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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but one of my favorite uses so far for ChatGPT has been to help me finally penetrate Ulysses. It's an almost unassailable work on its' own. Sheer genius, but hard to appreciate beyond the surface level without assistance.

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hey cool idea. I've always wanted to read Finnegans Wake, and am trying some paragraphs now with chatgpt. I don't think it's quite what Joyce intended, nor do I know if it makes any more sense, but it is easier to read :P

For example: Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

becomes: There was no sign of Jhem or Shen brewing a measure of their father's malt using artificial light, and the end of the ridge was not visible in the water's reflection.

theres something like 20+ different languages used in the wake and a lot of times its only half a word from one language mixed with another word so i cant see chatgpt being able to parse out all that

I expect its training data to contain multiple copies of both it, and text explaining it. It probably works better than with a less famous book.

I'm curious. How do you prompt it?

Mostly page by page, with text copied from Gutenberg. Generally I'll give it a paragraph (which in Ulysses can be multiple pages...) and start by saying "rewrite this in plain simple english" for the summary. Then I'll have it start rewriting in different forms, i.e. "rewrite this as a haiku" or "rewrite this as a poem in iambic pentameter with a modern setting using contemporary vernacular". Then once I understand the central themes, I can dig deeper and ask how it relates to the story as a whole, or how it ties back to events from The Odyssey.

I'd say about 70% of it is entirely enjoyable in a fashion akin to other Modernist literature. By the standards of contemporary YA and book-club lit fic, it's challenging, but by the standards of its own day, it is in many places written to be enjoyed. While it is true that there are aspects of it that are deeply overdetermined and a wealth of intentional allusion and linguistic play, that is for the most part frosting not presumed to be enjoyed by most readers—at least not in full. It is definitely true that Joyce assumed a classical education and a familiarity with e.g. the Odyssey (but also, the English canon itself such as it was in that day) that would be sufficient to allow many readers to appreciate his sardonic riffing.

For anyone who hasn't read it, it's worth saying, the first three chapters are considerably more abstruse and intimidating than the next half dozen or more, because they follow the consciousness of an anxious and precocious intellectual young man, preoccupied with Ideas, wandering through some awkward social moments and having overly intellectual reactions to them.

But then you switch to following a middle class businessman with a lot "earthier" of interests, and things clear up a lot.

The language can still be "challenging" in a way modern readers are not used to, but, it's meant to be enjoyed.

Much of it is actually best heard, as a lot of the "play" is in the sound of the language—there is a lot of pun and allusion in the way words sound like other words.

Later in the book the two principle characters meet up and go drinking in the sketchy part of town and things can intentionally surreal as they get inebriated, but, a couple of those later chapters are actually among the most straightforward to read.

All said it is however true that we're now well over 100 years distant from the world presented, so we increasingly need notes on things that were in no way meant to be obscure.

There are some excellent books around that serve as guidebooks, which can illuminate both those details and the allusions—and give you frank advice on which chapters you can skip through.

As to why one would read this, that is just one version of, why get a broad liberal arts education at all? The default answer remains as true or false as it ever was, it's because that is how you become familiar with the assumed fabric of our civilization, and become able to understand and participate in the discourse of today. There is no end of "issues" with the historic canon, but it remains the lingua franca of "serious high culture." If you don't have any familiarity with it does not mean you aren't living a full life; but it does mean that there is a sizable territory of shared public life that is closed to you, which might provide a rich set of tools for understanding issues that appear permanently part of the human condition.

Whatever else is true, the canons we have represent the collective curated coursework we have produced which recapitulates the intellectual underpinnings of contemporary society in most of its aspects, and provide historical perspective on the hows and whys of where we are. It is from this stuff that contemporary politics, science, religion, art, and moral reasoning emerged, for example. We are a lot more savvy now but all the deep serious mistakes and flaws of the classical canon—but it remains even in this, a common territory and a common point of reference.

Anyway, if you want to read just one bit? The "Sirens" chapter read aloud is amaze-balls.

I don't agree that contemporary literature in Joyce's time was as challenging to read as Ulysses. Many of the typical selections presented with Joyce are much easier reads - even stuff like Catch 22. The construction of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake especially make it seem that this style of writing was deliberate. I can say it makes these books unique, as few other authors try and capture the style of the mind of a drunk man wandering down the street and then taking a piss. But taking that and trying to add it into the serious culture of literature makes me skeptical of the curators, who seem to have an undue fondness for drunk pissing.

>Many of the typical selections presented with Joyce are much easier reads - even stuff like Catch 22

Catch 22 is a foundational (practically definitional) postmodern work, 40 years separated from Ulysses. I'm not sure what you mean here.

I was just thinking of contemporaries in time, not genre. Catch 22 stuck in my mind as one of the harder ones to read. Kafka is listed as a modernist, but he's dead simple.

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