A Staggering Rat of Heartbreaking Something or Other "I musta made a wrong toin at Al-buh-KOY-kee"
My friend Thomas said that the best way to approach this book was to open it anywhere and begin reading a passage. The structure of the beginning and end seem to suggest that this may be appropriate for the rat.
KatlorD I set my own scene.
You are more brave then I am to read Joyce’s last novel (or so I think it was.) This is just something I heard from a professor I took for a James Joyce class at SF State. Ezra Pound and Joyce were friends, and I believe that Pound edited some of Joyce’s work. Both were genius. I’m still working up to fully understanding Ulysses, so I look forward to hearing news about your opinion on this novel. My question, or comment, is this: This professor I had a while back said that Finnegan’s Wake was meant as a joke by Joyce. That it was intentionally written so high and intellectually dense with the aim of poking fun at the literature community by exposing the pretentiousness of critics. Ezra Pound read the book and said that this was James Joyce’s last insult to the intellectual community, and that only a handful of people (including himself) understood that. Many critics thought so highly of the book but really there is no substance in the work, reading it, digesting it, and finding meaning in it is impossible and painful. Painful because the reader has to constantly look up references to metaphors that amount to nothing, but if the critic pretends to understand then they seem super smart to the literature community. The joke is that the book means nothing. I don’t know if this is true and I’ve never read anything past Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (my favorite novel in my 20’s.) Joyce is my favorite writer. I’m wondering if this story I heard about this book is true. Also I’d like to get in that I loved many of your goals, so cheers to you on all of them. And happy new year!
A Staggering Rat of Heartbreaking Something or Other "I musta made a wrong toin at Al-buh-KOY-kee"
too; I suppose that and much by D.H. Lawrence shaped my thinking for years. I’m the type to go on ‘author-benders’ though, bearing an intense infatuation with one person’s literary output. (There’s probably some astrological alignment that explains this.)
I’ve heard the same stuff about Joyce’s purported insult to the literary community. The same sort of thing’s supposed to be true of Eliot and Pound, and… oh I don’t know. Martin Amis is still around, so one must ask him about the author he’s apparently feuding with…I can’t remember his name. Julian Barnes?
I think that approaching the novel with expectation or preconceived ideas in place will be beside the point. I’m hoping to sit down with the book and enjoy what wordplay I can get out of a passage or so, and if there’s enough for me to connect with (and perhaps reference), I will grasp a sense of what Joyce was thinking when he wrote it. Passage by passage makes more sense to me this year than page by page. It’s like having an interpretive work of abstract art on a bookshelf. I like that.
Happy new year!
KatlorD cheered this 11 months ago
