The Reactionaries SIR,—What Mr Burgess says about 'the penultimate episode
of Finnegans Wake' is very interesting, and one day if I am spared I will try to decide what the episode means. Joyce might (just) be saying that the world needed God, but not that it needed the Roman Catholic Church. Surely, the story that he was secretly in favour of that was exploded by the Ellmann biography. However, it is a side-issue here.
The main point of my little preface to John Harrison's Reactionaries was to say that one of their main tenets was not standard Christian doctrine, as they supposed. It is the idea, most explicitly sup- ported by T. E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis, that the human should be kept rigidly separate from the divine, whereas the Athanasian Creed, a work not usually thought to be worm-eaten with liberal- ism, recommends 'the taking of the manhood into God.' This (I think) is why they can fairly be called Unnaturalists. Mr Burgess might well have answered that, instead of telling us he despises the Cambridge School of Theology.
WILLIAM EMPSON The University. Sheffield
Previous page
