James Joyce (1) (1882–1941)

About story:
Stephen is born and raised in a religious context. He learns to interpret life through religion, through magical thinking, through the process of conforming to god's standards. If he gets some of the numerous rules wrong he will get the ultimate punishment - hell. If he gets all the rules right then he gets the ultimate reward - heaven. But the rule system is obscure, inconsistent with reality, with Stephen and with itself. He tries to twist himself into this weird cruel show more structure but finds himself turn into a shadow, a husk of a man. He loses interest in reality, he withers. At some point he has a breakthrough and jumps out of his mental jail into a bigger reality. After the release he stumbles around looking for a new mode of being but it's not that easy. Other structures also have their problems and limitations. In the end he attaches himself to art and goes off into the sunset.

To me the ending is inconclusive. We don't know if art is the true vocation for Stephen. What if he loses interest in it as well? But this inconclusiveness is kind of realistic. We never really know. We just live as we are until we are somebody else.

About form:
The writing was so beautiful that at times i just had to read it out loud in the most epic and expressive voices i could produce until my throat went out. The description of hell was actually really really terrifying - made me want to avoid it.
I don't think i've read anything like this novel. The combination of beautiful poetic prose with stream of consciousness with lots of skipping around time and place and vague ponderings on obscure feelings - it's like a dream, a dream of being alive. show less

Earlier in my life, I read Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, all by James Joyce. This year I decided to read Finnegans Wake, a novel notorious for its inaccessibility. Like The Cantos by Ezra Pound, it is a text many know, few read, and less understand.

While the Wake is difficult, this shouldn’t be seen as a deterrent to actually reading it. It is a singular creative artifact, overflowing with meaning. A cornucopia of languages, puns, and parody, the Wake will show more probably never be fully understood, at least not in any conventional sense.

Unlike my reading of Ulysses – a version heavily annotated – I decided to read the Wake without any guides, skeletons, and such. As noted Joyce scholar John Bishop states in the Penguin edition, “There is no agreement as to what Finnegans Wake is about, whether or not it is ‘about’ anything, or even whether it is, in any ordinary sense of the word, ‘readable’.” Perhaps reading the Wake isn’t about “getting it.” Without resorting to the trope, “All art is incomprehensible,” Bishop asserts the rather obvious point that the text will mean different things to different people. I’m a bit of a language nerd, collecting foreign language dictionaries, slang dictionaries, subculture- and/or industry-specific dictionaries (gay slang, soldier slang, etc.). The only real prerequisite for reading the Wake is a love for language. Language in and of itself. (Something I picked up reading Anthony Burgess and watching Monty Python.)

Conceived in a circular form – the last sentence of the novel begins the first sentence at the beginning of the novel – allows the reader to pick up and leave at any point. This circular form reinforces the works character as polyvocal, polysemic, and polymorphous.

Choice passages like:

“Male partly masking female. Man looking round, beastly expression, fishy eyes, paralleliped homoplatts, ghazometron pondus, exhibits rage.”

What does it mean? I don’t know. Not sure what Joyce meant either, although ghazometron sounds like a mashup of Arabic and Hebrew (ghazal = the poetic form + metron … could be based on Metatron the angel and/or the word metronome, the device that keeps the beat). Pondus relates to weight. Even within this sentence, chosen at random, meanings abound.

The Wake represents a gleeful effrontery against the reader’s desire to be told what a passage means. Meanings literally flood from the book, a logorrheaic gushing, and a smack to the face for those seeking to master a text. Like an ancient mystical text (The Zohar) or visionary art works (William Blake’s large-scale prophetic works), critics, specialists, and readers alike will be parsing and dissecting the work for years to come. While Samuel Beckett’s work plumbed the depths of the human experience through a merciless linguistic subtraction, the Wake represents the pinnacle of an encyclopedic intellect, the work of two decades, an orgy of obscurantist obfuscation.

Don’t think of the Wake as a literary Everest, an epic one slogs through to get an achievement badge. Read it because it is fun. Remember fun? See parsing the language and the multilingual puns not as an attempt to master the meaning, but as literary spelunking, exploring an infinite rabbit hole / Moebius strip / ouroboros. Finnegans Wake is a novel that encompasses everything, about the night and sleep and dreams written in a dream-language and embracing a punny dream-logic all its own. It is understandable only in the way dreams are. In the end, we will find meaning(s) in the text even Joyce never dreamed of.

https://driftlessareareview.com/2022/10/23/__trashed/ show less

Stephen Dedalus, being James Joyce's alter ego, is a study in personal and spiritual growth. The subtext is one of sexual awakening; a coming of age, if you will. Stephen navigates life with contradictory moments of trepidation and vigor. He believes that in order to be a great artist one needs to suffer for the art. A self imposed exile and abandonment of family is critical for success. Not unlike Joyce's own journey to becoming an accomplished author.
The trick to reading A Portrait of the show more Artist as a Young Man is to not take every sentence as gospel. Every detail is not going to be on some final exam. Read Joyce like you are on an acid trip. Tiptoe across the run-on sentences and uber microscopic details and you will be just fine. If it helps, Joyce was experimenting with different ways to write literature. They didn't always make sense. show less

My mother used to call me a Jackeen. I thought at first she was calling me a Dubliner, an Anglicised city boy, which is one of its meanings and insult enough from a Culchie like her. A Culchie is someone from the Irish countryside. Keep up at the back. It turns out Jackeen also means a drunken waster, which is more probably what she meant, but the two definitions are one and the same to her I reckon.

Joyce, in The Dubliners, never uses the word but there are one or two of both types of show more Jackeen scattered throughout the collection of short stories.

The book reminds me of an Ian Dury album. He makes the ordinary extraordinary. He takes the small and mundane moments of everyday life and turns them into celebrations of existence.

The stories start with tales of childhood and convey the tension and detail that consume a child’s life perfectly and continue throughout lifetimes until the last story, The Dead, which finishes with the best piece of writing I have ever read.

The perfect book to have in your pocket when waiting for someone in a pub. Preferably someone unreliable who wont turn up on time. show less