I’ve noticed significantly increased traffic to this blog in the last few days, most of which has been directed at my post James Joyce Created Star Wars.
Poking around the internet to find reasons for this, I’ve discovered that a British and Irish comedian named Jimmy Carr recently did an interview in which he gives his “hot take” on Star Wars, which is basically a version of the same argument I make there: that Star Wars descends from Finnegans Wake by way of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The thing that strikes me about the clip of the interview I saw, though, is that Carr says, “The greatest book in literature is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.” And when asked by the host why, he responds, “It’s incredibly difficult to read.”
I’m not sure if the interview was edited oddly there, or if he was building up to a better answer that I didn’t see, but as it stands, it sounds like he’s saying the thing that makes Finnegans Wake great is how difficult it is.
Whether he meant that or not, it’s an opinion that one sometimes encounters — the juvenile idea that the Wake‘s complexity or obscurity or difficulty is what makes it great.
Of course, this isn’t true at all.
Read on for some thoughts on what makes the Wake great, and for some thoughts on what the Wake has to say about this.
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