ABSTRACT
Few, if any, books of our time have been so much discussed before publication as Mr. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake—the book which was described during its sixteen years of gestation as Work in Progress. Here we were to have something even more Joycean than the Joyce of Ulysses—the quintessence, the ne plus ultra of that style and that method which have had so considerable an influence upon contemporary literature. Mr. Joyce is perhaps easily first among the literary innovators of to-day who have deliberately turned their backs on tradition in the conviction that life as it is honestly seen by perceptive minds to-day demands for its expression a new technique—in his case even a new vocabulary and a new grammar. . . . Finnegans Wake shows him as almost savagely satisfied with the thrilling spectacle of life as he sees it in all its sordidness, its restless emotionalism, its inconsequence, its somnambulant absurdity. He does not desire to reform it, but to gratify his creative spirit in the expression of his impressions of it. His constructive purpose is to find a way satisfactory to himself of expressing the movement of life as he sees it, changing its texture and hue from moment to moment, a flux of sensations whose reality cannot be appreciated without a sense of the flux. To achieve his end he thinks it necessary to rid himself of traditional literary methods which, in his opinion, lend themselves to the very falsities of apprehension abjured by him. . . .
