It has taken me quite some time to determine what I wished to write regarding Finnegans Wake, having completed it late last year. These comments are not so much about the Wake itself, of which countless volumes have been written, but rather about my own approach, experience, and assessment of reading this remarkable work.

People approach Finnegans Wake in diverse ways, especially those who truly intend a serious reading. Some plunge in directly, choosing to let the strange prose wash over them and experience the Wake, welcoming and relishing the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, rather than attempting to dissect and understand every single bit of it. Others enter it aloud, immersing themselves in the beautiful sounds, rolling the words around, giving voice to the rhythm and rhyme of Joyce's prose.

And then there are those left-brained readers, seeking order, logic, and linearity – those who, I suspect, have the most difficulty with the Wake. They approach it heavily armed with a plethora of exegetical aids, all kinds of texts like Joseph Campbell's 'Skeleton Key' or Tindall's 'A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake'. There are also many more resources, including numerous websites now dedicated to Finnegans Wake, such as www.finwake.com; the James Joyce Digital Archive (http://www.jjda.ie/main/JJDA/JJDAhome... http://oneyearinthewake.blogspot.com.

For me, it was a combination of all three methods. I started by diving in, but soon, gasping for air and nearly overcome, I reached for a branch, and Campbell's 'Skeleton Key' was there. Once I gained some confidence, I began to enjoy the Wake, as I now had a rough mental map of its architecture. From time to time, when alone, I would read long segments aloud, delighting in the lush, lyrical prose, and soon found myself in its rhythm and spirit.

One must accept a certain degree of ignorance and disorientation when entering The Wake. It has been studied, researched, and dissected continuously since its publication, and still, it has secrets to reveal. I never expected to understand everything. In fact, when reading, I prefer to be overwhelmed by complexity and erudition rather than dragged down by mediocrity and simplicity.

I'm not sure I have the words to express what the subjective experience of reading Finnegans Wake was for me. It was truly a mind-altering journey, with my synapses making countless new connections in unexpected directions, breaking barriers of time and space, looping all of human history around a tipsy barkeep who fell from a ladder, “the great fall,” with events recurring in different forms through Vico's infinite cycles. And even in those long, cryptic sections, you sense the hand of genius, and at some level, your mind apprehends something.

I suspect any attempt to explain the inner grasp, the apprehension of the Wake, will elude me – for how does one convey the subjective experience of the color red? On one level, the Wake is ineffable. It's beautiful, perplexing, glorious, frustrating, enchanting, hilarious, profound – name your adjective, it's all that and more. My Oxford World's Classic copy of Finnegans Wake is filled with notes, underlinings, arrows, and markings of all kinds – something I rarely do to my books, but Finnegans Wake demands that you make it your own. Indeed, Joyce can be indecipherable in places – but he can also be lyrical and beautiful: We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s without ends.

I could go on and on, but I think I've made my point: Finnegans Wake is among the great reading experiences of my life.

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Some help for your journey, should you ask for it:

Books:
FINNEGANS WAKE, James Joyce, Oxford World's Classics edition: This edition is one of the best. It has a helpful Introduction as well as a Chapter-by-Chapter Outline, Notes on the Text, and a Chronology of James Joyce. All very important to understanding the Wake. It also follows the 1939 pagination which most if not all reference sources use.

A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake, William York Tindall (1969)

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's Masterwork, Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson (1944, 1961, 2005)

How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, Luca Crispi (Editor), University of Wisconsin Press 2008

THE LANGUAGE OF FINNEGANS WAKE, william irwin thompson John Hopkins University Press
THE SEWANEE REVIEW Vol72, No. 1 Winter 1964.

Websites:
http://www.ubuweb.com/sound/joyce_fw.... Finnegans Wake audiobook, free.
http://www.finnegansweb.com/wiki/inde... Page by page annotations; very helpful
http://www.jjda.ie/main/JJDA/JJDAhome... James Joyce Digital Archive. Lots of info.
https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collect... James Joyce Scholar's Collection, University of Wisconsin Digital Library System – Many free to download PDFs of Wake scholarship
https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/hom... Interactive Book of Kells, Trinity College Dublin – Important book in the Wake
http://www.fweet.org Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury. A goldmine of searchable information about the Wake.
http://www.rosenlake.net/fw/FWconcord... Concordance for Finnegans Wake
http://www.fractiousfiction.com/finne... The Adventurer's Guide to FW

James Joyce’s Dreams

Finnegans Wake is an extremely complex novel that masterfully blends the reality of life with a captivating dream world. The concept that life is cyclical, encompassing birth, death, and rebirth, along with the repetitive nature of reincarnation, sheds light on the illusory nature of the reality we inhabit. The beginning and ending of this book seem to vividly illustrate this profound meaning.

The novel is a continuous stream of illusions and dreams. The plot is rather difficult to follow as the story delves into several fragmented and disconnected episodes. The main tension lies in the cause and effect, dream, and illusions, which are artfully illustrated through changing characters, settings, odd grammar, and strange sentences.

This story centers around the Porters and their three children. When they go to sleep, their world undergoes a remarkable transformation. You enter a dream world where their names and their children’s names are different! It is during the wake of a man named Finnegan that Mrs. Porter makes the spirit come alive at the visitation for the wake. There, she offers a one-woman monologue and energizes her husband from his dreams.

The linguistic tactics employed by the author are highly complex and include wordplay with hidden meanings throughout the book. Examples abound, such as words with one hundred letters that combine numerous languages. His polyglot idiom of puns is used to convey the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious side of reality. Finnegan’s Wake is indeed puzzling and confusing! However, the numerous corrections made by author James Joyce in notes and drafts in the later editions raise doubts about whether he is truly the genius as categorized by many literary critics. We may question the merit of his work. Nevertheless, this book is not for the timid or for readers interested solely in page-turners.

I think the test of how much you know the language in general and especially English, and how much ability you have to deal with texts, is a very interesting challenge regardless of its excellent structure and experience! I remember the first books that I tried to read in English (it was a youth comic book), I found that my hands and feet trembled at first when I went towards it, and while reading, my nerves were also exhausted from constantly referring to dictionaries back and forth to understand words, sentences, structures; and of course later, the strange pleasure of understanding what the story was finally about... This work also had such an effect in the end and of course its knots were解开 and seeing the knots behind it and the bigger knots behind them and so on until the end in the cloak of invisibility where nothing of it remains without knots and going back to tie the knots again and the wound that was put in its place, no matter how simple it seems, was again a cause of a kind of transparency.

Perhaps among modern literary and narrative works, it was the most difficult work that I have read. On the one hand, it had sincerity and relationships between elements, and its tangling due to the great extensiveness of relationships and the monstrosity of the structure made it difficult, and on the other hand, a kind of poetry made the words constantly slip through the fingers of the hand that held them and hide themselves, and my lack of knowledge as a reader also added to the difficulty in receiving the references outside the text.

To read it, despite relying on the annotation of the dear ones of the Persian language, I quickly added a dictionary - which of course these days its digital version is more useful - with important entries such as Longman and Oxford and the like and specialized historical entries along with sample sentences and structures that can all be found in popular software such as Babylon (for free in Iran), and an historical, mythological... glossary or an open Google page for searching is definitely useful. Along with the above-mentioned things, I browsed about 40 articles while reading, of which I read 10 to 15 completely, and it helped a lot in understanding the shape, form, and also the internal and historical references of the narrative; especially from the books of Joseph Campbell (for: general guide and mythological structure), William York Tindall (for: literary and stylistic-phonetic and word-by-word relationships and references), Patrick O'Neill (for: the thousand-word vocabulary of Joyce), Lucia Boldrini (for: a wonderful intertextual reading between Dante and Joyce and presenting a kind of topological narrative of the work), and finally Harold Bloom's work on Joyce (for: illumination especially for narrative areas and the principles of reading and criticism of Joyce in general and the defense and justification of some of Joyce's claims about the literary form), I got a lot of help in better understanding the work, and in my opinion, they were more useful for me than the other books that I took a passing look at a few others. All of them can be found on free internet book download sites, but I need to say that I will present them.

P.S: The reason for starting the work was actually the installation of Anselm Kiefer, the visual artist, which was held until 20 August in White Cube London and had the same name as Joyce's work for me. Therefore, before facing Kiefer's work, I decided to study Joyce's work. In my opinion, based on the evidence, it seems that the only inspiration of Kiefer may not be Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and even part of it has definitely been inspired by the artist's personal life, but the same clay and the same wounds can be felt while observing Kiefer's work. If only I wasn't far away and could walk on the paths of Kiefer's great work in person, not imagine the work with closed eyes from the artist's images, and directly be in the same world and language with Joyce and Kiefer in that space.

I have a tendency to never read the same book twice. Once I finish a novel or a book, I absorb it and then move forward. However, having just completed 'Finnegans Wake', I'm not so sure that this approach is even feasible. This book is truly impossible to completely finish. Indeed, I read it from start to finish. I also listened to it while reading. I spoke sentences aloud and even shouted words. I underlined phrases that amused me and rhymes that rang true. But still, I feel as if I've only scratched the surface of the semantic richness of this great work. I'm not sure when I'll go back to it, but I'm fairly certain that the allure is there. I sense it even as I willingly put this book aside for now. This is a novel that requires attention. It frustrates and confounds even the most dedicated seeker. I never felt in control or in command. I was like being in a river, floating for a while and just glad that I didn't drown. It's a world that I will return to, much like a dream-filled sleep when the day is over and night comes back.

"Wipe your glosses with what you know."

I listened to the audiobook where Irish actor Barry McGovern took on the male parts and Marcella Riordan did the female parts.

Surprisingly, even though I didn't understand a single bit of it, it was still an enjoyable experience. The two actors did an outstanding job in conveying the emotion of the piece. It was as if they made me feel that I was understanding the action that was unfolding. It was truly nice to not have to struggle through reading out those complex and strange words to myself like “So weenybeenyveenyteeny\\" and “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!”.

According to Wikipedia, "Although critics have described it as unintelligible, Joyce asserted that every syllable could be justified". I really wish Joyce was alive in this day and age so that he could sit down and provide his commentary on the full novel. I would be extremely interested to see how he would justify every single syllable.

“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude...” This statement makes me wonder about the nature of truth and knowledge in Joyce's work.

We have finally finished reading #JamesJoyce's remarkable work.

We embarked on this literary journey on January 1st, 2022, and reached the end on September 14th, 2023.

It was an arduous task, but we had a committed community of readers who persevered. However, we're not done yet! There's still more to explore and discover.

"Finnegans Wake" is truly one of the most challenging books ever written.

You can find a wealth of information and discussions on #booktwitter under the hashtags #JoyceEveryDay #FinnegansWake #FW.

The reading experience will also continue on #Bluesky.

James Joyce is undoubtedly a genius, and his work will continue to captivate and inspire readers for generations to come.

Don't miss out on this amazing literary adventure!

It felt as if I was listening to my favorite death metal album for the very first time.

At the beginning, you don't understand a single thing, yet there is this intuitive feeling deep within you that you are going to absolutely love this stuff.

This is my seventh or eighth attempt at reading this book, and finally, I have achieved success.

It took me more than two months, but it was most definitely worth it.

The process was not easy. There were times when I wanted to give up, but something kept pulling me back.

Maybe it was the anticipation of finally understanding the complex ideas and themes within the book.

Now that I have finished it, I feel a sense of accomplishment and a newfound appreciation for the author's work.

I can't wait to explore more of their books and see where this literary journey takes me.

This is my third time delving into Finnegans Wake, and it marks my final stab at penning a review.

I have always fallen short when it comes to reviewing James Joyce.

My mind persistently wages a battle against his writing style.

I keep striving to extract more from what isn't there, rather than simply relishing in what is.

I was taught to approach great writing as a dissection, much like an autopsy. Instead of treating it as a living, breathing entity that moves and evolves, I was trained to pin it to a board and meticulously discuss each part of the whole and its function.

In my attempt to pry open the chest and reach the heart of Finnegans Wake, I find myself with my arms submerged in a pit of gnashing teeth.

I keep anticipating to examine the inner workings of a mammal, only to be assaulted by the polymorphic musicality of alien flesh.

It dawns on me that my education has failed me.

What schoolish mortals are we, indeed?

James Joyce, in my mind's eye, is like a swarm of spiders concealed within a coat, masquerading as a man. I envision Joyce, Peter Parker, Arachne, and Kafka standing in a circle, pointing at each other in a stark and horrific realization. They are all shades of the same mythology, all victims of the same hubris, the Bug-People of the Bug-House.

You see, what you think, what you know, shapes what you become.

Joyce's work is akin to a spider-web. It is incredibly dense and yet astonishingly thin, such that you can easily become ensnared in a single sentence. For less experienced readers tackling his prose, especially Finnegans Wake, the more you struggle against it, the more arduous it becomes. But once you touch those delicate threads, you will never be set free. You are captured, forever. Ensnared. It is a trap, or perhaps more accurately, a glamour.

People may discard the book in frustration, but it will never truly leave them. It will rebound to them in the dead of night, like a cursed yo-yo. Haunting them from the periphery, at the edge of their bed, nibbling on their toes like a thirsty Tarantino.

"Ooooh, why is that book so highly praised? It seems like gibberish! But I just can't let it go? The maddening beats of this snickering fey Irishman!! His heart pounding beneath the boards of the floors of my mind palace! Like a dead man rising at his own wake!"

All of that endless, undefined silliness will pursue the reader until their memories crumble within the rotting stew of their aging brain chemistry.

And in their final moments, Joyce will emerge from the center of his hidden nest, crawl down, locate the entangled readers, and inject their bodies with his acidic prose. Breaking them down just as he deconstructs narratives and storytelling. And then James Joyce will drink the liquefied guts of the reader like a human slurry.

Ablublublublublub.

machimane ex zvriega. the schooner the batter.

As I grow older and more broken, I have come to dismiss the value of rationalism in artistic critique. I increasingly view it as self-aggrandizing silliness donning the guise of seriousness.

I've come to realize that understanding isn't always as crucial as experiencing.

I firmly believe that every failed attempt to review Finnegans Wake is, in fact, a success in its own right.

And so, I too, will fail. I must fail.

Of course, I am well-suited for this task. Just like Frodo carrying the ring into Mordor. Being a loser is an easy feat for me.

(My failed attempt to review Finnegans Wake is now accessible to the public and free on my Patreon.

As both a treat and a trick for Halloween.

Let us all, once again, fail to understand this work.

And appreciate the gift that failure bestows.)

Full Review Here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/finnega...

My Toxic Trait

My toxic trait is the belief that I could ever read this. It's a rather strange and perhaps self-deprecating thought. Maybe it stems from a lack of confidence in my reading abilities or a sense of overwhelm when faced with certain texts. But this mindset can hold me back. It prevents me from even attempting to engage with new and challenging materials. Instead of approaching reading with an open and curious mind, I immediately assume that it's beyond my reach. This negative thinking pattern not only affects my learning and growth but also my overall attitude towards new experiences. I need to recognize this toxic trait and work on changing it. I should start by believing in myself and giving myself the chance to explore different types of literature and information. Only then can I break free from this limiting belief and expand my knowledge and understanding.

In What Is Art?, Tolstoy launches a scathing criticism of all aspects of art, leaving no one unscathed. His central contention is that art, whether it be literature, paintings, music, or drama, should be within the reach of everyone. He asserts that anything that the common man cannot fathom or that does not represent the common man is, in fact, a form of aggression against the common man. All art must educate, all art must be accessible, and all art must tell the story of the common man. Otherwise, it is not art but an elitist manipulation, and a dangerous one at that. The main object of his ire is art that is enigmatic simply for the sake of being enigmatic. He even dedicates an entire chapter to Wagner to drive home his point. While some might argue that this kind of critique foreshadows the Stalinist suppression of anything not "for the people" (the Bolsheviks actually lauded Tolstoy and suppressed Dostoevsky), I do believe that Tolstoy has a valid point, especially when it comes to Joycean Modernism.

I'll be forthright. Modernism truly irks me. I comprehend the concept of using style to comment on style, but I really can't abide by this pompous approach to art. It's dull and somewhat defeats the purpose of publishing for the masses. This, of course, does not apply to all Modernists; Hemingway and Fitzgerald are both highly accessible. But Joyce is无疑 an author who takes pleasure in name-dropping and pretentious meanderings. It's simply not to my taste.

I was required to read Finnegans Wake for a Modernist British literature class in undergrad, and I couldn't finish it. I suppose I'm a lesser English major for criticizing the inimitable James Joyce, but I found this novel pretentious and, quite frankly, idiotic. As far as I can tell, there is no plot and hardly any characters. Every word in every sentence is a combination of three or more languages. This may sound interesting, but it's truly excruciating to read and a ridiculous way to address linguistic issues. If you have something so profound to convey, why on earth can't you make your writing accessible? Are you trying to keep it a secret? What is the point of combining 30+ languages to create linguistic gibberish? I learned nothing from this novel other than that language itself can be a form of imprisonment. I think D.H. Lawrence makes this argument far more persuasively in Lady Chatterly's Lover - another Modernist novel, yes, but one whose acclaim doesn't stem solely from the author's ability to reference every piece of literature written before the Common Era.

I guess I do understand the acclaim this novel receives: it references everything, and Joyce must have been rather brilliant to know all of these languages. You can also detect the emergence of Post-Modernism here with Joyce's total disregard for anything (and I mean anything) traditional. Perhaps that's why I loathed it.

Moreover, returning to Tolstoy, I believe there are political and biased reasons for this novel's almost godlike status. There are countless books that attempt to uncover the meaning of Wake, and many a floundering graduate student struggles to grasp Joyce's points. The pretentiousness of this novel ensures that there will never be a dearth of criticism about it, and being able to make sense of nonsense allows one to seem cultured and genius-like. This does pose a problem when you think about it. Only a few books out of the countless ones that have been written are included in the canon, and mostly because they reinforce our own racial, classist, gendered, and sexual prejudices. Finnegans Wake certainly meets this criterion by being accessible to only, say, 5 people on the planet. This isn't necessarily due to racism or sexism, but because of the idea that the best literature is not understood by the lowly masses. "They want John Grisham or Stephenie Meyer? Let them have Joyce!" is perhaps the best way to put it.

All in all, I can't stand this book. If you're looking for a good post-modern novel, read Kundera or Vonnegut. Finnegans Wake is a waste of time (and brain power).

I simply cannot fathom the idea of reading this book solely in my mind. Instead, I chose to listen to it as an audio book, which was an absolute delight.

If, for some reason, you are unable to locate an audio version, I highly recommend reading it aloud. To me, it functioned just like a beautiful piece of music, captivating my senses and drawing me in.

It didn't follow the traditional structure of a novel, but rather, the unique combination of sounds and the vivid visual images that the words evoked were truly incredible.

Each sentence seemed to paint a picture in my mind, and the rhythm and flow of the language added an extra layer of charm.

I found myself completely immersed in the world that the author had created, and I can't wait to experience it again.

This book is a must-read (or listen) for anyone who appreciates the power of language and the beauty of storytelling.

So it's tempting to say I didn't understand a word of these 628 pages, but that wouldn't quite be true.

Amazingly, much of it came together in the last 10 pages as various people said goodbye to Finnegan, Irish style. I said to myself, of course, this is a wake! a testimonial to a man subterraneally leaving earth, reaching to the great white???? and all he leaves in his wake.. excuse the pun, but this is Joyce, afterall, the master word player. Plus, he's "waking" up from sleep--we all are.

And of course he stands in our place explaining all the name play and changes--we are all Adam and Adam's sons and Anna Plurabelle (Many belles? Can't be an accident--there are no accidents in Joyce's neologisms, although at times it seems so). She is the river-mother-lover we all go back to, at the end and beginning of time, which is why that ending that returns to the beginning makes perfect sense and brought tears to my eyes.

For people who think this thing would be an arduous chore--it's really not that bad if you try not to overthink it and just flow with the poetry of the river of words. I finished the last 30 pages like water this morning without a break--a page can read really fast if you follow its own crazy logic and don't try to figure out what's going on!!

During a break in reading this, I was at my daughter's house (she is a reader like me and has a crazy collection). She had the Ellman Joyce bio, and that really, peripherally, helped me get a handle on this and Joyce in general. The bio was pretty straightforward--not flowery or poetic or analytical, at least not the section I read about his early years...It just made me realize a lot of what Joyce is about is recording his Dublin life, its people, its language, but just keeps approaching it in increasingly subliminal levels--some of the crazy spelling, word play, is something like phonetic Dublinese, that gift of the gab and Blarney the Irish are known for--go there, it's true.

While I was reading, I kept coming across phrases, band names, respellings of cliches, internet memes--I thought, was Joyce really the first to use that idea? Or did all these people read him and steal his idea? Or is it some Jungian universal connection. I wish I could think of an idea for an example but there were hundreds. Uh, "Mazzy"? I think? is a really weak example. Maybe I'll edit this later and give examples, but that was what made this enjoyable on a sort of purely sentient level--just little globules of words and phrases strung together in mellifluous beads.

Here's some: Quark. Unfact. Ere the hour of the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter. gifs a gross if we are. “Suck it yourself, sugarstick!” antipop. Shades of Dylan Thomas: "the nameform that whets the wits that conveys contacts that sweetens sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dog death that bitches birth that entails the ensuances of existentiality"...Television kills. windowdisks. to ginger up the tourist trade. your birthwrong was. beast of boredom. static babel. evermore. the keys to dreamland.

Maybe some of those haven't been copied. Yet.

And in the end the "plot" makes satisfying sense. It's as if Joyce has crafted a complex and intricate web of words and ideas that, when finally untangled, reveals a profound and moving story. The characters and their relationships come to life in a way that is both familiar and yet completely unique. The use of language is truly masterful, with Joyce's ability to create new words and phrases that seem to capture the essence of the human experience in a way that no other writer can. It's a book that requires multiple readings to fully appreciate, but each time you come back to it, you'll discover something new and wonderful.