To understand Joyce's later work you need to understand what it's like when you have the same BFF-tier best friend for like 20 straight years, and you hang out constantly and talk on IM programs all day and play Counter-Strike every fucking night, and you develop an intricate interior language that only exists between the two of you. You can text him what looks like complete non sequitur shit and it will make perfect sense and evoke entire conversations and anecdotes and inside jokes with spiralling meta-self-referentiality. He can combine three weird inside jokes into one reference while you're griefing a pissed off dude in a DM server and it'll make you laugh your ass off because you instantly recognise how clever and quick-witted it was for him to gel all those things topically and completely off-the-cuff. One day, you'll probably even jerk each other off.

Joyce is like that, but with himself. Finnegans Wake is just an Irishman texting himself CS:GO memes and inside jokes about the time someone shit their pants in a McDonalds, nonstop for seven thousand pages.

>>8116480

It sounds interesting. Thanks anon.

Oh boy, it's this thread again.

>>8116480
looks like you're just a buttblasted euro mad at lg winning tournaments

>>8116419
Just fucking read it, is what I think. I did it and I had lots of fun.

>>8116480
>Joyce is like that, but with himself.
Somewhat arguably Ulysses is like that. FW o's not "just le inside joke le private language :^)". Anyone can pick it up and pore over it and see something in it so long as they spend the time.

>>8116688
Pretty much. It all depends on how many random bits of knowledge you've accumulated throughout your life. And your cultural background. There are things certain people will easily pick up that others will completely miss.

>>8116419
Yeah, I actually read the whole thing because I had to. I was entering a prestigious PhD program and focusing on Joyce because I loved Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses. To my shame, though, I'd never read the Wake. I'd never even tried, as hard as that was to admit. It was this huge blind spot and area of vulnerability for me. Whenever it'd come up with my colleagues I'd just smile and nod, smile and nod, hoping they wouldn't ask me anything specific about it. "The musicality of it," somebody would say, and I'd say, "Oh God, yes, it's like Beethoven." Finally, though, I had to dive into it, and let me tell you it was tough going. Joseph Campbell's guide helped a lot. Reading it out loud helped. I listened to other people read it, read online commentaries. Eventually it started to make some sort of sense. It was like I was learning to read for the first time again, and in a way this was enjoyable. I got better at reading the book. Soon I was reading entire paragraphs without trouble, getting the puns, laughing at the jokes. I could sort of follow the story, it was like a blurry picture resolving into clarity, or like I was drunk and I was sobering up, I could actually understand it. As I became more and more adept at reading the Wake, I began putting myself to the test, initiating conversations with my colleagues about it, but specific passages this time, specific parts of the book. You can probably guess what happened. After a number of these conversations it became blindingly obvious that I understood the book a lot better than they did, they who I thought were the experts. It eventually became sort of embarrassing for them and I stopped trying to talk about it. And at the end of the day I would pack my things, catch the bus home, and settle into my apartment to read the Wake. It had surpassed all of Joyce's other works in my estimation. Ulysses, the book months earlier I would've named as my favorite of all time, the best book ever written, was now #2 to the Wake. So majestic, so ambitious, so wide-ranging, erudite, glorious, incredible was it that I couldn't believe that it was the work of one man. Best of all, the heart of it isn't complicated at all. What did I get from the Wake, what are its lessons? First of all, be yourself. Second of all, put one foot in front of the other. And lastly, just do it for crying out loud, time's a wastin'!

>>8116698
ugh, this again

>>8116701
>implying it's not hilarious every time it's posted

>>8116725
that's precisely what I'm implying, yes.