Finnegans Wake Grappa discussion

Borges Reviews Finnegans Wake

Work in Progress has appeared at least, now titled Finnegans Wake, and is, they tell us,the ripened and lucid fruit of sixteen energetic years of literary labor. I have examined it with some bewilderment, have unenthusiastically deciphered nine or ten calembours, and have read the terror-stricken praise [...] the trenchant authors of those accolades claim they have discovered the rules of this complex verbal labyrinth, but they abstain from applying or formulating them; nor do they attempt the analysis of a single line or paragraph… I suspect that they share my essential bewilderment and my useless and partial glances at the text. I suspect that they secretly hope (as I publicly do) for an exegetical treatise from Stuart Gilbert, the official interpreter of James Joyce.
It is unquestionable that Joyce is one of the best writers of our time. Verbally, he is perhaps the best. In Ulysses there are sentences, there are paragraphs, that are not inferior to Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Browne. In Finnegans Wake itself there are some memorable phrases. (This one, for example, which I will not attempt to translate: “Beside the rivering waters of, hither and thithering waters of, night.”) In this enormous book, however efficacy is an exception.
Finnegans Wake is a concatenation of puns committed in a dreamlike English that is difficult not to categorize as frustrated and incompetent. I don’t think that I am exaggerating. Ameise, in German, means “ant.” Joyce, in Work in Progress, combines it with the English amazing to coin the adjective ameising, meaning wonder inspired by an ant. Here is another example, perhaps less lugubrious. Joyce fuses the English words banister and star into a single word, banistar, that combines both images.
Jules Laforgue and Lewis Carroll have played this game with better luck. --1939

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More like BOREges... ha! heh. just kidding.

It's great being smarter than Borges though, for real, it makes me feel pretty good.

Geoff wrote: "It's great being smarter than Borges though, for real, it makes me feel pretty good."

Need I say I love my Borges? But he was at a disadvantage ; reading at a time when Stuart Gilbert still counted as a great Joyce interpreter. I tried reading his Ulysses book after finishing Ulysses-with-the-Gifford ; everything of value in Gilbert was already assimilated into Gifford.

Oh I love my Borges too. I was just kiddin' the ol feller.

It is also incredibly true that I am not smarter than Borges.

I should also say that in these past few weeks The Wake has turned into (am I using this word right?) a veritable page=turner!

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "It is also incredibly true that I am not smarter than Borges.

I should also say that in these past few weeks The Wake has turned into (am I using this word right?) a veritable page=turner!"

After I got my OUP Wake I started rereading it from somwhere around pg. 25 or something while I was out and about or at lunch or in transit or elswhere (reading the Restored at home from my later reading point in comfortable concentration with annotations.etc.) and yes, this time through the older sections it really is a page turner.

Can you imagine being one of those readers who first dipped into the wake in '39? Like Borges? An existential sucker punch, but blissful and virginal as a new continent of untracked wilderness. NR, you are quite right in saying that Borges was at a terrible disadvantage. How many other writers dismissed it then? I remember DH Lawrence turning his nose up at it, and even Nabokov called it a "cold pudding" or some such thing. This of course is all part of the wake's beauty.

Ashley wrote: "This of course is all part of the wake's beauty. "

I heard it said once that the 20th century was the century of Ulysses and the 21st will be that of The Wake. This small huddle of readers here on goodreads bodes well for that thesis. Reading it raw back in the days of Work-in-Progress and in the wake of The Wakes' publication -; rather an astounding thing to undertake. Even Campbell's Skeleton Key which is showing its age is rather tremendously impressive when understood as a first thorough interpretation. All of these early Takes on our book of books are really quite fascinating ; both the pros and the cons. Where would I be without the McHughs and the Burgesses and the Campbells and Schmidts of The Wake?