Summer of the Wake discussion
Week 5 (pp. 121-150)
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I am, even reading with a guide. I love the playfulness. At times I snort. I am enjoying his rip of literary criticism schools right now.
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Today in the Surveillance State: PRISM Meets "Finnegans Wake"
Cryptogams & the NSA
Oh, priceless stuff. When the FBI showed up, my heart truly was struck with terror. The prospect of explaining the texts—it was possible, but I had a secret and awful shame: I didn’t actually understand some of them. The Hopkins texts I could perhaps handle, but Finnegans Wake?
And when he is explaining "cryptogam" to AUSA Fitzgerald:
“See? Fungoalgaceous muscafilicial,” I said. “It’s a portmanteau of different types of cryptogams.”
The stenographer interrupted here, her north Baltimore accent like a knitting needle stuck in my ear. “Are those words in that book?” she asked, “Because – otherwise you’re going to have to spell them.”
And when FItzgerald asks:
“And why would someone write like this?”
My silence now. “Why?” I repeated, meekly. I was devastated.
“Just your opinion. A short explanation.” Absolute innocence in asking the question.
My hands began trembling. One of his assistants looked at the clock.
“I don’t know, sir – honestly I don’t.”
Hahaha, that last part was my favorite, too! This is awesome.Now I'm a little curious about Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I'm excited to get to the parts about mushrooms.
I've been trying to read without a guide, and then going back with a guide for the parts I didn't understand. This past week I've mainly been using finwake.com's annotations and the Tindall stuff (which I found online for free- http://books.google.com/books?id=dO2I...). I also picked up and leafed through Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key in Barnes & Noble.
To answer your question, Aroon: yes, I do see patterns and have "Eureka" moments when reading without the guide. Granted I have a ton of context from having looked through different reference materials about Joyce and FW, so I have some idea of what to keep an eye out for, and there is a lot that I realize I'm not getting when I check out a guide or annotations. HOWEVER, the flipside is when I'm reading without guides, I'm really concentrating and trying to glean as much from the text as possible with my brain. In other words, I feel like I have to bring more ME to the book and try harder to engage with it when I don't have a bunch of scholarly opinion to fall back on. The payoff is that a lot of times I will form my own interpretation or find some third or fourth meaning to a phrase that I don't see in the secondary literature.
I'll try to remember and share next time something like this happens. I will say, though, that sometimes I feel like I'm getting a sense of the meaning in my head, but it's the kind of "sense" that, if I were to try to articulate it it would fall apart. I guess that's "dream logic"? I may have made this comparison in another thread so forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but this book kind of reminds me of a Magic Eye picture... when you relax the muscles in your eyes/brain that you would normally use, THEN you're able to see the really crazy multidimensional image. Also, (just realized this part as I was typing) a magic eye picture just looks like chaos/nonsense when you look at it like a regular picture.
Has anybody else tried sharing parts of the book with friends/family/people? I've been reading parts of the book to my girlfriend who also loves books (we just finished rereading Ulysses) and she seems kind of baffled but amused by it. I was reading to her and this part made her say, "Whoa, read that again!"
"a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons" (p.120)
Meltinguncle, did you find the whole Tindall commentary? I find a lot but not all of it at google books.
You're right, big chunks are missing :(
Out of curiosity, if anyone is reading The Wake without any guides - are you finding patterns and pockets of meaning bubble up, now that we're 100+ pages in? Eureka moments? It's a drastically different experience from reading with the guides (though no method of reading is better or worse than any other.)