It has no specific subject indeed, as far as I can make out, it is not about anything at all. In between these two sentences lie 628 pages of a book that is not novel, poem, music, drama, symphony, declamation, parody, burlesque, fantasy, epic, or vaudeville sketch, but apparently something of all of them. Academic precisionists may be reminded that life itself, from which writers draw their materials, often begins and ends on the same note of uncertainty. “Finnegans Wake” opens in the middle of a sentence (“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”) and closes similarly (“A way a lone a last a loved a long the”). And, anyway, “Finnegans Wake” is so extraordinary that it’s worth talking about even if, like myself, you understand precious little of it. I cannot believe, though some do, that he would spend seventeen years in the elaboration of a gigantic hoax.
I have enough sense to know that the man who wrote “Ulysses” is a great artist. But one doubts that “Finnegans Wake” will be grasped-at least in our time-except by a few conscientious philologists and a small lunatic fringe of autohypnotic Joyceans who seem able to hurl themselves into a trance of intuitive comprehension. Joyce’s achievement, assuming the world understood it. Photograph by Man Ray / Library of Congress / Gettyįor the past seventeen years the author of “Ulysses” has been at work on a new book, released this week as “Finnegans Wake.” The world would doubtless be amazed at Mr.
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