sweet, I'm just gonna give a long answer b/c I feel that at least a couple ppl are interested in this
I admire Finnegans Wake as a concept, but I haven't read the whole book -- in college I tried to really sit down and study the book like I did with Ulysses, in terms of unpacking all the meanings that Joyce stuffed into his sentences, but I didn't get very far
I spent several weeks reading the first twenty pages, and then I spent a month reading the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter, and once I got fully immersed I loved it in many ways, but honestly it was just too much work for me and I eventually got exhausted with it and moved on to other things
I kind of agree with what Pound said: "Nothing so far as I can make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all that circumambient peripherization." -- the books takes an insane amount of work
I've read more books about Finnegans Wake, than Finnegans Wake itself -- I almost prefer Joseph Cambell's and Anthony Burgess' commentaries about FW to the actual book
on the other hand I feel like maybe Pound is wrong -- maybe FW really is nothing short of a divine vision, and all the work it takes to read and comprehend it is more than worth it
ideas that I respond to in FW:
the world, and all of history, is a dream that bleeds and mixes together in the mind of...??? -- one person? yourself? a collective unconscious? all of humanity? God? Joyce? who is dreaming the world?
language as a sort of bizarre DNA where all the thoughts and feelings and histories and myths of humanity are encoded -- I love how Joyce used puns in the book (cobbled together from many different languages) to create new words (like 'funferal' ... funeral + fun for all)
that history, and maybe the nature of reality, is cyclical...Giambattista Vico was a huge influence on FW, and all throughout the book Vico's theory of history is there in the background...the idea that history progresses from an age of theocracy, to aristocracy, to democracy, to a post-modern age of chaos in which everything from the past gets recycled in shorter and shorter bursts until the world explodes in some sort of great disaster, after which humanity goes back to the beginning, cowering in their caves fearing the tyrannical rule of God(s) -- that is genius, I love that idea
it feels like these days the amount of time for something to be considered 'retro' is getting increasingly shorter...maybe humanity is getting too big for its britches, and the time is right for another Black Plague or nuclear war which will remind everyone of what insignificant ants we are in the grand scheme, that's a scary idea
*sparks a blunt*
so that's my very long answer to that very short question
if you're an FW fan, I recommend checking out this video of Terence McKenna talking about the book...I listened to this like a month ago and it made me want to sit down with the book again
thanks