Thread 24576165

Has anyone here actually read this book? Like, the entire thing, cover to cover? If so, what did you think of it? In your interpretation, what is it even about?

>>24576165 (OP)
I've read it. Overall I'd say it's enjoyable.There are easier parts and there are harder parts. If you want to just dip your feet in the book, an easier standalone chapter to read on its own is the Shem the Penman chapter, (Chapter 1.7). This chapter goes into the character of Shem and his relationship with Shaun is one of the main motifs that gets repeated throughout the book.

You can't really boil FW into one thing that it's about, there are just multiple themes that get repeated over and over again in the book which is the main point, the rise and fall of HCE, the redemption through ALP, the warring brothers Shem the Penman vs Shaun the Postman. honestly similar to Ulysses in that regard.

yes, multiple times
you never really stop reading this book

its "about" the english language more than anything else. the plot is fairly barebones and is just a vehicle to explore language, history, and ideas

one of the things worthy to say about the book is that it is not as difficult as the first pages might make it out to be. Terence McKenna attributes to this to a fractality where the whole book is contained in the first word, then the first two words, then first four words and so on, so that the beginning parts are "linguistically dense"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QrWfbYFtNk

I recently read it as well, and as an ESL reader, even though I majored in English in college I have to admit it is pretty challenging.

As others have said here though, it is not as impossibly difficult as it may seem at first, although it helps having read his other works beforehand.

My advice would be to let go and not obsess too much about trying to understand the plot and what happens. I read somewhere that it helps to try to read the words aloud in your mind, so you can see how Joyce twists and turns the language, and conveys themes and concepts that may even contradict the original meaning of the words.

On the side I took notes of what I thought was going on so I could compare later with online summaries, but I got the most enjoyment out of the twists in the language and having the feeling that the characters were some sort of shadows weaving in and out of the story without truly definite features.

As others have said I'd recommend it as well, but mostly as a curiosity, just don't obsess over understanding everything.

>>24576165 (OP)
>what is it even about?
The Collective Unconscious, and how it is renewed in every human psyche.

a possible interpretation is that it is partly about the concept of scholasticism in or as a systematic sense in language or the formal nature of form that would potentially condense the systematic of that language into form

why that system would be presented in the media res where that systematic form has reached an almost complete aporia is not something that i understand entirely or at all completely

why would that be possible in the context of a book that would seem to elide the possibility of narrative systematicality

>>24576165 (OP)
>what is it even about?
It's about one Irish family.
It's about the original sin.
The topic of book is spelled in one sentence on the first page of the book. It's related to the fall of man. Everything else circulates, fractally, around this topic.
The plot is simple. It's a story about the evening and night of one family: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the main man, father; Anna Livia Plurabelle, the wife, mother; Sham, the "bad" son; Shaun, the "good" son; and Issy, their sister.
Humpden does something in Phoenix Garden in London, is spotted by a cad who then tells everyone and soon a lot of people are gossiping about what Humpden did under the tree. The crime is never specified. Anna Livia, the wife, tries to prove that Humpden is innocent. Shem is an artists and lives like an anarchist and is shameful to the family. Shaun is a good boy, upstanding citizen: a prototypical chud and redditboy. The two brothers are in conflict with each other. All these character recur fractally in every chapter under different guises, the most obvious being Sham and Shaun transforming into Mute and Jute, Fox and the Grapes, the tailor and the general, the ant and the grasshopper in different chapters and replaying the tension between anarchy and order over and over again.
The book is divided in fourth parts which are arranged according to Vico's schema of human history. If you know it and keep it in mind, some patterns will make sense.
The first part introduces the place, the history of the place, the main question of the plot (what HCE did), and the analyzes the family through different voices that mimic gossip.
The second part tells about the evening and night in Earwicker's pub. The narrative shifts from children ceasing to play outside, going inside and doing their homework and going to sleep, night entertainment in the pub, HCE and Anna going to sleep. The four judges and the ass appear.
The third part is about Shaun, the upstanding citizen who seems to get drunk and is questioned by the four judges about his family. The last chapter of the third part is the oddest one in the book because it introduces a Porter family, which makes one question if the whole book is the dream of the Porter family and if HCE and ALP actually are Porters in the dream world.
The fourth part exonerates HCE of the crime and concludes with the scene of a man and a woman lying under a tree and dreaming of a life together until the woman's father comes and drags her away. The woman pleads the man to remember her and then the man finds himself alone on the shore and the book restarts again. This implies that HCE's original crime might have been either an a relationship before marriage - something that's not acceptable in Christian countries where virginity must be saved until marriage.

>>24577984
I think this might be correct since it gels well with the Joycean motive of the dead living in the memory and influencing the present (the Dead, Bloom's son and Stephen as a surrogate son in Ulysses).
The book isn't that difficult to read if you understand that it works through puns and metaphors and allusions, and that the point is not to get a sentence word for word but to get the overall gist. The first page introduces the method of the book along with the themes.
This method allows Joyce to imply several things and events at the same time, which is an evolution of the layering of meaning present in Ulysses (where an average day of an average person in Dublin is treated as the modern version of the Odyssey). My hunch is that Joyce's obsession with such polysemic narratives stems from his reading of Dante's Divina Commedia, which is traditionally regarded as having four levels of possible meaning.

>>24576376
not listening to what a drug addict who believes he is smarter than others on the basis of his doing drugs has to say

>>24576165 (OP)
The ramblings of a syphillis infected loser

I have. It helps to read it out loud, as slow as that is.

>>24576165 (OP)

The entire book is actually one long Nora farty transcribed into language. This has been confirmed by me.