ABSTRACT
The problem of what Mr. Joyce has to say in Finnegans Wake may be left to those who have time and energy to waste. The reader who takes up this book for the first time will at once be involved in the problem of how he says it. Mr. Joyce claims that he understands and can explain every syllable of the book. Doubtless, but who cares? Readers are not interested in what the author’s words mean to him, but in what they mean to them. And what Mr. Joyce has written is 628 pages of pedantic nonsense…. This heavy compost is frequently infected with that lecherous suggestiveness of which Mr. Joyce is a master, which was defended in Ulysses as germane to the characters, but which here seems to have no purpose more interesting than the author’s morose delectation….
