James Joyce was honestly the smartest man to ever live.
>>25587384I was reading the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter from good ol' Ulysses last night. Fuckin' hell, man -- the virtuosity. And FW reads like an even wilder version of that.
Why would I write when Joyce has already written?
>>25587403You must return to poetry, Anon. Joyce has finished the novel, Finnegans Wake has perfected prose. What is left is to "begin again" and go back to the epic. We must go back to Homer and Virgil for literature to move forward. We must write narrative verse again.
He wrote a bunch of gay books which are notable solely due to their incomprehensibility. I don't know, man. I think people who write math and econ textbooks for a living are a tad smarter.
>>25587453IncomprehensibilityIt’s okay to admit you were filtered, anon. Plenty of people read and understand Joyce, I think it might just be a you thing.
>>25587444Checked, but I’m so tired of people claiming the novel has been “completed” by this or that author and that no more progression is possible. maximalist polyglot prose is not the only avenue for formal reinvention
>>25587476It genuinely is, though. A maximalist can write minimalistic prose in sections if he wants to; a minimalist, however, can't necessarily switch to the converse. Personally, I'm only really interested in the most complicated, erudite, and experimental works out there. Everything else is for women and children, largely.
>>25587502>A maximalist can write minimalistic prose in sections if he wants to; a minimalist, however, can't necessarily switch to the converseThis is just silly. Minimalism and maximalism are more than mere prose styling, a maximalist can write sparse prose but it doesn’t mean they’ve truly adopted minimalism as an aesthetic philosophy. Beckett tried the maximal approach in his early works but he was far better suited to minimalism. Conversely I’ve never even seen Joyce attempt what Beckett managed to achieve with his late fiction. >Personally, I'm only really interested in the most complicated, erudite, and experimental works out thereWhich is a problem. Your biases are on full display here. With the right approach Complexity and novelty can emerge from even the simplest of structures, in fact Id argue that a book like Ulysses is easier to read than, say, How It Is.
>>25587384I think, had he finished FW a little sooner, or lived a little longer, his next step would have been a return to poetry. That, I’d loved to have seen, considering how much he improved throughout his life. How FW is oftentimes more rhythmic than many other 20th century poetry, it would only be natural that if he wanted to cement his name to be revered in the same group as figures such as Shakespeare, Homer, Milton, Dante, he’d have taken one last excursion into poetic form.
>>25587453>im not smart but i want to fit in! tough
Does anyone have any good videos on other writers (fuck critics and journalists, boring wiseacres) talking about FW? Toni Morrison, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Campbell, etc. Hell, even David Lynch.
>>25587988I hope someone does but I suspect that most writers haven't read Finnegan's Wake. I've read about 20 pages of it and while it isn't a defacto slog exactly (as there are constantly little puns and jokes flitting about) if you cross the line into being a Serious Reader of the book it absolutely transforms into a slog. Ulyssees (which I have read and enjoy and respect), as everyone on this board knows, is full of references that not only contact the humanities not contained in the book, but link to each other. Many of the later chapters are foundationally that -- Circe basically recaptures all of the plot elements up to then in the book, often but not always altering them, and if read without notes or a guide the effect is often you wondering if you misread something before, or if your memory is failing before you can line things up to make some coherent statement out of it.Anyway, all the time Joyce spent doing that lead him to develop an instinct for how to construct these devices that are basically a form of literary cryptography. Devices that he could spin up in linear time that would require readers exponential time to unspool. Finnegan's Wake, for the pages I read, was heavy with the signs of those devices and at a certain point you just have to nod to Joyce and bow out of these engagements or else you'll spend as much time earnestly reading 100 pages of that book as he spent writing the whole thing. There are worse ways to live your life than engaging fully with Finnegan's Wake, but most of these literary entanglements are gold veins in potential only -- the reader is required to complete them, and if it turns out you're not a good enough reader the work you put in is not at all guaranteed to bear fruit. Of course some are not going to be that way, some of them Joyce has seen how it unfolds beautifully into meaning and it doesn't take extensive labor by the reader to get there. But you can't tell which is which, as a reader, until you do some work. There is art. There is also art that hides the art. Neither is necessary, both are nice, but for all the good things you can say about Finnegan's Wake, it's difficult to say it's very rich in that second dimension, the art that hides the art, which is a part of literary craft. In short, I am 30% too stupid and 20% too lazy for that book. But that also lets me off the hook, so in this case I'm halfway glad of it.
>>25588022>No, I don'tOkay, thanks.
>>25587384How's his "new Irish mentality" coming along? Oh, they're still pale niggers? I guess he failed, then.
>>25588027What I actually said was no I don't, and no one else does either, and this is why. Thanks.You're even less cut out for Finnegan's Wake than I am.
>>25588045>Still don'tI know.
>>25587453Why would the smartest people in a given field be writing textbooks instead of papers? Need to get Newton himself to write an intro to calc for 16 year olds
>>25588053Smug cunt needs "Writer Opinions" though, strange
>>25587453>people who write econ textbooks for a living>smartlmfao
>>25588209>gives pretentious diary entry because he can't directly answer simple questions>not the smug one
>>25588235Why don't you just ask google then? Internet fried moron.
>>25587384I MET A JAMESHE WAS AN IRISHMANHE WAS DEEPLY SYMPATHETIC WITH THE MUSIC CAUSEI MET A JOYCESHE WAS FILIPINA BY HERITAGESHE WAS A HEALTHCARE WORKSTER
>>25588210THE TRUE, AND PERSONALIZED-TO-YOU ECONOMIC BIBLE IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE YOUR FINANCIAL STATEMENTS ABOUT HARD COLD CASH
>>25587554Joyce's poetry (Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach) are surprisingly conservative. Unlike his peers Eliot and Pound, Joyce's poetry uses rhymes and strict meter. I doubt he would have made anything revolutionary.
>>25588328pls stop infesting this already shit board
>>25588235You're talking to two different people. Take a hint.
>>25588352Yeah, his poetry is thoroughly mediocre.
>>25588383But would it have been in the aftermath of the Wake? I think >>25587554 makes a compelling case that working on the Wake might have so thoroughly transformed Joyce that his poetry would have taken a leap forward, if he had lived a little longer.
>>25588022>all those words to avoid the questionyou just love the sound of your own farts, huh
>>25588413He wrote Pomes Penyeach and Ecce Puer while writing Finnegans Wake, and they were all conservative
>>25588318>Why don't you just ask the brain-damaged search engine that disproportionately provides slop AI resultsWow brilliant, what an intellectual response
>>25588356YOU HAVE THE VOCABULARY OF A PRSTINE MEDICAL DOCTOR IN HIS OR HER VERY EARLY BEGINNINGSYOU MAY JUST MAKE IT BIGBUT A BIT OF POSITIVITY WILL GO LONGER THAN WHAT YOU TYPED THERE
>>25588427If anything other than "yes" and "no" sends you into Snarky Overdrive then maybe that's exactly the level of answers you deserve?
>>25588428CAPS MAKE ME INTERESTING
60 replies and no actual discussion about FW. Very well, I'll begin.You won't fully understand FW until you understand its circuler, infinite structure.Go take a look at the "final" words of the story:>"...and that's why we need to"The book cuts off mid sentance. You might be thinking that's a printing error or something, but actually it was a choice. Becauce the author, James, intended you to be able to pick up and read the book anywhere. Now look at the starting sentence.>"Begin again, Finnegan." Which not only gives me chills every time I think about it, but now put the end at the beginning together.>"And thats why we need to begin again, Finnegan"Yes, that's right. Finnegan literally predicted the rise of YouTube Shorts. Just one reason why the book is genius.
>>25588459Great now we also have the Begin Again spammer, Snarky Redditor, Cum-infested Genus wannabe (or the real one, there's no difference) and you. What has JJ done to deserve this I cannot say.
>>25588459>Very well, I'll begin.BEGIN AGAIN
>>25588428You are a rabid mutt dog and you need to be put down.
>>25588438>didn't read Pythagoras Start with the Greeks, Timmy, you can play Elden Souls and practice your power chords after your homework is done.
>>25587384he was a literal fart-huffer
>>25587384During my Joyce phase, I spent a few years reading FW on and off. Excerpts and entire chapters, that probably added up to about ~60% of the entire book being read by me. I also read lots of annotations (as well as contributed some of my own), and secondary materials. I do not regret reading it, since I did get things out of it, as well as a bunch of miscellaneous factoids. It also developed my linguistic muscles in general. Some sections are even somewhat interesting. But I can assure you that FW has no "deeper" meaning behind it. There is no hidden philosophical unity to it, nor anything of serious literary interest. In fact, Carrol's Jabberwocky is probably more literarily interesting than FW. The only interesting thing about FW is from an aesthetic standpoint and letting it speak for itself as its 'own' self contained world. Other than that, it is mostly a pointless work. Joyce basically used the book as an excuse to jerk off for 2 decades and get paid from his patron, while he avoided the work of writing another actual, serious novel.
I've read somewhere that he was genuinely annoyed and/or sad that folks were not enjoying it. Maybe you need delusions to be great?!
>25588988nice twitter grifter spacing, stinky
>>25588988>I also read secondary materialsDid you read Vico's New Science? If not, you are a shitter
>>25588022This was the way Moby Dick was for me. Took me five attempts to get through it. Genius.com had good enough references and explanations for me to get most of it. I’m going to put my penis in my wife’s vagina and fire ropes of sperm loads all over the back wall of her sloppy and hungry vagina. Knowing I’m going to do this to her makes her cum extra hard. I’mthinking of breaking up with her though because she went on birth control. She’s also a quarter Jewish and technically Jewish herself. I can’t do this to my people, after I blow another gallon of jizz in her I’m going to end it. Sex is off the charts but I want a family and not the Jewish kind. She wants to get advanced degrees to prove to herself that vaginas are as smart as men.
>>25589371This means u r gay
>>25589371That's good can I have a go at her first though?
>write gibberish book to troll people >pseudo intellectuals pretend to “get” it in order to seem smart Yeah that’s pretty smart and based of him
>>25589388When I’m done with her you can do whatever you want. She is sexually insatiable, emotionally needy, needs a big dick and needs to be put in her place sexually and intellectually but in a loving way. I should not have married her. I’ve told her this and then she feigns forlornly looking back at our marriage and sighs. I think she knows I’m going to divorce her but is in total denial. Good thing we have no kids or financial commingling. She’s 27. I think she’s a fucken loser for not wanting a family. She going to regret it one day. Other than that she’s pretty special. I will miss her.
>>25588459Thanks for the spoiler, I guess now I don't need to read it.
>>25589186I didn't, but was already aware of Vico and that NS influenced the book. Reading Vico won't reveal anything interesting about FW in the same way that reading the Book of Kells, or Tristan And Isolde myths, or Bruno, or the Bible, or the Book of the Dead, won't. (You are aware each of these also highly influenced the plot of FW?) If you think reading Vico is some "key" that's going to give FW a new layer of meaning you are wrong. All these materials appearing in FW is basically because Joyce was drawing on anything he thought would be interesting. It was an excuse for him to read this or that, and incorporate it into the novel. Here's a protip for you. If you look at earlier drafts of FW, it's all much more comprehensible language. It tells a mundane story. This basic, clear english prose was the skeleton Joyce built on and incorporated puns into. Beneath all the bluster, there's just a generic story that anyone can write in a week. The puns and language in FW are interesting, as are the unique vibes you sometimes get. And it's certainly not a meaningless work. But there's no "deep" point to FW in the same way there might be to, say, Shakespeare.
>>25589392Damn dude. That’s one hell of an original take. Definitely no one has ever had that thought but you
>>25589466Great thoughts, I appreciate your contribution, but what do you think about *that* opening line?>Begin again, FinneganStill gives me chills when I think about it
>>25589528who said anything about originality? why would you post this?the truth doesn't have to be "original"
>>25589392Based>>25589528Seethe
>>25589613>>25589620The truth =/= banal platitudes regurgitated by midwitsMy problem is whenever people trot out this claim, there’s nothing to suggest they’ve attempted to read anything of the book beyond the first page. I’m not claiming I understand it entirely myself (and I won’t even pretend I managed to finish it), but I’m also humble enough to admit that’s likely a failing on my own part rather than simply assuming it’s complete gibberish. Most people vastly overestimate their reading comprehension, so when they encounter something that reads as incomprehensible, the knee-jerk reaction is to get assmad about how there isn’t any meaning there to find in order to shelter their own ego from the reality of their own inadequacies.
