ABSTRACT
Nothing could be less profitable than any attempt to offer a definite analysis or evaluation of the Joyce work at the moment. It is true that sections of it have been available for fourteen 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 re-published in this country.1) 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 written 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 publication 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 modern 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 learned to appreciate, we will be content to proceed for some time by what Yeats somewhere calls ‘little sedentary stitches’.
