Who did Joyce write Finnegans Wake for? Who was his intended audience? Who did he expect to enjoy it?

Question

Did he write it for himself? If so, is he a bad artist, if he created things that nobody could possibly understand?

Answer 1

I have not read "Finnegans Wake" but I will answer the more general question you ask with reference to "Dubliners," "Portrait of the Artist," and "Ulysses", all of which I have read more than once. His progression is from something like recognizable narrative fiction to abstraction and stream-of-consciousness, where thoughts, ideas, phrases flow into one another, completely baffling those who look for recognizable landmarks.
"Dubliners" can be read by anyone with an interest in carefully structured, ironic short stories, in which Joyce assembles a collection of characters who embody his rather caustic or realistic view of Dublin. The interest lies much less in the story-line than in the slowly unfolding revelation of a character or a situation.
In the "Portrait" Joyce tells the story of his own early emergence as an artist, freeing himself from old notions of nationalism and what he saw as the constraints of the Catholic faith he was brought up in. It is a coming-of-age novel told with boldness, in the course of which Joyce shatters taboos on what may be written about. More difficult than "Dubliners," it still has a line of development which may be followed.
Now for "Ulysses," whch I and many others consider his masterpiece. It takes place on a single day, as Aristotle had said tragedy should, uses the episodes of Homer's "Odyssey" as its structural backbone, includes a young man's search for a father-figure (Stephen Dedalus in relation to Leoplold Bloom), includes all the significant moments and functions of life (defecation, masturbation, sex, including extra-marital sex, childbirth), and closes with a joyously erotic affirmation of life (yes,yes,yes).
Now for your questions. Some would say that Joyce began with comprehensibility and then progressively strayed into obscurity, leaving behind all but the most fanatically dedicated readers, and in doing so overthrew fiction and art. This is a more general charge levelled at modernism (Picasso in art, Messien in music, T.S.Eliot in poetry). Others would argue that Joyce could have said what what he wished to say only in the way he did, for form and content are inseparable. In addition, modern psychology has taught us that our minds move quickly from point to point without following the dictates of logic, and Joyce wished to duplicate this. The answer to your questions depends on which side of this divide you come down on. And one's attitude to modernism, which overthrew rhyme and meter in poetry (Frost said that was like playing tennis without a net), comes into play as well. Some hail modernism as a bold, exciting innovation, and others deplore it as an unwelcome development which we would have been better without.
Finally, Joyce will never have many voluntary readers. Your question is whether he should have any at all. His wife, Nora, who was his Muse, did not read him. She said she understood without reading.
Philip Larkin, the English poet who disliked modernism, thought that Joyce was "a textbook case of the declension of talent into absurdity".

Answer 2

Joyce's genius was stylistic, and he changed the way novels are written, if not read. His love affair was with language - and languages - with puns, allusions, and inside jokes. He also grew increasingly obscure - if you read the stories from The Dead, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and portions of Ulysses, his work was accessible, but with Finnegan's Wake he entered the world of the subconscience, a dreamworld, his own, as he slowly lost his vision and his health. There is even strong evidence that Joyce regretted the direction of his work near the end, realizing that his learned obscurity would serve only to alienate and lose readers.

Samuel Beckett was his secretary at this time - another Irishman with more than a touch of dark wit and obscurity, although he turned to theatre instead. Joyce was a true original, who broke the mould. And the greatest problem, for so many serious writers of fiction who followed him, in awe, was a desire to emulate him, and as a result made "literary fiction" synonymous with obscurity. He was a giant, afraid of thunder. Think of him as a learned hermit at the top of the mountain, with no real role in the world, only in the dark recesses of his mind and imagination.

Answer 3

Don't say nobody...

I can understand it perfectly well. Those who lack the patience and insight are usually the first to put it down. You are not alone in those who lack insight and imagination unfortunately.

When you don't understand something, you should fight harder to have it make sense, not just brand it with a personalized moniker so as to have it become truth to everyone who hasn't yet looked for themselves, to decide for themselves. In other words, you are not giving it a chance and therefore by making such a generalization, you are ruining it for anyone else who might otherwise see the beauty and the value of it.

Young readers think that EVERYTHING should revolve around their understanding and their intellect and that is shortsighted and a base form of literary ignorance that cuts short the process of understanding anything really.

Like I have already told you... Get the companion book written by Joseph Campbell. It will give you the key you need to unlocking it and appreciating it for what it is... Not what you believe it should be so you can understand it.

Only cowards call Joyce a "stream of conscience writer." That is yet another way to discredit his own understanding of what he wrote, because the reader couldn't grasp it. The READER couldn't accept that it CAN make sense, just because he can't make sense of it. The only portion of Joyces work I found to be anything close to stream of conscience is Molly Bloom. And what better way is there for a man to see a woman's thought process? See, maybe he didn't understand it/her, but he tried... Otherwise she would't have been such a vital character. What would Leopold have been without Molly? How does a man love a whore and hate a whore in the same breath and make sense of a woman who doesn't make any?

Finnegan's Wake is hard... But it is like a dreamscape not meant to form any semblance of documented reality. Joyce re wrote that! That is what great men do! And I agree with David W below... Joyce was old and very Ill by the time Finnegan was written. Practically emaciated. But it took over 15 years to write so... It was personal, you are right there... Some of the characters like; the cloud, and the twins were his children his sons and daughter...

Joyce believed that the world should never bow down to the understanding of man, but that man should always aspire toward lifting up his intelligence to understand everything as it is as opposed to how it should be... he believed in changing things, not giving up on them all together like Parnell did.

Which I do believe was the point in writing it that way... Joyce is a genius who believed in making people think outside their own little perceptions of the way the world works as individual little Eco systems with not one... knowing anything about any of the others via experience. Which is supposed to be delibrate and intentional. Not easy and or accidental.

Joyce, By writing specifically about Ireland and Irish experience also managed to have it relevent to someone else, in a little town in Ohio. Trapped by his own love, sense of adventure, respect and disreguard for tradition and cultural habit. It is everyman's story. If you take out the Irish specifics, you have the story of every boy, trying to understand his own state and condition against the personal landscape of his specific limitations.

Read beyond the irish...

It's called literary Immersion. Be the character when you read rather than just reading words on a page. It helps.

"All of the stories in Dubliners move from repression to epiphany, from a condition of moral inarticulacy to a moment of revelation even if the revelation is nothing more than an exposure of the initial condition."

Joseph Campbell

I suppose you hate Sartre too?

Answer 4

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Answer 5

i do not know b/c i do not even know who you ar etalking about