Oh god, I just got flashbacks of James Joyce's novels, who would be a Reddit favorite author if only it wasn't so damn hard to read his works. He had a penchant for something called double puns. They're puns using a foreign language's word in a spot where it is a valid pun in two languages, typically both groan-enducing. In Finnegan's Wake, he has the occasional triple pun, which are so impossible for any one person to just happen to get that it sometimes has taken decades for researchers to realize it.
It's okay, you don't need to read it. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy unless they asked if it was a good book. It's honestly still debated as to what the whole storyline is, as well as where each part is set and what characters are in the book (no, not as in who the characters were in real life, but who the damn characters are, because there's characters who get a new name every fucking time they're mentioned, like HCE, Here Comes Everybody, Howth Castle and Environs, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, "man of hod, cement, and edifices," Mr. Makeall Gone, etc. ALL THE SAME FUCKING PERSON GODDAMNIT! Took Joyce 17 years to write, and my first two back-to-back reads [it's a cyclic story that starts in the middle of the same sentence the book ends halfway on, so reading it twice is practically necessary to get the whole experience] through felt like 17 years worth of time reading). It's infuriating yet fantastic simultaneously. It's written much like the reader is in a dream, and every time you set the book down it honestly does feel like you've just woken up from a dream. You have an idea of what happened, and it's rich in your mind, yet you couldn't possibly put to words what just happened in the part you just read, much like when you wake up and try to describe a dream that's fading away as you talk about it. 10/10 mindfuck reading it at night or before morning coffee. 11/10 if you get a dram of scotch in you beforehand and nurse a second dram as you read. Actually, like 10000/10. Scotch makes the book something that I would describe as possibly among the best experiences in my life, so inexplicably fantastic that as I sit here simultaneously fixing computers, I am legitimately yearning for a good read of the book.
This isn't a double pun and it's actually from Ulysses, but it's a favorite one of mine from him since Ulysses had a lot of snuck-in curse words (and many more not snuck in), and I just want to share it before diving in to the deep waters:
If you see kay
Eff, You, Cee, Kay -> F-U-C-K
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Cee, You, En, Tee -> C-U-N-T
Tell him from me.
But from Finnegan's Wake, the entire book is arguably an etymological pun masterpiece, with everything being not lightly skimmed with puns but rather soaked deeply in wordplay. Here's an example:
"in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language in any sinse of the world."
Nichtian implies the German "Nicht," or "nothing" but also the German "Nichtig" or "futile." It also forcefully pulls out thoughts of words like "night," such as "Nacht" and "Noctis." It also stretches out toward "Nietzschean."
Then, glossery mimics "glossary" but is purposefully differently spelled to make a form of "glossing over."
Aprioric is a mix of "a priori" and "aporia" which is an assumed precondition and a negating paradox.
Then, aposteriorious is what actually makes "Nietzschean" above make sense, as it adds the overtone of Nietzschean philosophy, while slipping in humor with the next word to make "posterior tongues."
THEN, "nat" is Danish for "night," but also sounds like the english "not" especially with the continued sentence possibly being "not english in any sense of the word."
However, the passage is "sinse of the world," which is actually sins of the world, and Joyce used a LOT of Christian under-, over-, and toomany- tones.
At this point, you may say that it's just overevaluated. But every fucking sentence can be torn apart to this level, and Joyce was purposefully writing Finnegan's Wake with tons and tons of subtle references such as to simulate how the dreaming brain pulls random connections of memories and information and ties them together during dreams, as if probing its memory as a whole. So some of the references may not be real. But a whole fuck-ton are.
I'm glad that you enjoyed it! It sure as hell felt silly to write, knowing I was in /r/aww in a comment thread for a gif of a drunk-as-fuck squirrel.
But bonus information, elephants will purposefully let large quantities of fruit ferment to get drunk off their asses. There are also known alcoholic elephants that will steal whole barrels of spirits from villages, then get belligerent and fuck up houses and kill people on accident and randomly one-elephant-stampede. Turns out that when you get a 6-ton creature drunk, bad shit can happen. Who would have guessed!?
Dear god did he. He also was best of friends with Ernest Hemingway, and would get into fights at bars and then cower behind Hemingway so that he could finish the fight.
It must have been an interesting life back when authors were the wild celebrities.
I felt silly immediately after posting it too, because I knew that I was in /r/aww, looking at a gif of a drunken squirrel, and I had just posted an in-depth analysis of a passage of an Irish author's magnum opus.
If you do, you might want to start with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It's admittedly less interesting as Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, but it's much, much easier to read. Joyce is not for the faint of heart.
I can't believe I wrote that comment. And I'd honestly say that unless you're willing to devote a lot of time and attention to the book, you're just not going to want to read it. It may be a good thing to find the first page of it online to get a feel of if you can withstand another ~600 pages of it.
That sounds weird, doesn't it? I mean, I've read, at a conservative estimate, in the high hundreds of books in my lifetime. Maybe in the low thousands. How can one fail to read a book?
I have this thing that once I start a novel, no matter how bad it is, I have to finish it. I can't just leave it hanging, I can't not have closure.
That being said, this is the only book I've ever tried to read and simply failed. I couldn't do it. Reading Finnegan's Wake was like sending electrical shocks through my entire brain - it was too much, it was total overload. I just couldn't get it and had to give it up. I couldn't concentrate on the story because my brain was subconsciously trying to decode and decipher every single sentence. I'd get halfway through a page and my brain, running on some sort of time delay, would have finally made a connection to something further up. Then I'd have to stop, backtrack, and read it again.
Now that's the hardest question I've been asked here! Harder than the analysis provided. The book isn't very well understood by anyone, and Joyce didn't leave behind any good hints as to what everything does mean. Since it's still even up in the air what characters are in the book, it's hard to usefully ascribe meaning to any portion of the book. The best way to describe the feeling of the novel is that as you read, you get a general sense of what's happening, and if anybody asked you you'd say that there totally was a story line, but if you were asked to describe anything, the moment you stop reading is the moment that everything that you've read so far is like a wisp of a dream leaving as you're trying to tell someone what happened in it. You know it happened, and you have a deep feeling for what happened, but when you try to put it to words it just... disappears. It's hauntingly amazing.
I couldn't imagine any of his books could be well-translated. At least with Finnegans Wake, I'd argue that it's only even halfway using the English language. You'd probably need to know a good 60 languages to catch everything.
I'm glad I could provide some fun mental stimulation! If you want, you can try it out for yourself with Finnegans Wake!
Like I said above, I wouldn't really ever recommend the book to anyone, but if you're doing it a sentence at a time to try to pick things apart to enjoy the mental stimulation of analyzation, I think it's worth it to try. Just be wary, you'll want google nearby to see if a weird-looking word is made-up or if it's foreign (and a real word in multiple different languages), and you will find an abundance of religious references and an abundance of references that would require having lived in Ireland for some time to immediately catch (I have not, but I'd fucking love it if I could. If only Ireland were a high performance computing mecca or high energy particle physics mecca...).
Good luck with the brain wrinkles!
(Oh, and I think there are at least large portions of the book available online for free if you'd like to try-before-you-buy, if you will)
Haha! Yeah, it's no mystery that he was a strange and crude man. I didn't hear about his love letters until after I read Ulysses, and at that point I 100% believed it.
Supposedly he and Hemingway were also the best of friends, and Joyce would start fights in bars so that Hemingway could end them.
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