ABSTRACT
Finnegans Wake will be read by people who have an avid interest in what goes on in the mind and the emotions; it will be read by people interested in the renewal of language, in the sounds of language, and in the fantastic, unexpected word and idea associations that take place in the mind; it will be read by people interested in such things as the racial mind and the racial experience. But it will be read especially by those who have followed the way literature has been going for the past seventy years, for it represents the perfectly logical development of that way, and its influence will stretch far beyond the narrow circle of those who read the book. But I do not believe that that narrow circle will embrace more than a couple of thousand or that a single one of them will comprehend it totallyexcept, perhaps, some lonely and persistent reader on the banks of the Liffey who can retire indefinitely to an attic with a bottle of whiskey under one arm and a musical instrument of some kind under the other, to read of and ponder on an Earwicker who is himself and who contains all the past and future that is in himself.
