[ExI] Joyce

John K Clark jonkc at att.net
Tue Jan 29 22:04:53 UTC 2008


"Damien Broderick" <thespike at satx.rr.com> Wrote:

> It's hard to know how to reply to this thought experiment without
>knowing more about the implied reader.

It's interesting that you need to give a long and detailed answer to a very
simple question, if somebody inserted a page of computer generated
gibberish into Finnegans Wake would anybody notice?

If somebody asked me if anybody would notice if a page of gibberish was
slipped into one of your books I wouldn't need paragraphs to reply, I'd
just say "Yes, of course they would".

I just got back from a bookstore and saw Finnegans Wake on the shelf and
in light of our recent conversation I picked it up, I hadn't seen it in
years and I wondered if I was a little too hard on it. HOLY COW, it's worse
than I remembered! I started thumbing through it seeing if I could decode
one coherent thought, no luck, all I got was a headache. I did read the
introduction by some Joyce scholar because at least that part was written in
English. I can't quote verbatim because needless to say I didn't buy the
book, but he said don't worry if you go through many pages having no idea
what Joyce is talking about because it happens to the best of us. Then he
tried to make the case that Finnegans Wake is more accessible than Tolstoy
because if you don't understand or misinterpret some part of War and
Peace it will seriously compromise your understanding and enjoyment of
the rest of the book, but with Finnegans Wake if you don't understand
something it doesn't matter because it will have nothing to do with the
rest of the book anyway. He certainly didn't use these words but he
seemed to be saying those parts of Finnegans Wake that are not gibberish
are saying nothing of importance. So why read the damn thing?

It is not my usual habit to lambaste a book I have never and will never
read, but I will make an exception in this case. I'd rather have my teeth
drilled than read Finnegans Wake.

> FINNEGANS WAKE does (no apostrophe, for dog's sake

But there should have been a apostrophe! How can you tell if Joyce is
artistically expressing his contempt for the oppressive rules of English
grammar, or if he just fucked up?  I seem to remember times when you
chastised me for my less than perfect spelling; how did you know my
alternative spelling was not deliberate and part of a brilliant artistic
edifice making a bold and heroic statement about the nature of man?

> In other words, what looks momentarily like a word salad to a
> monoglot is nothing of the sort, and attention paid to Joyce's
> strange construct is repaid, or so we've been told by intelligent and
> creative people I admire, from the brilliant sf writer James Blish to
> the equally brilliant and exuberant Anthony Burgess.

Ok I will admit that maybe you're right, maybe Joyce has tapped into a
source of knowledge that is just inaccessible to a being with a mind like
mime; I doubt it but I must admit it's possible. By the way I loved Anthony
Burgess's novel "A Clockwork Orange", the movie too, but that's about as
avant-guard as my literary tastes go.

 John K Philistine







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