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Did any of you... read it and understand it? Becaise I fear a great many do not get it.
I would recommend taking a hit of LSD. It will greatly increase your knowledge and appreciation of this truely collosally ****tardedly phantasmagorical piece of what have you in a great field of ???.
After reading part of Ulysses, the idea of wasting time on this "art" makes me nauseous when I think of all the other great literary works there are to read.
I've read it. And no, I didn't understand it. It's meant not to be understood. That was Joyce's purpose in writing it.Quote:
Originally Posted by 0=2
Wake is more of an elaborately jumbled crossworld puzzle than conventional novel; and as intricate as it is, I don't know if I could ever FEEL the concept he originally set out to create...the world at night.
I think that Finnegans Wake has some kind of meaning behind it. Its quite mysterious. Meaning is exhausted to the point of outwardly appearing to be complete gibberish. Trying to fully understand one paragraph is like trying to get through a triple fortified castle. One must wonder what Joyce was trying to get at in a deeper sense and how he possibly thought the book was his favorite of what he wrote.
I'd really apreceate some help with this, this seems like a good place to ask my question.
Ignoring large scale features like the storyline for now, lets look at small scale stuff like the meaning of words in the context they are used or the structure of individual sentances. I'm not just any native English speaker but I consider my comprehension to be verry good even if my spelling is not. Although to me it exactly as if this book is written in a foreign language, the text itself doesn't make sense to me at all any more than if it was written in French, or more likely Irish. Yet in this thread people are talking about it as if it's other than random words connected with cirtain rules as to form plausible sounding nonsence that has some rhythm as it is read.
There is a big differnce between each word being completly unrelated to every other and it having lots of meaning but using complex languege and sentance structure. Could somone who claims the latter help me by describing how this is the case?
I took a class on Irish Studies in Belfast, and we spent three lecture periods going meticulously going over just the first chapter... it is amazing as every phase is at least a double, and sometimes triple, entendres. That being said, I will never pick it up again, and anyone who would read 1000+ pages of a book they don't understand is either retarded, or the maddest most awesome genius I have ever heard of.
riverrun past swerve of shore passed Adam's and Eve..... or close to it.
So many words are in Irish and not English?
If there are multiple meanings to most of it's sentances then are there roughly (average meanings per sentence ^ number of sentances) meanings to the whole book?
Apparently 80,000 words is typical for a novel and the avegerage sentance length is 15 to 20 words, so lets say 17 words per sentance. That means that for example as a rough estimate there could be 4705 sentances in the book.
If the average meanings per sentance in this book is for example 1.5 then there would be 3 and a bit times 10 to the power of 828 paths though the book.
Do all of thease possible paths create valid stories, did he think all thease though, do they conflict with each other, are most of the paths full of sentences that have multiple meanings but make little sence to the book as a whole?
Ok, do you know what a pun is? A pun is a 2 or more words mixed together that give off connections to all of those words/meanings. For example, the word "apfall" would bring to mind an apple, but also a "fall". An apple and a fall together bring to mind Isaac Newton and his story of how an apple fell on him and it inspired him to write about gravity. This same word is actually from Finnegans Wake.Quote:
Originally Posted by alan2here
Now, imagine a novel filled with words like this, thousands of them, and most of them being obscure references. To complicate the issue, most of the words are multilingual puns. There is no barrier to the language, meaning a phrase like "we moest ons haasten te declareer it" (from Finnegans Wake) will bring to the mind of an English speaker "we" "must" "hasten" "to" "declare". But logically, the sentences will make no sense. In Dutch, however, the exact sentence means "we had to hurry". There is Irish and French, but there is also over 50 other languages used throughout.
This is a site which explains tremendously much of the references:
http://finwake.com/
I love puns (play on words) although they are normally different to this.
Thanks for that information. I'm more impressed with the book now I know that all the words arn't supposed to be real words but that many bring to mind similar words and that this works for many langueges at once.
Thanks for the link, along with your explanation I can now understand what is intended.