A PRIVATE DOCUMENT
Finnegans Wake. By James Joyce. (Faber and Faber. 25s.) REALLY all a reviewer without a month's leisure can do is to describe externals : Finnegans Wake is 628 pages long, it is elegantly printed and handsomely bound in rust red and gold, it is advertised as having taken sixteen years to write. Apart from these details there is little one can say, for a first read- ing of it conveys about as much idea of any meaning it may have as would a book written in Italian to a reader equipped only with fragmentary recollections of his schooldays' Latin. It may be doubted whether it is worth mastering a new language, as Mr. Joyce requires his readers to do, in order to read one book.
In Finnegans Wake a technical method which enjoyed its infancy in Ulysses has reached a monstrous maturity. The sequences of logical thought have disappeared. Words are distorted, compounded, invented, and the resultant combina- tions of letters which take the place of the expressions known to the dictionary are piled together without any obvious aim at order. Description, reflection, invocation are inextricably mixed, time and place and identity are annihilated. One may approach the product of this method in either of two ways. One may treat it as a jigsaw puzzle, and try to sift the little fragments of meaning and suggestion from the chaotic mass, analysing and piecing them together until each page yields up some appearance of sense. Alternatively, one may reject the theory that logical meaning is there to be extracted, exchange the eyes for the ears as the medium of approach, and recite select passages to oneself in the hope that some sequence of consonants and vowels may find an echo in the imagination. The former is the martyr's way, requiring either an unlimited devotion and trust or the expectation—on the face of it difficult to entertain—that through travail a heavenly kingdom of enlightenment may be reached. To adopt the second course is to acquiesce in the proper functions of literature being resigned, and language degraded to the level of brute sounds. That anyone would be able, by either method, to comprehend the whole of what was in the author's mind defies belief. One may even wonder whether Mr. Joyce himself, re-reading now the passages which he wrote at the beginning of those much advertised sixteen years of labour, could give a plausible explanation of their meaning.
There is a temptation to dismiss Finnegans Wake as the work of an ingenious hoaxer with a Rabelaisian tongue in his cheek. But it is too sombre for a hoax. Its air of tortured earnestness, its deathly struggle against the circumstances of language, and the immense pains the author has taken to work in sexual allusions, suggest rather a mind trying to free itself from obsessions by a prolonged analysis. Since analysis cannot be medically effective without communication, it was presum- ably necessary to conduct the process on paper. But it was surely carrying self-devotion to unnecessary lengths to expose
that paper to the public gaze. DEREK VERSCHOYLE.
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