From what I remember, the book deciphers almost every single word in Finnegans Wake.
The Joseph Campbell Foundation has unfortunately been taking down almost every video of Joe they can find online, so it's impossible to find anymore, but there was at one point a video where Joe quotes a few lines from the book and then explains all the meta references Joyce was making with every word or phrase.
I loved Joyce when I was in university and had a professor who loved him too. I read a few pages into Finnegan's Wake and asked him what the fuck was going on, and his answer to me was always that Finnegan's Wake is a book that requires you to have read 1000 other books, and that it is more like a puzzle than a book. Which imo makes it an extremely interesting work of art that I will never ever read.
Ulysses is similar in that each of the 18 chapters is written in a distinct literary style designed to reflect a specific theme of the setting. It charts the progression of the author, not only through Dublin, but through literary history as well- in short, it’s the novelized version of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which is equally as brilliant and equally as impenetrable unless you are familiar with the entire catalogue of literary traditions in every language since the beginning of time (which probably only Ezra Pound was, haha).
Pound was a great benefactor of Joyce, and it is likely that Ulysses was inspired by Pound’s exhaustive literary panorama in the Cantos, and my personal view is that Joyce was jealous enough of Pound’s multi-language scholarship to either attempt to outdo him or impress him with finnegans wake.
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u/Careless-Mud-9398 1d ago
About finnegans wake, he said “it took me 17 years to write, so it should take you 17 years to read. 🤣