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PARTISAN REVIEW
any privilege in advance. Many sections of the book seem to me so
evidently about fathers, mothers, sisters, older-brother-and–
younger-brother that I would be reluctant to see these families
dislodged or "disselved." In other parts of the book I'm willing to play
the game of fairly-free association, with Bishop to brother me . The
trouble about turning
Finnegans Wake
into a riddle - which is another
of Bishop's analogies- is that a reader indifferent to riddles may
freely elect not to play.
If a reader agrees to play
Finnegans Wake
according to Bishop's
easy law of association, he is promised a particular boon:
In its richly particularized "nat language,"
Finnegans Wake
shows
that the human experience of "one percepted nought" can be ar–
ticulated with as much richness and zest, pathos and humor, as
the plenitude of wakeful life. In ways to be made clear in pass–
ing, it finds this "nought" everywhere and always underlying and
circumscribing the living of life in the Daily World. "We see
nothingness ," in a way distinct to Joyce, "making the world
iridescent, casting a shimmer over things ."
That last quotation is from Sartre's
Being and Nothingness,
and it
seems an indelicacy. Bishop concedes, in a footnote, that "there are
of course differences, though finally not irreconcilable ones, between
Sartrean nothingness and the
Wake's
"Real Absence." I would hope
they are irreconcilable: the one glow I don't want to find in
Finnegans
Wake
is Sartrean chic . I hope Bishop has something less glamorous
in mind. William Troy's review of
Finnegans Wake
referred to the
state of panic which the mind experiences when "it feels itself passing
beyond its own borders." I can imagine a reading of
Finnegans Wake
in which that panic, the vertigo of shifting boundaries and lost bear–
ings, would be sensed along with the pleasure of relaxing into in–
discriminateness. Such a reading would keep the two worlds in some
degree of relatedness, variable and mercurial indeed. But I don't
think Bishop's book would let me persist in it: he wants to cut the
night entirely adrift.
DENIS DONOGHUE
