Talk:Finnegans Wake/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Major overhaul

I can't quite believe that this article is B-class. It is shockingly bad, and it's only thanks to the efforts of intelligent people like Gaff and Warchef that it has any kind of quality rating at all.

If ever a book was in dire need of a terse, lucid, clear encyclopedia article in reasonably plain English, it's surely this one. And yet this article is dense, turgid, riddled with appalling prose and suffering from the efforts of people who want to write their own little critical essays about Joyce and his work and how much it's meant to them. I am a huge fan of the book and consider it Joyce's masterpiece, but I don't want to read anything about it that is trying to be as tough and difficult as the book itself, and I consider any theory of article-writing that assumes that the commentary must be as difficult as the text to be sheer guff.

Even the first sentence is bad. If you look up an encylopedia article on 'Finnegans Wake', presumably you want to know something about it. You don't need to know straight away that Joyce didn't write any more books after this one; that will become clear in the ensuing article, if it's any good. I have amended the opening sentence accordingly.

I agree that this article should be FA status some day. In the meantime, let us start looking at it with the eyes of people who know little or nothing about the book and who seek more information, and when we have worked out what might be useful to them, we can start trimming this article of the appalling verbal weeds that currently clutter it and replace them with genuine content. I will make a start in the meantime. Lexo (talk) 23:02, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I've cleaned up the Plot Summary section but it's still not very good. Too much time and effort is spent on warning the reader that it's not very easy to do a synopsis of the book, and too much space is given to Joyce scholars (for the most part, a cranky and unhelpful bunch) going on and on about how synopses are against the spirit of the book, etc. etc. This merely looks defensive, as if we are apologising for the ineptitude of the following plot summary. I would rather focus on what Joyce had to say about the book, especially as this is an article about the book itself, not about the Joyce industry. Incidentally, there is at least one recent book that disagrees strongly with the tendency of people like Benstock and Hayman to focus on how difficult the book is: Philip Kitcher's Joyce's Kaleidoscope. It's no coincidence that this is one of the single most lucid, helpful and interesting books on the Wake that I have read. Lexo (talk) 00:54, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, personally I'm of the camp that feels that the existing plot summaries do not entirely represent the book as it is or the experience of reading it; or at the very best, they choose to speak about only the parts which will cohere, and sort of sweep the many many opaque and unclear interludes and digressions under the rug, which is a somewhat arbitrary and selective process. That being said, my personal opinion has no bearing on the article, but I do disagree with the idea that the article appears to be apologising for itself - I feel that to present a plot synopsis (any plot synopsis) as "fact" would be dishonest, and I'd rather be honest than give a false impression that there's consensus among the books' readers. However if you feel that the article gives the impression that there's no plot (there clearly are traces of plot, and clear narrative events and threads) then please change it; and if you feel the article is giving an elitist impression then please change (my biggest pet peeve with the Joyce industry is how they give the impression to readers that Joyce is so difficult that you need their help to get anywhere - I believe many an annotated edition of Ulysses or critical study have ruined the experience of actually reading the books). as for the Joyce community, they are pretty much the only referable bunch on the issue, apart from other writers (who are quoted in the reception section), so whether we like it or not in order to avoid OR in the article I suppose they're here to stay. My recommendation would be that instead of removing the arguments against plot synopses in the intro, you counterbalance them with some references to people who are more enthusiastic and hold more belief in the current generally accepted (and no matter what the complications may be, they are pretty much generally accepted) plot details.

All that being said, I think that all of your edits thus far have been spot on, so I look forward to seeing the plot summary getting a fine comb treatment as well. peaceWarchef (talk) 07:07, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

By the way, if you look up there in the previous section (Clarity in the article) you will pretty much see my own goals for the article and what I think it should achieve. One other note on what I think is wrong with the plot intro as it is now; if Finnegans Wake does not have a plot in the commonly accepted sense of the word, that should not be tied into a discussion of the book's difficulties - the two are interconnected, but the plot synopsis section should merely point out how the concept of plot in FW is different, and let the reader infer what difficulties might arise from Joyce's approach, rather than simply state - as it unfortunately now does - that "the plot is hard to find because the book is so difficult." I think this notion (that FW is a novel in disguise, which needs to be translated to find its plot - which is buried just under its surface) is inherently false, so its difficulties don't mask some kind of plot; the approach to plot is just radically different (and i mean radically). So the over-riding message of the intro should be that Joyce took a different approach to narrative and plot, so it's difficult to speak about it in conventional terms, and there isn't an overall consensus on what the plot is (or if it exists as such) but most people agree on the following vague plot outline (selective and all as it is). Do you agree in part? I think we both want the same end result, but we're coming at it from slightly different perspectives, which I think is the grounds for a very healthy working relationship, so I'm enthusiastic that our middle ground will be a very good article (hopefully even FA for the 70th anniversary next year). Once again, welcome on board.Warchef (talk) 20:38, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments about my edits. I don't want the article to give the misleading impression that most people find the book as easy as P.G. Wodehouse; that would misrepresent the common experience of reading it. I also think that Joyce knew that people found the book difficult, and that that should be clear from the article. But I don't think that the evidence suggests that all he wanted to do was write a book that nobody could understand (because he wanted to perplex them, or whatever). I think he basically wanted people to enjoy it; he is on record as being disappointed that people didn't seem to find it much fun. In the case of someone like Fritz Senn, who has of course been talking about the book forever, my problem with his particular contribution is twofold: a.) I have never read anything by him that I found particularly illuminating, and b.) like many Joyce experts of a certain age he seems to have a joyless and almost priest-like reverence for the book. A large majority of experts on the Wake tend to write about it as though no other contemporary book is worth reading; they get hypnotised by it. I enjoyed Campbell and Robinson's Skeleton Key, which I'm sure many experts despise, because although it's a slightly silly book it at least represents an honest attempt to demonstrate that FW has an overall design and something resembling a story. Philip Kitcher's book does the same thing in a more sophisticated way.

The other thing about 'difficulty' is that it's often used in a way that implies 'boring'. Some things are difficult - maths, for example (at least if you're me) - but the difficulty can also be enjoyable when things become clearer and you see the fundamental beauty and rightness of the work. It would be good to try and convey this somehow (without waffling or going into original research, obviously). So yes, I agree - we want to suggest that the book has a shape and a design, but also that the reader shouldn't expect to find it immediately obvious, because of Joyce's unusual approach.

I am aware of the school of thought who claim that you're not supposed to be able to gain a deep understanding of FW, that it's just 'unreadable', that anyone who claims to find story and narrative in it is basically being naïve, and that this is a somehow significant and interesting thing for an author to do. I regard that (non-)argument as being (in the scientific sense) trivial. Lexo (talk) 10:41, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I felt I had been a bit hard on old Fritz Senn, so I Googled him to see if there were any helpful remarks from him lately. Instead, I found this (I think highly revealing) exchange, from a Japanese interview:

"Q:[...]Is the sex in FW not erotic? Then what is it? A: Totally subjective. In my response none of the abundant parts with sexual content, or overtones (or vibrations, etc.), are erotic as something pleasant or stimulating, or cheerful. Other readers I am sure feel different. However, I believe that some of us engage in Joyce's text (the language, the interaction with the text, not any erotic content, I mean) as kind of substitute for what cannot be had in real life. Many of us are amateurs in this sense as well."

Insofar as I can make anything of this at all, it's that Fritz Senn seriously needs to get laid. Lexo (talk) 00:16, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Rose criticisms

I originally added these quotes from Danis Rose concerning the complicated process of Joyce's composition of book II as I thought that they might provide some insight into the choppy nature of the book (which is by quite a long way the most difficult of FW). however i've come to the decision that they're just confusing matters, so i have removed them. However, i copy them here now in case we can find a use for them at some later stage - they are insightful, but just do not belong in the plot summary section.

However, this story concerning Shem and Shaun studying together is preceded by an extremely long, complicated and seemingly unrelated introduction. Joyce rewrote and re-ordered the chapter many times, imposing its distinctive schoolbook format along the way, and significantly restructuring it again just a year before the Wake was published. These many transformations Joyce forced on what were already fairly stable texts account in large for its disrupted narrative and help to explain why following its plot can be so difficult. Rose also criticises the final published version of the chapter, stating that "it was not the optimal, nor the original, arrangement of the parts."

Rose has criticised the chapter as a "rather forced composite of the two pieces [i.e. "Tristan and Isolde" and "Mamalujo"] which in their original forms are radically different in mood, style and technique." Warchef (talk) 21:10, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Nonsense Redirect?

I'm sorry but why does Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk redirect here? 61.68.146.118 (talk) 00:32, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure why anybody bothered to make a page with that name, but it's a word that appears several times in Finnegans Wake. It is said to represent a clap of thunder and it's of some significance (in the book). — Malik Shabazz (talk · contribs) 01:53, 9 July 2008 (UTC)