/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7148454]

My dad says that this book is incomprehensible garbage. What a pleb, right? I bet he doesn't even, like... understand the stuff. Ha ha.

[Anonymous No.7148455]

xD

[Anonymous No.7148465]

>>7148454
lel normii tbhorny

[Anonymous No.7148542]

your dad is a smart man, i'd suck his dick too

[Anonymous No.7148583]

I made a rather lengthy multi-post about this book and it got a lot of nods from people, however I was really hoping it would spark some sort of debate, mostly for my own edification as I did not expect to win. Anyway I will be porting it over here in hopes of getting that debate.

[Anonymous No.7148590]

(1of3)

I know for certain that I will get chewed out for saying what I have to say but FW has been a sort of love/hate relationship for me. More accurately this love/hate relationship is more of a beguiled/beguiled relationship. Or explained even better, what I feel is intriguing about the book also feels like a sensation of being swindled. I can hear your whinging already "oh, its this trite aesthetic argument again". Yes, but I will try to present it in more, shall we say understanding terms. I want to say in no significant sense will I be criticizing the book or the author here, but rather those who have contributed to its acclaim.

I feel I'll have to make an important concession before I can complete this post in good faith. I will readily admit that James Joyce is clearly extremely erudite, creative and his overall intellect is something to marvel at rather than hope to ever attain and in doing so, set oneself up for disappointment. However this plays into my ultimate argument, which is that people allow this genius to precede the aesthetics of the book itself. If it is an interwoven tapestry of subtle allusions to a wealth of mythological, literary, philosophical and political subjects many of these reasonably obscure, it must be great right? If it contains clever wordplay and a cryptic superstructure, it must be great. This is where I disagree.

I will pin my flag to the mast and say that I think relativism in aesthetics is mostly bullshit. I believe aesthetics have indicators, that followed to their origin, are primordial and interface with fundamental structures in the human brain. I believe insofar as Finnegans Wake fails to interface with many of these structures- although it may interface exceedingly well with others, for instance those that react to rhyming schemes and familiar phonetic organizations- it does fail the aesthetic test. No its not bad, but I don't see how something so deliberately and thoroughly uncanny can realistically enter the pantheon of great literature.

[Anonymous No.7148594]

(2of3)

The best comparison I can draw to FW is in music. Namely Schoenberg's brand of expressionism, which eventually became so all-consuming for him that he codified it in a serialist method known as dodecaphonic composition. This new musical language had one primary purpose and this was to deliberately subvert the composer's natural, indeed primordial, gravitation towards tonality. The details of this 12 tone system are pretty much irrelevant, however I draw the comparison because in music this idea of the primordiality of aesthetics is better represented than in literature.

The reason I say this is due to the harmonic series. For those who do not already know this is a series of naturally sympathetic resonances or "overtones" which result from a resonant sound, such as a chime. Throughout the world scales are built off of primary members of the series and some scales contain more members than others, explaining the odd, but nevertheless appealing tuning of Gamelan instruments amongst other worldly musical oddities. Anyway, this overtone series, by virtue of the fact we heat it is represented fundamentally in the structures of the human ear. Furthermore, the development of music theory in the west was primarily based around the dominant tonic relationship and the three strongest members of the series. Everything from Sonata form to species counterpoint down to the atomic level of tuning had some consideration for this naturally existing relationship. Well Schoenberg, at the turn of the century decided that this needed to be done away with. The results of this experiment however are a music which lacks emotional context or mostly any sort of immediate reward and therefore may be said to challenge aesthetics all too fundamentally.

Before continuing I will say I love Schoenberg and even more his pupil Berg, who I believe mastered and perfectly reconciled with the old methods the 12 tone system. However, I cannot say I would defend Schoenberg as one of the greatest composers. His experiment is interesting and I was devoted enough to understanding it that its entirely appealing and much easier t understand his music now. However I don't know if I would ever defend it as some of the greatest music ever. And if I defended his follower Berg, it would be in his capacity as a liason between musical languages.

[Anonymous No.7148604]

(3of3)

Okay now how does this tie in? Well I cannot say I have even a basic understanding of how the aesthetics of language or literature may manifest in a similar mechanism to the overtone series, however I think what I have accomplished is making an argument for objective, and more importantly measurable aesthetics. I only posit that similar systems exist in how we interpret language and narrative structures and probably to a less obvious degree than in music admittedly. But here is my argument: Finnegans Wake subverts primordial understanding of both language and narrative that it fails to meet evident aesthetic criteria and therefore, against a monolith of critical authority its mythological status may be called into question. I feel that Finnegans Wake is brilliant both in its demonstration of knowledge and in its intricate cryptic organization. But does this necessitate that it is good art? This is where I believe it is on some shaky foundation


Call me an idiot and drag up a bunch of dead guys and almost dead guys (e.g. Bloom), I have made my peace.

[Anonymous No.7148716]

>>7148590
>>7148594
>>7148604

Epic copy pasta bro

[Anonymous No.7148731]

>>7148716
Fresh off the boat hey? Let me guess, you're at a party on your phone.

[Anonymous No.7148857]

>>7148590
>>7148594
>>7148604
Joyce said he was going for a subconscious, dreamlike aesthetic with Finnegans Wake and it makes perfect sense in that context. It's not a puzzle or cryptogram with a definite "solution", but a dream that can be interpreted in a number of ways.

The only way you can honestly say it "failed" in an aesthetic sense or was strictly an academic demonstration of various disconnected bits of knowledge is to misunderstand what it was aiming for.

[Anonymous No.7149215]

>>7148857
Thats what academics say about Jackson Pollack or Stockhausen though. I think this "death of the author" shit can only go so far and this was my point to begin with.

[Anonymous No.7149248]

>>7149215
Oh fuck I just realized "death of the author" is the opposite of what we're talking about as this actually concerns authorial intent. Oh well, whatevs

[Anonymous No.7149292]

>>7149248
Forget academics, it's what Joyce himself literally said. Besides that, death of the author is just as limited a perspective if not more so than taking authorial intent and historical context into account. The fact of the matter is that any given work is distinctly a product of a given author's mind and surroundings and only exists in a vacuum if you want to pretend it sprung out from nothing. The notion that ambiguity somehow negates the function of context in its entirety is a ludicrous one.

Though Finnegans Wake is the sort of text that confounds both perspectives and shows their limitations.

[Anonymous No.7149705]

>>7149292
Well I only questioned this idea that it is necessarily worth reading. Like either you read it and enjoy it or you are a dummy. A lot of attention was put into making it clear I was not attacking Joyce for writing the book. I was attacking its popularity. In particular I was attacking /lit/.

[Anonymous No.7149739]

>>7149215
>Jackson Pollack
>Stockhausen

[Anonymous No.7149740]

>>7148454
H.G. Wells, in a personal letter to Joyce, argued that "you have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence [...] I ask: who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousands I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?"

[Anonymous No.7149764]

>>7149705
What popularity? It has a reputation for being "the best book that no one's read". Most people on /lit/ are just posturing and haven't even read a single chapter of it.

Whether or not something is "worth it" is always more subjective than objective even if it has a clear aesthetic value. The generic /lit/ "start with the Greeks, read the entire western canon" meme has always been a load of horseshit.