the references but mostly to just get a handle on what is going on in the stories and concepts the book is about. Otherwise you can get stuck forever.
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Oct 25, 2014 19:15
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mazzi Chart Czar posted:it should be noted that the letter 'T' and the letter 'D' when spoken have very similar effect on the mouth where the tongue raises up and a puff of air is pushed out. It is actually a bit helpful in the context of FW to think about that these basic sounds have shifted within one word as languages grow and split off from one another. The Sanskrit pitar and Latin pater influence the Old English faeder Old German fatar later down the line the German vater and English father, and so on. For most words in the English language there is a somewhat linear history with, back in the very distant past, some proto-Indo-European root word and, in more recent history, a strong French influence built on top of an older Anglo-Saxon core and of course many stages in between and of course the modern standarizations. In Finnegans Wake however, that history is not so linear. It's more like all of these histories are sort of superimposed on each other and so more visible at the same time, the cycles of history stacked on top of one another rather than a progression in a line. And of course it is not just the history of the English language that is relevant, but the Irish language as well, especially with regard to place names. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 23:09
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Niric posted:the story of man, and the text of Finnegans Wake all begin with Adam and Eve Actually it's Eve and Adam('s), and that reversal is important. He's reversing not just the name of the actual church he's talking about, but the primacy of Adam over Eve. Before monotheistic religion arrived in Ireland, it was dominated by Celtic polytheistic beliefs, which involved worship of rivers or at least belief in river spirits, and which has also popularly been thought to be a less strictly patriarchal religion than the Catholicism which later came to dominate Irish culture. And in that patriarchal religion, the primacy of man over woman is explained first by the story of Adam and Eve, and justified with the explanation that Eve is, essentially, more responsible for the Fall.
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Oct 31, 2014 04:09
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We have already started talking about the first sentence a bit, but before that first sentence there is the title, which is also noteworthy. At the time the book was published more of Joyce's audience, especially in Ireland, would have recognized it as the name of a somewhat popular folk song. The song is about a worker (Tim Finnegan) who falls off a latter while drunk and cracks his head, his friends think he is dead and begin to have a funeral for him, only for Finnegan to wake up when they pour whiskey over him. So it is a story of "death" and "resurrection" much like the core story of Christianity, as well as that of many the other "mystery cults" which existed during the period in which Christianity was born and which also worship deities that died (in some manner) and were reborn, Mithras, Persephone, etc. It is also more broadly a reference to the cyclic nature of history which underlies the book. And I think it is also reminiscent of the passage in Ulysses in which Bloom dwells on the problem of people who have been buried alive and the idea of a machine they could use to alert funeral-goers from within their coffin.
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Oct 31, 2014 15:43
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Spoilers Below posted:Is sleep not a small death from which we are resurrected every morning? That is a great point. And the process of awakening is often unclear. Sometimes it's sudden, but many times there is a slow process of waking up where you are somewhat conscious but also still somewhat in the dream world, you do not have a clear grasp of "reality" and the sensory input from one world flows into another in strange ways. The sound of a dog barking outside in the waking world has a different source in the dreamworld. I've had many times where in the early morning where I will be awake enough to look at my phone to check the time, but will then think of 7:56 and 7:57 and 7:58 as different "rooms" and think to myself "I'll just stay in 7:56 a while longer", which is the sort of logic that only makes sense in a dream. I think that sort of confusing transition can also describe how one cycle of history becomes the next.
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Oct 31, 2014 17:46
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Niric posted:It's interesting that one of the footnotes for commodius vicus mentioned Giovanni Vico; he apparently said something to the effect that his Scienza Nuova was the only book readers would ever need Yes it is from Scienza Nuova that Joyce takes the idea of the cycles of history, so Vico will be brought up a few times throughout the book (its Giambattista by the way) That phrase also compares said cycles of history with the swirling of the water in a toilet. Joyce was a big champion of toilet scenes in literature. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 15:00
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CestMoi posted:I just got Finnegans Wake and Tristram Shandy in my delivery from amazon and I looked in FInnegans Wake and one of the first names mentioned is SIr Tristram so I feel I should read Tristram Shandy first just in case that is related and I can get this one reference at the start. Tristram is a different spelling of Tristan from the Arthurian legends, particularly the story of Tristan and Iseult (his name is spelled Tristram in Le Morte D'Arthur). The Tristan/Iseult/King Mark triangle is a major theme throughout FW so that is a good one to be familiar with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan
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Nov 4, 2014 16:29
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Speaking of reading it out loud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8kFqiv8Vww
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Nov 7, 2014 21:54
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anilEhilated posted:Silly question: is there any point in trying to read Finnegan's Wake when English isn't your first language and there's no way in hell you can tell whether the translation is worth a drat? I managed to finish (translated) Ulysses and kinda hope that the feeling I missed everything important is what you're supposed to have at the end. I've never looked at a translation of FW and I'm not sure how that would even be possible, considering a rather large volume of words in the book aren't really English in the first place. If the result looks anything like modern French or German or Spanish etc., the translator hosed up pretty bad. That said, there's no reason you can't read it in English, based on your posts you are fluent enough, but you will definitely need a guide.
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Dec 6, 2014 16:54
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