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Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book - Page 1

Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book

Posted by: Guy
Date: 2018-06-09 01:12:59
My interest in video game glitches, particularly Pokémon Red and Blue's huge mass of exploitable (intentionally or not) code wrapped in a package filled with childhood memories, always came down to an enjoyment in watching the game go outside its bounds, yet remaining within a different set of bounds, such that the result was still something I could perceive visually and aurally, even if it didn't "make sense". Somehow I didn't make the connection right away, but it's the same concept that's fueled an obsession of mine over the past year, the book Finnegans Wake.

Open it up, and you'll quickly see what I mean. Right off the bat, it bombards you with a cascade of English–or, are they really English? Close enough, I guess–words and phrases, all of which seem completely disjointed when you look at how they're outputted onto the screen page, yet all stem from some central source and can be explained. In addition to every individual part coming from a particular block of code train of thought, all 628 pages encompass a single program cohesive whole. While it may seem needlessly riddled with quirks at first glance, every word is a direct result of the 6 17 years of tireless work put into creating it. (Others have done a better job of showing this than I ever will. I'm more keen on just admiring it.)

The similarity of reading it to watching memory locations be overwritten as the game continues to run is too great for me to not post about here. Take, for instance, this segment. It appears very early on and doesn't make any more immediate sense than what surrounds it, and yet tends to be the first one to grab many readers' attention simply due to how it looks. (Remind anyone of the ZZAZZ glitch? TMTRAINER effect? JACRED?)

[size=14pt]Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain! Comeday morm and, O, you're vine! Sendday's eve and, ah, you're vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again![/size]

Seems pretty nonsensical, right? But if it's being exclaimed with such passion, it's got to mean something! As it turns out, just as ZZAZZ comes down to the number 0x99 and a buffer overflow, this segment has a "behind the scenes" explanation too. Arguably it's most effectively summed up here as "a statement of the resurrection theme involving Finn MacCool and his comic shadow, Tim Finnegan". What do the mythical hero and the subject of a comedic folk song have in common? Well, the myths about "Mister Finn" say he'll eventually rise again. Finn will rise and, by doing so, he will be Finn…again! What's that? He'll be Finnegan? What a coincidence: Tim Finnegan was also thought to be dead, but arose from his coffin when his friends poured whisky on top of it. Too out there? The Wake begs to differ. How peculiar, too, that the passage starts with five Omegas and ends with five Alphas.

What then of the book's central character, RED HCE? Oh, right, that abbreviation stands for…uhh…Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. You see, Humphrey is a reference to Humpty Dumpty, and an earwig (or perce-oreille in French, lending him the alias "Persse O'Reilly") is a type of insect, and this character committed–oh, actually, it stands for Howth Castle and Environs, meaning Dublin. A person must be quite large to be an entire city, which finally leads me to my point, that the acronym stands for Here Comes Everybody. Being Dublin itself, he Haveth Childers Everywhere, which gives us, at last, what the trigram HCE is short for, that being Highly Continental Evenements–no, wait, it was that other one I said. Yep, that one. Oh, and all the others too, but this one in particular. Which one am I referring to? Oh, obviously, it's Huge Chain Envelope. What's that, you're saying I didn't mention that one? Nonsense, I can see right up there that I remembered to include His Eagle and Child!

You get the idea. Bladyughfoulmoecklenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpapornanennykocksapastippatappatupperstrippuckputtanach, am I right?

Re: Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book

Posted by: Parzival
Date: 2018-10-12 20:55:23
This is art.

Re: Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book

Posted by: Sherkel
Date: 2018-10-14 14:07:31

This is art.
Yes! :D Totally agreed.

Re: Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book

Posted by: ISSOtm
Date: 2018-10-14 14:16:00
I simply see that as people reading hard in something just random. Of course you can always find some sense in anything if you look hard enough. (I think there's a math theory about that.)
I completely dismiss this book, tbh. It's much less interesting than any other book because it doesn't tell a story – you have to look hard to find meaning that you artificially constructed. There's no need for a book to do that.

Re: Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book

Posted by: Sherkel
Date: 2018-10-14 15:06:02
If it hadn't come from the author of Ulysses, I'd probably agree. The Wake was dismissed entirely for a good while, more than the previous book was, but surely enough a scholarship community formed around it and was able to come to quite a few agreements on the characters and plot. In my case, the existence of all those research publications, as well as things in the text like the sentence I highlighted and the HCE and ALP trigrams, is more than enough to convince me it's not random. This site explicitly opposes the idea, urging contributors to employ a more proper and "conservative" way to analyze the text. To each their own, though I will say being a native English speaker helps, which isn't exactly something anyone can change.

The reason I titled the thread as I did is that while it has the appearance of surface randomness to everyone, there's a "program" it's all generated by, a program whose original code died with Joyce's mind but has been largely reconstructed by the community researching its output.

Re: Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book

Posted by: ISSOtm
Date: 2018-10-15 02:29:24
On one hand, I'm not convinced at all by all of this, and I was even gonna write a large post explaining why; but it doesn't matter in the end, because it's up to each. Ff you like digging into that particular book, well, whatever floats your boat!

Re: Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book

Posted by: Roberta
Date: 2019-05-20 00:10:55
I wished for years an Italian translation for Finnegans Wake, but eventually the translator gave up *sad chuckle*. Too manu 'technical' difficulties due to the particularity of Joyce's jargon. I'll never be able to experience this delicious madness in my native language. :(

Re: Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book

Posted by: Sherkel
Date: 2019-05-20 06:22:09
Well, it's not exactly like I can either…although that's not completely true. It's much easier to trace through the distortions of the words in Fillagain's Chrissormiss Wake as an English L1, thoughperthrough that F-septation of ssed dessertesseractetrations it takes a simple partial temporal rip to the humptyhillhead to vide that English was the "base language" of sorts. I might not be as quick to notice a "7EME ETAGE" in the midst of scrambled tiles as a "CANCEL", for instance.

Incidentally, playing fools2019 and seeing various glitches mentioned and referenced in a normal setting gave me the idea of a "Finnegans Gaiden", dropping names from the Third Census here and there, turning some into major characters who would speak word-for-word lines associated with them, with dialogues of varying levels of intelligibility…travelling through the lands on the surface of HCE's body, finding "Rusted Oranges" and other items along the side of the River Liffey…now that I think about it, I'm just describing Yume Nikki. Just something that crossed my mind while playing those hacks.

Re: Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book

Posted by: Parzival
Date: 2019-05-20 14:27:43
It's much easier to trace through the distortions of the words in Fillagain's Chrissormiss Wake as an English L1, thoughperthrough that F-septation of ssed dessertesseractetrations it takes a simple partial temporal rip to the humptyhillhead to vide that English was the "base language" of sorts
Uh… Sherk, you good?

Re: Finnegans Wake: Super Glitch, The Book

Posted by: Sherkel
Date: 2019-05-20 16:33:35
A relative lack of wake-ease today probably helped my off-the-cuff Wakese there, but I'll be fine.