I mean yeah you are riffing on the popular joke about Finnegans Wake.

shrugs

I can’t refute that framing, that is kind of the point right? Whatever I say you can just say “nah it is just a book of nonsense meant to distract academics” and if that is the prevailing rheified meme about the thing as it is with Finnegans Wake than people will just terminate the thought there.

Finnegans Wake = unreadable

I am not going to defend Finnegans Wake as an easy read, I am not even that interested in defending it as any kind of perfect work of art, but it is definitely the most interesting work of art I have ever encountered in ANY medium, by far, and it isn’t even close.

It would be one thing if Finnegans Wake was a little experimental spurt of chaotic, anarchistic language like Lewis Caroll’s Jabberwocky, then its chaos could be written off as an interesting diversion, a curious anomaly that ultimately leads nowhere but itself… but the problem for the rest of art is that Finnegans Wake is hundreds of pages. It is a thorough demonstration that we are still drowning in a conservatism of imagination that threatens to uttely blind us to the actual nature of the human condition and there are very few artists I have encountered that have actually glimpsed that same radical expanse beyond that Joyce did.

No matter though, if you don’t like Finnegans Wake as a work of art that is fine, you are in good company!

(I don’t say that sarcastically, genuinely I mean it, if you read Finnegans Wake and go “Wtf?” that is an entirely rational response lol)

…However, you should at least appreciate the importance of Finnegans Wake in the fight for freedom of expression in the english/western world during the 20th Century. I wish Finnegans Wake and Ulysses were more widely appreciated for at least that, for fighting like hell for the freedom to express yourself and talk about the human things we normally shy away from (you’ve heard about Joyce’s letters to Nora, his novels are no less scandalous) even if people still refuse to give either work a fair chance because they don’t fit comfortably into pre-existing categories.

There is a history here, a living one existentially relevant to the very moment in history we find ourselves in now, careful how you trample over it…