llotes on "Finnegans Wake"
William
Troy
NOTHING COULD
BE
less profitable
than
any attempt to offer
a definitive analysis or evaluation of the new Joyce work* at the
moment. It is true that sections of it have been available for four–
teen years; we have had time to become accustomed to its difficult
language and technique; and there have been a number of tentative
exercises in exegesis and interpretation. (The best of these are still
those to be found in the symposium issued by Shakespeare and
Company in Paris ten years ago and recently republished in this
country.**) But the work in its entirety has been off the presses
only a few weeks; it is over six hundred pages long; and it is writ–
ten in an idiom that can very easily create that state of panic which
the mind experiences when, to recall a phrase of Proust's, it feels
itself passing beyond its own borders. This last statement is not
intended to be derogatory. It means simply that the impact of the
book is such as to cause an extraordinary strain on the normal
equilibrium of our faculties of response. It is not altogether a joke
when Joyce refers to his
"funferal''
as designed for "that ideal
reader suffering from an ideal insomnia". And since few of us can
answer to the requirement we must follow the admonition to
patience offered elsewhere in the text. What we must try to avoid
are the facile and premature judgments that attended the publica–
tion of
Ulysses,
realizing that in the seventeen years that have
elapsed since that event no single adequate interpretation of the
central symbolism of the book has been written. Interpretation
must precede evaluation; and, for several reasons that will become
evident, the problems of interpretation in
Finnegans Wake
are
beyond those presented by any modem work.
If
we have enough
confidence in the task on the basis of Joyce's other performances
and of those sections of the present work that we have already
•FinAt:tt:ns
Fake, by James Joyce. Vikinc Prett. IS.
"..4•
EutmintJtion of
/ame1 Joyce. By
te'Yenl
writert.
New Directiont, Norfolk, Connecticut.
12.
New
Direction• baa alao brouaht out a tnntlation of the 6nt
uttream-of-conecioutneaa"
novel, Edouard
Dujardin'a Lea
U.u.rie" Sorat Cou.JH•,
UDder tho title
f'e'll
10
the 1Yood1 No More.
97
