ABSTRACT
Mr. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake faces the reviewer with peculiar difficulties. In the first place he cannot read it, only battle through a page or so at a time without pleasure or profit. This would not, in itself, matter so much; but he does not know what the book is about. The dust-cover, which might be expected to help, says nothing except that Finnegans Wake has taken sixteen years to write, that it has been ‘more talked about and written about during the period of its composition than any previous work of English literature,’ and that it would inevitably be ‘the most important event of any season in which it appeared.’ . . . Thus defeated by book and blurb, it is natural to cast a surreptitous eye at what other reviewers have had to say. . . . The usual line is that Mr. Joyce is a great writer, that for reasons best known to himself he has evolved a curious way of writing which bears little resemblance to the English language as commonly used, that so painstaking an effort is not to be dismissed out of hand, and that in any case gramophone records of passages from Finnegans Wake recited by Mr. Joyce have been found by competent persons to be delectable. . . .
