OT: Anyone ever read Finnegans Wake? Is it as difficult to read like every says?

[retired711]

I’m part of a Classics book club that started up mid part of last year. Austen, Dickens, etc. Last two books were Madame Bovary (Flaubert) and Lolita (Nabokov). Next books is Middlemarch (Eliot). Really have to carve out some quiet time to get through some of these. Lolita in particular was a “heavy” read given it’s only 300-ish pages.

You thought Lolita was a heavy read? Nabokov made millions on that book. While the subject matter is creepy, to say the least, there's a lot of fine writing in it.

OTOH, I could not get myself through more than the first two chapters of Middlemarch. "Don't marry him, don't marry him!" I wanted to scream. (I get too emotionally involved in fiction!!)

 

[ClassOf02]

You thought Lolita was a heavy read? Nabokov made millions on that book. While the subject matter is creepy, to say the least, there's a lot of fine writing in it.

OTOH, I could not get myself through more than the first two chapters of Middlemarch. "Don't marry him, don't marry him!" I wanted to scream. (I get too emotionally involved in fiction!!)

I probably should have clarified….Lolita was “heavy“ in terms of the subject matter. Just weird reading it against the backdrop of today’s society.

 

[ashokan]

I'm gonna suggest that, if you truly feel that way, you may be doing it wrong.

The wonderful thing about reading good fiction is that the book merely presents a framework for a dream; the reader must fill in the blanks, consciously or subconsciously. So it's not so much having someone else's dream as allowing someone else guide to you in your own dreams. And switching books, authors, or genres makes for endlessly changing guidance requiring varying degrees of imagination by the reader.

Whereas visual entertainment mostly lacks this quality. Watching TV is much closer to having someone else's dream than reading fiction books or stories (or poems).

Not that anybody should or shouldn't like any form of art. There are no rules, despite what we're taught. We should all like whatever we like and to hell with what anybody else says.

I use imagination with non-fiction.
If someone writes non-fiction about Gettysburg I imagine many things rooted in reality.
Imagination is ok when it an extension of the mind.
When the mind becomes an extension of the imagination that's the border into all sorts of issues.

Heightened degrees of fantasy proneness are associated with greater suggestibility.
That's a reason hypnotists use imagery/concentration to alter a subject's mental state.
When people focus tightly to one thing while losing track of others that can be being transfixed.
People can be told tight focusing actually helps a person be more aware but they are actually less aware
People get married to the wrong person, elect the wrong person, hate the wrong person etc because of imaginary perceptions they think are real.

A guy wrote a Pulitzer book about Vietnam called "A Bright Shinning Lie"
We can all fall for shiny lies if we get lost in them uncritically.
Nazis gassing people in the day and enjoying fine wines, foods and Wagner at night had altered states
So did the kamikaze pilot dying for the emperor.

A saying about jazz is that "music is a journey and jazz is getting lost."
Jazz started to suffer when people started studying and dissecting it too much
A person cant know what its like to drive cross-country from studying a map.
But people try just that when the trees become more important than the Forrest.
Watching a video of a CC drive isn't a substitute either but its more informative than a map or Google Earth.

Joyce is a jazz type who burrows deeper into terms and crevasses and thoughts and feelings and most are just evocative nothings - he admitted to trying to lead a reader into an altered state. It seems like a lot is going on when there isn't really. Reminds me of old public TV ads when they played discordant music suggesting bizarre sates of mind that that were supposed to suggest deep knowledge/mystery but a scrambled mind isn't deep in anything - it can just think it is.

A reason academics are often bad at practical things is because they they studied and absorbed, and got deeper and deeper into less and less thinking they were expanding into more and more. They get prone to bright shinning lies. Joyce himself had a fairly broken life and thats no surprise

I'll take Hugo's reality based fiction over Joyce's jazzy nonsense that "seems" smart. A lot of artists get lost because they are self-conditioned to be suggestible and fantasy prone.

Fantasy-prone personality​

Fantasy-prone personality - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Exploring the relationship between fantasy proneness and delusional beliefs in psychosis and non-clinical individuals​

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165178118316883

 

[phs73rc77gsm83]

I was an English major solely because I needed an undergrad degree to get into the 5 year Masters program for teaching. I did have to read a ton of books, mostly classics. However, there were some great classes books I got to read in classes on science fiction, Black studies and Shakespeare. I think I was up to reading 25 books a semester from Sophomore to Junior year. Then I used all that to become....a first grade teacher!

Did you by chance have Maurice Charney for Shakespeare at RU? He was fabulous and taught classes 100% based on Shakespeare plays.

 

[ashokan]

This author "gets it."

‘The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.’
James Joyce

Dear Jim,

I never thought I’d say it.
It’s over.
After more than forty years.
I mean, what’s in it for me?
You get all the attention.

"I’ll keep the academics guessing for the next hundred years" you said.

And you were right.

In the meantime, I am left behind, having misspent my youth lost in your labyrinth, my looks squandered, alone with a pile of indecipherable books. Abandoned, just as you abandoned Nora in a park in Paris after your elopement from Ireland.

I wonder now why I ever wanted to be your friend in the first place. Reflected glory, no doubt. The need to be seen hanging around with an Important Man. A Literary Giant.

You always believed that thirteen was an unlucky number. Typical superstitious Irishman. Perhaps you were right. Thirteen is the number of years I’ve spent reading your final work. And I’m still only up to page 203.

You were right again when you suggested one of the alternative titles for Finnegans Wake:

How a Guy Finks and Fawkes When He Is Going Batty.
Maybe you were going batty.
Maybe you always were batty.
And maybe you’ve sent me batty along the way.

When you left Ireland you said you wanted to fly the nets, free yourself, non serviam, you said. I will not serve.

And yet as you flew free, you left in your wake a gigantic net that thousands upon thousands have got caught up in. All of whom serve you. Networks, newsletters, conferences, symposiums, theses, dissertations, papers, institutes, foundations, centres, theatre pieces, adaptations, musicals, chapters, articles, essays, films, online elucidations, and hundreds upon hundreds of books. To which I vowed I would never add a word.

I offer you now, my broken vow.
Your (Once) Devoted Reader.
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/writer/gabrielle-carey/
Gabrielle Carey

 

[retired711]

I probably should have clarified….Lolita was “heavy“ in terms of the subject matter. Just weird reading it against the backdrop of today’s society.

Yes, it's really remarkable that the book was an instant best seller in the mid- 1950s, which many of us think of as a puritanical time. It was banned in some places, and the New York Times reviewer hated it -- but that only helped the book.

 

[Rhuarc]

Did you by chance have Maurice Charney for Shakespeare at RU? He was fabulous and taught classes 100% based on Shakespeare plays.

Unfortunately, I did not. I enjoyed the actual content of the classes more than the teaching from what I remember.

 

[mildone]

My mother, born in the age of radio, always said that she preferred radio programs over TV because radio required more use of one's imagination. BTW, this is a great post.

My mom said the exact same thing, about radio vs TV, when I was young.