Finnegans Wake (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: The Emperor has no clothes!
Review: I am convinced that people do not read Finnegans Wake, or at least not in the same sense that we ever normally use the word "read." FW is 600+ pages long and I've yet to find more than a handful of standard English sentences among them. In 1999 (this is 2005) I started to read the Wake, with the best of intentions, but I soon noticed a problem. A few paragraphs in, my mind would start to wander, for there was nothing solid that my mind could hang on to. I encountered no setting, no characters, no plot, no narration, nothing concrete nor conceptual. The best that I could say was that every once in a while, some group of words would be evocative of an image or memory, but even when this would happen I could not say for certain whether it was intentional on the part of the author or accident. Eventually, I started reading it aloud in order to keep myself "in" the book but, no help. Today, I am 100 pages in; I can't really bear to read more than a page at a time, and even this is an effort. I get as close to 'zero' from reading it as I can imagine.

Now, please understand that I am not a stupid man, nor unaccustomed to difficult literature. I've a college degree and, in fact, currently teach 10th grade English. I've read (and understood), among other things, Shakespeare, The Bible, War and Peace, and also Ulysses. It is sometimes said that this book was written "for the intelligensia"... well... I consider myself part of the intelligensia and this book was not written for me. I am not here trying to argue that the book was written as a joke, or has no actual meaning (though I think those arguments have some merit, when one considers the work) but that a person who picks this up and starts running their eyes over any given page will not be engaging in the same activity as they would when reading a book. The Wake might be closer to some sort of giant puzzle, though I doubt this as well, but a prospective reader should ask himself whether he wants to engage in a 600 page rebus. Further, I doubt that the Wake could have been "written" in the same sense that other books are. Am I to imagine that Joyce had a firm intention in mind that guided his decisions in writing this book? That he, say, edited it? Rearranged sentences for impact? Checked for consistency? Is this book translated into other languages? How could it be? And wouldn't that assume that it had been written in some language to begin with. And, finally, if it's not written in English (and it's not), or in any other intelligble language (and it's not), then in what sense do we have a book?

Is everything printed on paper literature?

I think not. I do not believe that the Wake was written as a book, and I do not think it possible to read it as one, and I submit the book itself as my evidence. It has occured to me that it would be fun, someday, to take some group of people who've given the Wake 5-star reviews, and then test them. Perhaps we could give them a group of five selections, with one of them a faux-passage and four of them authentic FW-Joyce, and see if they could determine the fake? Or, we could provide them with a passage and then ask for an explanation, and them compare their explanations with one another to see if there's any validity. In fact, FW could make for a great party game along the lines of Balderdash.

Yes, FW is perhaps (doubtful, though) a rebus and it could, with some imagination, provide a party game of sorts (largely revolving around mockery), but it is not a book to be read. Don't feel bad--it wasn't intended to be read. Through it all, the most interesting thing and the greatest value of the book is to watch the actions of the book's defenders. They haven't read it either, in any meaningful sense, and yet like the people in the fable they claim to see the clothing. After all, people of the highest virtue are able to see the Emperor's New Clothes, you see. And who wouldn't want to be a part of that group?

Rating:
Summary: Finnegan's Wake
Review: Stream-of-conscious blather that only a psuedo-intellectual could appreciate. I can't imagine being the person who had to proof-read this drivel, I would sooner plunge my hand into a vat of boiling oil. If it were possible I would give this book zero stars. You'd be better off spending your money on some LSD and interpreting the meaning of the waves in your fingerprints.

Rating:
Summary: Joyce is Joyce because of Ulysses. A curiosity of old age.
Review: This work is Joyce's finale. It is the logical extension of processes within his work from the earliest writing through Dubliners the Portrait, through Ulysses, and at last 'Finnegan's Wake'. He invents a language of his own , a language of all languages, and expects Mankind to spend ' all the years of the nights' reading it. Aside from his courage, and conviction his great arrogance and literary power this work is the proof of the artist going to the end of what he is with all that he has.
And this said in praise- the truth , the basic truth of the unreadibility of the work, of its being rescued for readers by certain lyrical passages, the opening and ending most notably, leaves the work as a secondary one in the Joyce canon. Joyce is Joyce because of Ulysses. Finnegans Wake is the curiosity of his middle old age. The truth is too that the fundamental efforts to make all of history myth, and to find in repetition the answer to our meaning is mistaken historically . And the other great failing is in the punning language itself, the proof positive that in trying to mix up everything into one , one arrives primarily at confusion.
Finnegan 's Wake thus stands more as kind of chapter in the literary biography of Joyce than as a literary work of value in itself. And yet how to forget ' riverrun past eve and adam's from bend of bay to swerve of shore' all the way to ' carry me along taddy like ya done at the toy fair a way a lone a last a long the '

Rating:
Summary: Praising the Wrong Genius
Review: Far and away the best thing about this book is the quality of the analysis it has spawned. The book itself is drivel; but the reactions to it form some of the most intelligent and enlightened reviews I have encountered. I have never sprinkled as many "helpful" votes within a single site as I have here, to both one-star and five-star appraisals alike.

Firstly, the book itself. I cannot subscribe to any of the academic apologias. This book took an interesting concept and stretched it well past the point of absurdity. Like the surrealist movement that ultimately ended up justifying paintings of Campbell's Soup cans, "Finnegan's Wake" takes stream-of-subconsciousness to such idiotic lengths that it becomes self-parody.

Yes, I have exhaustively analysed the book. I studied it many years ago under the tutelage of an infectiously enthusiastic English professor who dissected its every nuance. Puns, portmanteau constructs, auditory versus literary jabberwocky, dream-state evocation: we analysed all of these elements and more. And for a time, during my "intellectual" period, I pretended to admire it. Nowadays, age and--I like to think--wisdom compels honesty: this book is a self-indulgent conceit. Had anyone other than Joyce written it, it would never have been published, much less garnered all the notoriety it has enjoyed over the years.

The real value in "Finnegan's Wake" has been in the intelligent debate that it has fostered. By stringing together chaotically connected thought fragments, Joyce created the literary equivalent of a star-field: any resulting patterns are a tribute to the richness of the readers' imaginations and not the writer's.

Does Joyce's exercise constitute genius? Hardly. Artificial Intelligence research has produced numerous examples of similar jabberwocky constructs, some practically indistinguishable from "Finnegan's Wake". So what we have here is a sampling of the peculiarly human ability to impose order upon chaos. Some of these five-star reviews are testaments not to the meaningless jumble that is "Finnegan's Wake", but to the creative ingenuity of their authors and to the larger genius of the human imagination.

Joyce was not a prolific author, but what he did produce was some of the best writing ever conceived. "Portrait", "Ulysses", "Dubliners": each is a star in the literary firmament. It is natural to try finding a place for his last work in the same firmament, but "Finnegan's Wake" doesn't deserve such elevation. This novel was the product of a genius who in the end became so narcissistic and self-absorbed that he dared to pen a scatter-brained homage to his own ego. Would we dismiss this work as vapid nonsense by any other author, it would be dishonest to do otherwise just because that author's name is James Joyce.

Rating:
Summary: Finnegan's Wake
Review: Before continuing this review I would first like to make it clear that I have only read parts of 'Finnegan's Wake.' Not the entire thing. I personally don't think it's necessary to read all of 'Finnegan's Wake' to truly enjoy it -- it is, for the lover of nonsense, explosive creativity, and utter literary chaos, a delight. I loved what I read of it and intend to continue sifting through it's many linguistic treasures. Who knows, maybe I'll finish it one day.

'Finnegan's Wake' was an experiment. The result of an idea James Joyce wanted to flip around. I'm sure all you writers out there understand the concept -- Joyce was trying out a new form of the art. Whether or not he succeeded is totally up to the reader. Fan of the nonsensical? Sick of technical, murky prose? Give 'Finnegan's Wake' a try. To those people (myself included), Joyce's book is an absolute joy; a hilarious, thought-provoking joyride through the English language.

However, there is the other side of the argument, a side not entirely without merit. 'Finnegan's Wake' makes no sense. Literally. It is not supposed to. It represents the intricacies of Joyce's complex mind. There are those that scorn that type of literature, calling it pointless and difficult, lacking depth and meaning. To them, 'Finnegan's Wake' is a failed experiment. Perhaps you are one of them -- if so, read the lovely section Amazon has open and decide whether or not you REALLY want to spend your money on this book.

What's truly wonderful about 'Finnegan's Wake' is that it's ambivalent. It is the embodiment of ridiculous (sometimes frustrating) linguistic puns, yet also hints at a deeper meaning. Perhaps that in and of itself was Joyce's experiment, to create tension between the rational and the irrational, and he's poking fun at us 'artsy intellectuals' as we argue over this oddity in traditional canon.

One last note: to anybody that enjoyed 'Finnegan's Wake', I would highly recommend John Lennon's book 'In His Own Write' (yes, John Lennon wrote other material besides songs). It is a similar mish-mash of twisted words, running together in a very James Joyce-esque manner. Sometimes the similarities are eerie. The one thing about Lennon is that his work tends to be slightly more coherent...