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Was James Joyce a computer?

  • 08-10-2019 8:35pm
    #1
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 13,712 ✭✭✭✭


    Riverrun. Nous rêverons. riverranno. Why all in lower case?

    I used to think that Joyce was pulling our leg. When I read Dubliners I thought he was a serious artist. When I read Portrait, I thought he was the perfect Dubliner. When I read ten pages of Finnegan's Wake, I thought he was a computer.

    He is as far beyond our comprehension as a man googling TripAdvisor reviews on an Internet that he just doesn't know exists. In other words, the human race is not ready for Joyce. He is doomed to be under-appreciated in our lifetimes, because our generation cannot process his genius. In short, he was a computer. Discuss ?


Comments

  • #2
    nkl12xtw5goz70
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,497 ✭✭✭nkl12xtw5goz70


    A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »
    Riverrun. Nous rêverons. riverranno. Why all in lower case?

    The word "riverrun" is in lower case because it continues the last sentence of the book: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..."

    The book is thus circular, the last sentence feeding back into the first, in part because Joyce in writing it made extensive use of Giambattista Vico's cyclical theory of history in Scienza Nuova (1725).
    When I read ten pages of Finnegan's Wake, I thought he was a computer.

    There's no apostrophe in the title of the novel, which is more than a minor technicality.
    He is doomed to be under-appreciated in our lifetimes, because our generation cannot process his genius.

    Sadly, the same could be said of most serious literature today.


  • #3
    Franz Von Peppercorn II
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,398 ✭✭✭Franz Von Peppercorn II


    I’d be fairly dubious about anybody enjoying Finnegans wakes as a reading experience.

    I knew a guy who told me he loved it and I asked him to just go through the first paragraph to explain. Exit stage right. Or as Joyce would have written:

    exit stage right, yea your goolden, silve me solve, exsogerraider! You did so drool. I was so sharm.

    There is no reading in it, only studying, and unlike Shakespeare and Dickens where most of the vocabulary is easy enough, and the rest obvious in context, there’s little or no sense to it even if translated from Joycean to English.

    (As it happens I understand most of the first paragraph because it’s local Irish history. This guy was an English software dev though).


  • #4
    BDI
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,005 ✭✭✭BDI


    So how did he do it?

    Did he learn this language then become a poet in it? Surely nobody spoke like that at the time, he had to be taught.


  • #5
    nkl12xtw5goz70
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,497 ✭✭✭nkl12xtw5goz70


    Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »
    There is no reading in it, only studying, and unlike Shakespeare and Dickens where most of the vocabulary is easy enough, and the rest obvious in context, there’s little or no sense to it even if translated from Joycean to English.

    It may not make conventional sense, per your comparison to Dickens and Shakespeare, but I'd contend that's different from making no sense.

    As an effort to render both the dreaming unconscious mind and the collective unconscious in prose, Finnegans Wake is deeply indebted to both Freud and Jung, not least in its insistence on endless interpretation and reinterpretation. A simple Cliff's Notes–level explanation or translation is unthinkable. That said, Joyce did seem convinced that his readers would take the time and patience to figure out his method, and was deeply disappointed when they responded with befuddlement and even hostility.


  • #6
    tdf7187
    Registered Users Posts: 1,597 ✭✭✭tdf7187


    Finnegan's Wake is best considered as the most elaborate literary practical joke in history.

    Ulysses is just about tolerable. It's like prog rock, some of it was interesting but when they started making concept albums about combine harvesters or whatever they disappeared up their own ****.


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  • #7
    nkl12xtw5goz70
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,497 ✭✭✭nkl12xtw5goz70


    BDI wrote: »
    So how did he do it?

    Did he learn this language then become a poet in it? Surely nobody spoke like that at the time, he had to be taught.

    Joyce didn't learn a new language. He knew about 17 languages, and mostly wrote Finnegans Wake in multilingual puns, drawing on the languages he knew and many others that he sourced from reference texts.

    For instance, the title of the book refers to the popular ballad "Finnegan's Wake" but Finn refers also to Fionn mac Cumhaill and "Finnegans Wake" to the idea of multiple Finnegans waking, referencing the legend that the ancient Fianna would wake again when Ireland needed them. The title also puns on the French word fin (end) while egan sounds like again, so we get a multilingual pun ("end again") that refers to the book's cyclical structure and Vico's theory of history on which it's based.

    The entire book is like this, so you can tease meanings endlessly out of its multilingual and endlessly referential density.


  • #8
    nkl12xtw5goz70
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,497 ✭✭✭nkl12xtw5goz70


    tdf7187 wrote: »
    Finnegan's Wake is best considered as the most elaborate literary practical joke in history.

    Why would anyone spend 17 years working on something if the intention was just a practical joke?


  • #9
    tdf7187
    Registered Users Posts: 1,597 ✭✭✭tdf7187


    Mavis Teeny Track wrote: »
    Why would anyone spend 17 years working on something if the intention was just a practical joke?

    Who knows! Why would someone spend thousands and thousands of hours on internet forums spouting right wing economic theories that no-one is interested in?


  • #10
    BDI
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,005 ✭✭✭BDI


    Mavis Teeny Track wrote: »
    Joyce didn't learn a new language. He knew about 17 languages, and mostly wrote Finnegans Wake in multilingual puns, drawing on the languages he knew and many others that he sourced from reference texts.

    For instance, the title of the book refers to the popular ballad "Finnegan's Wake" but Finn refers also to Fionn mac Cumhaill and "Finnegans Wake" to the idea of multiple Finnegans waking, referencing the legend that the ancient Fianna would wake again when Ireland needed them. The title also puns on the French word fin (end) while egan sounds like again, so we get a multilingual pun ("end again") that refers to the book's cyclical structure and Vico's theory of history on which it's based.

    The entire book is like this, so you can tease meanings endlessly out of its multilingual and endlessly referential density.

    Amazing I find Irish education tells you somebody was great, then when you ask why they say because he was.

    Thanks for that blown away.


  • #11
    RobbingBandit
    Registered Users Posts: 18,073 ✭✭✭✭RobbingBandit


    Mavis Teeny Track wrote: »
    Why would anyone spend 17 years working on something if the intention was just a practical joke?

    Satire is an art, art takes time to perfect


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  • #12
    Franz Von Peppercorn II
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,398 ✭✭✭Franz Von Peppercorn II


    BDI wrote: »
    Amazing I find Irish education tells you somebody was great, then when you ask why they say because he was.

    Thanks for that blown away.

    Really, that exact question and answer happened in school?

    I’ll come out and say what I think about Finnegans Wake. It’s hard to prove on the internet but most of its fans probably haven’t read it, and anybody who describes it as their favourite book isn’t a reader.


  • #13
    nkl12xtw5goz70
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,497 ✭✭✭nkl12xtw5goz70


    Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »
    I’ll come out and say what I think about Finnegans Wake. It’s hard to prove on the internet but most of its fans probably haven’t read it, and anybody who describes it as their favourite book isn’t a reader.

    Why would a non-reader describe Finnegans Wake as his or her favourite book? That makes little sense to me.

    It also raises the question of what it means to have "read" Finnegans Wake. One could dutifully parse the words on every page, but would likely end up none the wiser.


  • #14
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 13,712 ✭✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    Mavis Teeny Track wrote: »
    The word "riverrun" is in lower case because it continues the last sentence of the book: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..."

    The question was rhetorical. Everyone knows that the last line is supposed to run into the first line. I'm mentioning riverrano and nous rêverons (we will dream, etc) for similar reasons. There are about five or six further explanations which are all legitimate.

    For the person who said that Joyce was pulling our leg: I used to believe that too. Then I discovered that his notebooks survive, where he spent several years painfully extracting every last meaning out of the words he used, and adjusting his text as he went along.

    It's a remarkable work. I don't think I've managed to read more than a dozen pages, and I'll be lucky to finish it in my lifetime. Its staggering.


  • #15
    nkl12xtw5goz70
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,497 ✭✭✭nkl12xtw5goz70


    A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »
    The question was rhetorical. Everyone knows that the last line is supposed to run into the first line. I'm mentioning riverrano and nous rêverons (we will dream, etc) for similar reasons. There are about five or six further explanations which are all legitimate.

    Especially in a post-Barthsian world, all explanations are legitimate. By the time of Finnegans Wake, Joyce himself seems to have rejected any notion of authorial intention, shifting interpretive responsibility to the reader in a manner unprecedented before or since. I think it's legitimate to say that we are free to make of Finnegans Wake whatever we wish.
    Jacques Derrida could not have conceived of such a masterpiece.

    Derrida's writings are essentially an elaborate footnote to Finnegans Wake — in fact, he once stated that there would have been no deconstruction without Joyce.
    It's a remarkable work. I don't think I've managed to read more than a dozen pages, and I'll be lucky to finish it in my lifetime. Its staggering.

    Keep at it — only 616 more pages to go! :)


  • #16
    Arghus
    Registered Users Posts: 14,327 ✭✭✭✭Arghus


    Ever had the feeling you've seen this before?


  • #17
    nkl12xtw5goz70
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,497 ✭✭✭nkl12xtw5goz70


    Arghus wrote: »
    Ever had the feeling you've seen this before?

    That's exactly the point. Based on a cyclical theory of history, Finnegans Wake assumes that there is nothing new under the sun—that human civilization is an ongoing pattern of rising and falling, building and destroying, death and rebirth. We are all part of that larger pattern, which is fundamentally embedded in the very language(s) we speak.


  • #18
    BDI
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,005 ✭✭✭BDI


    Mavis Teeny Track wrote: »
    That's exactly the point. Based on a cyclical theory of history, Finnegans Wake assumes that there is nothing new under the sun—that human civilization is an ongoing pattern of rising and falling, building and destroying, death and rebirth. We are all part of that larger pattern, which is fundamentally embedded in the very language(s) we speak.

    Every empire is like the last empire with better technology and flushier toilets.


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