ABSTRACT
The constant monitoring of the internal relations of the text, crucial to our ability to make the text cohere, also produces formal pleasures analogous to those provided by a musical texture of digressions and returns in harmony, melody, rhythm, and timbre. The functioning of digression as a structural principle clearly depends on its double nature-at once necessary and dispensable, part of the novel and excluded from it, inside and outside at the same time. In order to minimize the risk of putting the most notoriously unreadable book ever published into a paperback edition, in 1975 Faber and Faber attempted to woo hesitant purchasers of Finnegans Wake with a reassuring statement on the back cover. Deconstructing Digression with "the real world" or "humane values" or "common sense" is strengthened by the gesture with which it excludes Finnegans Wake for what it calls its "artificiality," its "shallowness," its "inaccessibility.".
