ABSTRACT
. . . Finnegans Wake takes a step forward. Just as Ulysses is a day in a man's life, the new book is a night. The rational control of the waking state, the circumstances of everyday life, are suspended during sleep; the subconscious has no values except those in the psyche itself, psyche in the psychoanalytical sense, that is, the Freudian censor. In such freedom, the flowing of the consciousness can expand and deepen until it touches the earliest roots of the mental life which are common to all humanity. Mr. Bloom was still a man; in Finnegans Wake there is to be sure a man (a vulgar man), and it seems to me, the ironic side of the book is extended to this very insistence upon individuality in such an unassuming form; but with him man in a universal sense is always present, more according to an historical universality than a philosophical universality. This seems to be confirmed by a fact which presents itself at first glance as an unlikelihood: if it could be understood, at best up to a certain point, that Mr. Bloom's Brain was so fertile in subtle associations and in scholarly memories, it would be far less easy to admit, without that universality of which we were speaking, such an historical memory, albeit unconscious, and such a faculty for transference, as those of which Finnegan gives proof, Finnegan who is no more than an inn-keeper.
