Finnegans Wake

Rating:
Summary: The only book you'll ever need.
Review: This book is a drug. This book is a weapon. I'm almost surprised it's legal. But then a friend of mine tells me that people can get away with a lot more in books than they can in other mediums, because so few people read these days. Buy this book. Pick any page. Make sure it is daytime; reading late at night may cause insomnia. You do not have to finish or understand this book to enjoy it. It's like Joyce took all of human energy and made it into one huge handy random reference tome. Incredible. A sure cure for depression. When I discovered it I almost immediately felt like going out on the street and reading ramdom parts to random people.

Rating:
Summary: The Wake
Review: It was funny, but not "ha ha" funny

Rating:
Summary: Gathering at the Wake
Review: I just finished a graduate seminar on the Wake, and I found it stimulating and enlightening, though still daunting. I believe the format we chose helped tremendously; we had nine strong, informed readers who each read the same passage and gathered once a week to discuss it. Reading in groups, I think, is the only way to begin to grasp the Wake; everyone brings their own idiosyncratic knowledge to the table, and can shed light on passages that would otherwise remain obscured. I believe the Wake is uniquely built in a way to reward group studies. It seems all of history is in these pages, and discussing it with some wise colleagues is the best way to unpack it all. Of course it helps if one of your colleagues did her dissertation on Joyce!

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest Book Ever Written
Review: True, this book is complex, true it is non-linear, true it toys with reinventing the concept of gramar, but that should not stop anyone from reading it.

YES, THAT'S RIGHT, YOU TOO CAN BEGIN TO DECIPHER JAMES JOYCE'S UNINTELIGIBLE MAGNUM OPUS.

What's this? How? Doesn't he compound something like forty diferent languages and impossible symbolism in to a dense stew of anti-literature? Yes, but you have to remember why he did that. Joyce intentionaly wanted to make the book dificult so that you couldn't just superficialy read all the words once in order and then set it down and forget about it.

If you are willing to make the commitment, Finnegans Wake won't just get something out of Finnegans Wake, you will get everything out of it. Go out. Do the research. Get a companion book, get two, and they will show you how to read it, they will translate the obscure languages, and then things will start to make sense. For instance, the guide by Wm. York Tindall is of great help.

If you do this, and if you love great literature, Finnegans Wake will never let you down.

Rating:
Summary: Mine own interpretatoin
Review: This book is not to be read literally, rather it should be read aloud -- "sung" as if it were a piece of music. And like a piece of music, I find myself lazily following the words whilst occasionally getting a flash of images. One wonders how a musician, not of instrument or voice but of words, would interprete this piece.

I know there are audio book versions available, but they're abridged. Besides, they're probably read as if the text were prose not poetry -- like a student reciting an historical document. I eagerly await the release of an unabridge version in the vein of the complete and unabridged Ring of the Nibelungs by Wagner (with James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera).

Rating:
Summary: "I have read this book and want to review it"
Review: The Wake is reviewed by so many people who haven't read it!

1. How can anyone familiar with Joseph Campbell's "Wings of Art" or "Skeleton Key", or even John Bishop's "Joyce's Book of the Dark", suggest that the Wake is not great art?

The greatest novelist of the 20th century did not spend 17 of his most creative years on a prank. Joyce had a flair for foreign languages, regarded Catholicism as "a beautiful lie", had at his disposal the collective wisdom of East and West, was EXTREMELY well read, gifted in music, delighted in wordplay, extensively researched the psychology of sleep, and was notoriously autobiographical in his literary productions...

Joyce describes a night's dream in both biographical (Freudian) and archetypal (Jungian) terms: brother against brother conflict, inevitable haunting guilt ("this municipal sin business"), raging lust percolating through "the fury and the mire of human veins", chrysalis-like psychological dependence on (temporal and ecclesiastical) authority, ultimate redemption through love, inevitable death...These situations characterize both human history and tomorrow morning's news.

And so, the Wake is OUR dream: each of us is the poor harried protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, subjected to the cold patrician ridicule of the Four Customers and Twelve Jurymen and burdened by guilt and the misplaced faith of our personal and collective innocence.

Those with little patience for Joyce's presentation are not willing to reassess what a book should convey or else lack a herculean desire for wordplay. In defence of detractors, knowledge of at least one foreign language probably helps, as does general knowledge of comparative religion and mythology, Vico's historical cycles, Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, alchemy, Biblical tales, childrens' games, the history of English literature, etc...

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to approaching the Wake is that many readers come in bad faith, unwilling to believe that an order is there, hidden in the obscure labyrinth of protean wordplay.

If you want to turn the lead of the Wake into gold, then you must be a modern-day alchemist. And do not expect to complete the Great Work without much meditation and effort.

Rating:
Summary: Huh?
Review: Will someone please, please tell me what the heck this man is talking about? This is the book for people who didn't find The Jaberwocky to have quite the necessary amount of pretentious pseudo-english garbage. Don't even bother trying to read this.

Rating:
Summary: A low point in Western Civilization
Review: Okay, here's the first paragraph:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

(it's actually the end of the last sentence in the book). I defy anyone to honestly say that they would have any desire to read further (in fact, I am certain that no one has ever actually read this book). But, lest you think it must get better, here's a random paragraph from later in the book:

So olff for his topheetuck the ruck made raid, aslick aslegs would run; and he ankered on his hunkers with the belly belly prest. Asking: What's my muffinstuffinaches for these times? To weat: Breath and bother and whatarcurss. That breath no bother but worrawarrawurms. And Slim shallave some.

Uh-huh, fascinating stuff, eh?

Here's the cover blurb from the version I have, as written by Joseph Campbell, one of the folks who tried popularizing Joyce:

Finnegan's Wake is a mighty allegory of the fall and redemption of mankind...a compound fabe, symphony, and nightmare...Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the necesssities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all phases of individual and racial development, into a circular design, of which every part is beginning, middle and end.

Let me just point out that "freed...from...logic", is code for "it doesn't make sense". And the blather about circular design reflects something I recall reading about how Joyce intended the reader to be able to read the book from any point and in any direction with equal felicity. It worked; it's idiotic from start to finish.

So what's the end result? Well, you remember that old example that's used to demonstrate the magnitude of infinity--if you set down infinty monkeys in front of infinity typewriters (I suppose now it's computers) eventually one of them types Hamlet. Well, I think it's safe to suppose that in the meantime, they're typing Finnegan's Wake.

Now, some folks claim that it should be read for the beauty of it's language alone. But let me just say this, you'ld get en equally enjoyable aural experience by listening to the dialogue of the Ewoks from a Star Wars movie and it won't make any less sense.

GRADE: G (as long as we're being experimental, let's go lower than F)

Rating:
Summary: To be savored like foie gras -- in small doses
Review: I admit it. I never 'finished' Finnegans Wake. I did not sit down and read it from cover to cover like I did Ulysses. And yet I read Finnegans Wake. Those people who treat it as a hoax are missing the point. Finnegans Wake was meant to be read out loud in small sections. The richness and beauty of the language are unbelievable and the cohesive structure of the book is astonishing. The book begins with the passage of water, and ends with the sea. It is the journey down a river, the journey through life. During the past few years I have picked up Finnegans Wake on numerous occasions and read parts of it. It is beautiful. The sounds are so overwhelming that I always find myself repeating them over and over. Joyce was a master with language and this book was his 'masterpiece' of language play. It doesn't matter that you don't understand the words. Read it for long enough, and the words will begin to make sense. Maybe by the time I die I will know the full meaning of Finnegans Wake.

Rating:
Summary: Who's Laughing?
Review: This is an ongoing hoax perpetrated, sustained and constantly embellished by a Literary Establishment who simply wish to award each other doctoral degrees in pretending to understand this mishmash of a book. It may very well be the worst thing ever published. It is certainly the worst thing ever published with college courses based around it.