ABSTRACT
Joyce has been writing Finnegans Wake for seventeen years…. A whole school of imitators has clustered around its linguistic and philosophical example, and its influence has been so strong that critics have been led to write of it in, as it were, its own terms. Something unheard of and extraordinary was happening to language, history, time, space, and causality in Joyce’s new novel, and the jawdropping and hat-waving of the front-line appreciators were remarkable in themselves. Because this subjective, or rolling-alongin-great-delight-with-a-great-work-of-art, school of criticism has had its innings with Joyce’s book, the plain reviewer might do well to approach the work at first with a certain amount of leaden-footed objectivity, remaining outside the structure and examining it from as many sides as possible.
