ABSTRACT
Commentators on Work in Progress have sometimes spoken as if the principal characteristic of the ‘polyhedron script’ were philosophical or linguistic, tending, as systems of thought or classifications always do, to what is abstract and finite. A certain philosophy, something of the essence, the quidditas, of Vico, Bruno and Scholasticism is, indeed, an element in the latest creation of Joyce:—that the work shall lead from preoccupations of the moment to generalizations is important. That it shall delight and amuse us is of greater importance: and a broad, vigorous humour, touching the homely aspects of life it must be too-the laughter of a curiously familiar Dublin race inhabiting a dream-city of Dublin…. Nor can the more than Rabelaisian ribaldry suggested or expressed on nearly every page of the work with the pagan frankness of a soul that has rediscovered for itself the delights of ‘nature at her naturalest’ do any other than sustain the general humorous effect of puns, spoonerisms, calembours, polyglotal word-compounds, and all the variety of verbal inventions calculated to evoke laughter…. Joyce, limited by the exigencies of the dream world where neither deliberate logic nor memory of the past dream-actions exists must have his recourse to the word, the multi-colored, age-wise, perennially youthful interpreter of the spirit, the strangest of creatures, the word, ‘as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons.’
