Why is it so important to the literary canon if most people haven’t bothered to read it?

oh no is that a soijack? I guess you win this argument.

People getting upset about finnegans wake is like people getting upset when people say they unironically enjoy viper

I think this is true for Joyce to the extent that people who say this often can't articulate anything about what he's written. Like for Ulysses people will say vague things about stream of conciousness and the structure being modeled on the Odyssey, but they won't be able to talk about anything that happens or how the language is actually employed.

>except that quantum mechanics is legit.

Actually its practically an esoteric religion at this point.

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8/10 made me rage. Quantum is so great. It only gets better the deeper you go

>Finnegan's Wake
>Finnegan's
pleb

A religion cannot be logical, elegant and self-consistent? You've never heard of Neoplatonism?

based

>they won't be able to talk about anything that happens or how the language is actually employed.
People can do this and I have seen them do this on this very board. I have done it a few times as well.

I read selections to my roommate yesterday. Don't know about him, but I enjoyed myself.

>I have done it a few times as well
prove it

you sound like an insufferable phaggot

ive read FW twice, front to back. and read misc chapters and passages dozens of times over. not a scholar, but also read campbells key, the burgess interpretation, and narrow exegeses that focus on the rivers, occultism, booze, etc.
its hands down among the greatest works of all time. ulysses is fine, but fw is in a class of its own. most people fail to read it because they attempt to read it like a traditional book. it requires a sort of subconscious skimming, hearing the words allowed and seeing them visually to catch the three or four words or concepts embedded in the text. the title has at least three layers - the song, the wake of dead finnegan, and the finnegan family awaking from sleep.
its also the funniest book ive ever read - womens clothes described as 'inharmonious creations', etc
its basically the eternal story (the inspiration for campbells 'monomyth' (literally from the text)) of mankind, with man eternally rising and falling through generations and woman eternal sustaining life. the symbolism is dense and deep but consistent.
i recommend reading a few lines or a paragraph of campbells key and then the accompanying text. itll make more sense. its a deeply human book about heroism and regret and primal lust and our small place in the grand story of humanity.
i dont blame most people for not reading it - it's hard, takes months, and requires learning how to 'read' in a different way. but i thought it was worth it. ill open it up randomly and read passages for the hell of it. its surprising humorous too, once you learn to read it.
anyway, these threads usually only contain people who've never given it a serious attempt, so i dont expect any substantial conversation on it. but it has been read and continues to be read, and i dont regret any of the hundred or whatever hours ive spent with it. the only pretentious posters talking about fw are those who've never read it... go figure.

good post. you have convinced me to read it.

its a literary shitpost

Paglia explains it best imo. it's a literary exploration in avant-garde art. The basic question of avant-garde is how much can medium X be changed and still be medium X. What we learned from Finnegan's Wake is the idea of a novel without precise prose is fucking retarded.

i have not given it a serious attempt. i have looked around it a few times but it just seems inaccessible for a number of reasons:
> innumerable cultural references for a culture i am totally unfamiliar with
> references to languages i do not know
> i literally cannot parse some of the words, their sound in my head has no meaning or effect on me. if it has meaning it has gone over my head.

everything would have to be explained to me in plain language. why is it worth the effort? (not a troll please, i am trying to be honest and sincere here). is insight gained? is it fun??

i hear mason and dixon is also deliberately linguistically difficult but i also hear it is a worthwhile, moving book.

Gravitys Rainbow has the same air of pretentious illegibility, and it is still just barely fun enough that i still pick it up to read it sometimes.

Finnegans Wake i just hear rationalizations like this

I appreciate the honesty of you self-filtering yourself as a pseud. The path to knowledge always begins with an admission of ignorance.

Ulysses is pretty comprehensible after you’ve reread it a couple times. Same with other notoriously hard novels like Gravity’s Rainbow or The Tunnel.

which the tunnel

why would you read gass' tunnel more than 0 times

I really enjoyed Mason & Dixon and found it easier than Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s written as someone telling a story to an ever changing audience, and the style changes when the audience changes, i.e. if a woman the old narrator wants to flirt with comes in to listen, the vignettes, asides, and style gets a little bawdy, when children are listening, the tone completely changes. It’s kind of like something Nabokov liked to do with his narrators, it’s central to Lolita and Pale Fire, only Pynchon took it and ran with it and did so much more.

nice omg im looking forward to it

the themes of the book resonate a lot more if you're irish I think in my opinion (not saying you have to be Irish to get it or anything)

not even from a historical context; just our society and our culture is celebrated in a really melancholy light in the book and are used as the canvas for painting the story of man.

Why is this book so shilled recently.

Because it encompasses the whole of human history, from tribal to electric man.