continuing on mainly in soliloquy, first person, Jaun / Juan? lecturing of the young ladies
Some reflections on Finnegans Wake in general:
I note that my reading acuity and analytic ability has improved by the reading of Finnegans Wake. It requires such focus and be-here-now-ness that I think it has generally improved my ability to interpret and consume text.
When I now read other works, such as poetry and other novels, essays and articles, my comprehension is much improved by the improved focus that I have developed. I can easily concentrate, uninterruptedly through pages of a text without diversion. I have improved my acuity by reading the Wake.
FW requires you to attend to every word and not to assimilate general meaning from context. Since nearly each word in the text is altered artistically in some way, one has to consider the words one-by-one and not as simply part of a sentence or clause. In order to do justice to Joyce's work requires you to relearn how to read. No more of that speed reading scanning. Read-interpret, read-interpret, .... assimilate. Its very different from immediate apprehension.
FW also requests of you a higher form of interpretation than most texts. One needs to consider the current word on many levels - literal, narrative, historical, novel-context, dream vs. waking, mythical context, theoretical context (e.g. Vico, etc). To read it, you have to adjust your mental focus across all of time and literature. Wow.
So, other texts, when consumed simultaneously, seem quite 'transparent' to use an au courant term.
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