See What Happens When You Run Finnegans Wake Through a Spell Checker

Read­ing James Joyce’s Ulysses is no walk in the park. Why else would so many peo­ple false­ly claim to have read it. (See our post from last week, 20 Books Peo­ple Pre­tend to Read.) But Finnegans Wake is a whole ‘nother deal. Joyce’s final work is con­sid­ered one of the most dif­fi­cult works of fic­tion ever writ­ten, and con­trary to Ulysses, the nov­el “has some claim to be the least read major work of West­ern lit­er­a­ture,” accord­ing to Joyce schol­ar Lee Spink. Put sim­ply, peo­ple don’t even both­er read­ing … or pre­tend­ing to read … Finnegans Wake (unless, of course, they live in Chi­na, where the nov­el reached the #2 posi­tion on a Shang­hai best­seller list ear­li­er this year.)

But I digress: why don’t read­ers even give Finnegans Wake a shot? The illus­tra­tion above per­haps says it all. The web site stammpunct.com has cre­at­ed a visu­al show­ing what hap­pens when you run a page of the nov­el through a spell check­er. It yields a lot of red, and then some more red. A fram­able print of this visu­al can be pur­chased at stamm­punct for $35.

Copies of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake can be down­loaded from our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks. And you can hear James Joyce read­ing ‘Anna Livia Plura­belle’ from Finnegans Wake here. It was record­ed in 1929.

via The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear James Joyce Read From his Epic Ulysses, 1924

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates 1935 Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Reads Joyce’s Ulysses at the Play­ground (1955)