It has been a long time since I last tried to read Finnegans Wake. I think I managed about 3 pages last time. I got a bit further with the Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake, but even that left me scratching my head, rolling my eyes and yawning.
Nowadays, I don’t even care for the idea/ideal of Finnegans Wake. I no longer feel the desire to spend countless hours dissecting a purposefully obscure novel. As Nabokov said: it is a 600 page crossword puzzle and you can’t even win a dictionary for completing it.
Nevertheless, in homeopathic doses, Finnegans Wake can be interesting, especially when you start unpacking all the neologisms. My favourite (everyon’e favourite) is the word funferal, which contains “fun for all”, fun, feral, and is overshadowed by its closeness to funeral. I was reminded of this when I saw that the Armitage Shanks urinals in the toilets where I work are controlled by an infra-red system called the Cistermiser. Joyce would have loved this word and might have extracted the following: cyst, systemiser, cistern, sister, sodomiser etc. I’m not sure if the company who created the Cistermiser anticipated all of these associations, but I’m sure they’ll be overjoyced to have them brought to light.
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