#and i've read the bible more deeply than i ever did as a beliver

[taperwolf]

The ogre cartoon reminds me that I did actually read Finnegans Wake, in high school — but in the way that my religious upbringing set me up for.

To back up briefly, I was raised Mormon, and like a lot of other denominations, Mormonism goes hard for "reading the scriptures". (Unlike most, it's got about double the "scriptures", so in addition to reading the Bible, you're also supposed to read the Book of Mormon [the one with golden plates, Jews becoming Native Americans, and wooden submarines], the Doctrine and Covenants [contemporary "revelations", mostly about who should give Joseph Smith money] and the Pearl of Great Price [mostly pastiches/rewrites from the Bible, but also the weird Kolob stuff].) The trouble is, like with a lot of more conservative denominations, the way you're meant to read scripture. It's a very literalist hermeneutic — you're meant to consider everything as sober history, if not eyewitness accounts, and everything reported happened exactly as it's told.

This really cuts you off at the knees when looking at it from a modern perspective. I'm not even talking about miracles — just absurdities. Take one story about Samson: Judges 15:14-16 has him kill 1000 armed men with a donkey's jawbone. How?! Did they line up? Why wouldn't he kill, say, a couple of them and then take a discarded sword? But it's all literally true, so you can't ask those questions. You learn early that you're not getting answers. So you ignore things like when the story about one of the patriarchs pretending his wife is his sister and getting a kingdom cursed for it happens three times, or that the two Nativity stories don't match up at all (the only thing connecting the story in Matthew to the story in Luke is that they take place in Bethlehem, and the holy family itself; even the genealogies don't match).

(Mormons take the Bible as literally true "as far as it is translated correctly", and then turn around and stick with the known-bad translation that is 1611's King James Version. I can only assume that the reason for this is to make Joseph Smith's bad pastiche of Jacobian English in his other works not stand out; God just talks like that.)

So you learn that the way to read works that don't make a lot of sense on the surface is to just keep going. Let your eyes take in all the words, and if you've got nothing at the end of the page, well, sometimes books are like that.

So that's how I read Finnegans Wake. And when I got to the end and had no idea of what I'd read, and still had to write a paper on it for AP English, I ended up recycling a bunch of stuff Joseph Campbell had written about it in Creative Mythology. I did cite it, at least, and I think my teacher was just glad I wasn't regurgitating the Cliff's Notes.