So what is the point of this book?

What is worse, a guy who claims to like this book or a guy who claims to like Schoenberg?

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Finnegans Wake is nonsense but fuck you, Schoenberg is based. you're just too much of a brainlet to listen with your brain instead of your ears.

This. Joyce was ahead of his time; he realized all of life was a dream and that by becoming fully aware of this, you can control the dream/life around you. Also, death is just waking up again and again.
>inb4 "schizo"

>inb4 schizo

that's okay, because i was just going to call you a retard

Whatever it is, it pulls off quadruple entendres pretty well. It's fun.

Metaphysical cipher. Hard to say if the meaning behind it is really worth putting in the effort for (Joyce seemed to think so; ‘I spent seventeen years writing it, you should spend seventeen years reading it’).
Either way, it has some of the greatest prose passages in literature and more than enough witticisms to keep the reader reading.

I don't give a flying fuck about Meme Joyce, but I just saw an excerpt of this book and I WANT TO READ IT.

What are the main languages his vocabulary derives from? I can only into Germanic and Romance, so I hope that's enough.

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But everything anybody writes is just an excuse to write whatever shit pops into their head.

Joyce predicted and embraced shitpost almost 200 years before it's birth

Don’t worry about it. Just dive in and let it babble away in your brainspace. It’s awesome.

Alright, I'M GONNA DO IT, REDDIT!

I'm mostly interested in getting the story (or whatever content is there) through a more colorful/impressionistic angle than totally precise understanding anyway, so as long there are enough recognizable vocabulary to connect the dots, it should be fine.

What was the passage?

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it's unironically a masterpiece

>tfw you've read so much random early-modern bullshit that this looks 90% intelligible to you

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he's crazy but yes.

>Finnegans Wake is nonsense

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Schopenhauer is actually the inventor of shitposting. See: The Art Of Being Right

thanks

Ok, so how do I choose a version?
Just get whatever from Libgen?

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Nevermind, got a decent 2002 one without ~le revised~ on the cover.

Whichever edition you can find at Half-Price Books so you can read it in public like the cool cat you be dawg.

Sounds kind of like a you problem.

>it's supposed to represent how a character thinks
It's not.

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Sounds legit

this one is more like how a person dreams than thinks. Ive only ever kind of perused through it casually but there are some nice snippets

To filter plebs. Congratulations, you got filtered.

You should go gay with him. Bet he's a freaky good lay.

Check'd and kek'd

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A few years ago i tried reading this and thought it nonsense. Today i think its absolutely insane how he plays with so many languages and creates puns that go beyond the English. I dont have the patience to read this either with or without a skeleton key, because despite my appreciation, whatever glimpse of genius i see is shaded by all the seeming nonsense

Joyce was building off Vico's idea of cyclic history and was trying to inaugurate a new cycle of history. Such is why much of the plot repeats and character's are difficult to keep track of: given a long enough expanse of history, everything repeats in a different form. Sons become the fathers. Daughters become mothers. Oppressed becomes oppressors. Joyce is struggling with how to break this cycle. The problem at the core of breaking from history is, well, history itself. Ignoring the stupid bitching on this thread, the puns throughout the book are actually very nuanced and multi faceted. They just require knowledge of like, every language on Earth to recognize. Considering that the book is trying to grapple with history, this has a level of sense to it considering how every language is itself a residue of history and the product of multiple languages and cultures intersecting to produce the works we communicate in now. Reading through the book, one can see these histories being exposed and excavated within the narrative itself, exposing the reader to the sheer cacophony that is the heritage of but a word. Considering the context of Joyce being an Irish writer (where Irish had been extinguished by the advent of British occupation), one can understand why this would be a fascination of his: history had robbed the Irish of their language and left them with the language of their conquerors; to question history is to question their daily experience of identity. It's a narrative questioning history itself and its relationship to the conquered and conquerors.

You want to get the Penguin or Viking edition. Some original publications had to be revised by Joyce since they fucked up the editing. Anything along the lines of Viking 197X or so should be good.

Lot of French and German. Some Scandinavian (Danish?) languages. Armenian comes up rather prominently. Some Chinese and Japanese but they're not super important beyond recognizing Confucian references. Latin and Greek of course cause Joyce. A few passages are all in old Irish. Should get you through about 60% of the references.

the cycles of the universe. when everything is destroyed, this will be and was the blueprint. it's an overly long and completely alien experience that manages to be consistently boring, but so is life. but i wouldn't know, i only read the first page and only cause it was posted here.

Dubs but failed anyway

After a certain point of literary stardom, all you wanna do is dab on other writers.

Terrence McKenna had an interesting take on finnegans wake: that the book was an attempt to compress and tell the story in the first word. And then again in the first sentence. And so on and so on.

someone should photoshop an apostrophe into that image

>there's an Infinite Jest chapter

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Here, user.

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"I am an extremely well-educated man." -James Joyce

Donwloading audiobook to get extra girlfriends

It's a load of shit, no matter how you look at it. Sure it does some clever things, but try reading it as it is.

It might come off as a surprise to you, a frogposting cretin, but most of Schoenbergs compositions are not even that abrasive. Gurre Lieder and Verklarte Nacht are something I can play to my mom.

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>So what is the point of this book?
For stupid people to claim they are smart because they read it.

Works great in liberal arts departments in universities.

yikes
dumb normie

Change Schoenberg to Babbitt or Xenakis and you've got yourself a real question.