Sir : In his admirable article on Joyce (6 March),
Roger Scruton suggests that the 'lyric quality' of Finnegans Wake is still ignored, and quotes Joyce's statement that 'Time and the river and the moun- tain' were the real heroes of his book. Surely the search for a fruitful approach to the Wake can come up with more than this? A 628-page lyric is a daunting 'nough prospect; but while Joyce would have had his reasons for belittling the 'human' content of his book to Jolas, Time, the river, etc, are no more its real heroes than language or Humpty Dumpty or the geni- talia.
Joyce's obvious glee at the puz- zles he had set for his commenta- tors should not be overlooked. He must have seen his task as creating not so much an object of know- ledge as a field of knowledge, a single work as inexhaustible and as resistant to comparative evalua- tion as philosophy or physics. But though it might be tempting to see Finnegans Wake as resembling Borges's infinite Library of Babel, with the Joycean scholars as its hapless inmates, Joyce was also an imaginative Freudian who believed all myths and dreams to be redu- cible to a few 'fundamentals'. The fundamentals (shames, desires, af- fairs of the family) cannot be de- finitively stated. Instead. we are asked to contemplate what all the humane disciplines require us to believe, that to investigate some basic problems is itself to generate a whole field of discourse; a field which is at once a picture of the universe and an egregious human comedy.
Mr Scruton is surely mistaken when he calls John Gross's de- scription of Ulysses as a 'demo- cratic' novel 'an unusually eccen- tric non sequitur'. Non sequitur perhaps, but hardly an eccentric one since many people have said this of Joyce's work before (and the authors of Gerrninie Lacerteux would presumably have done so had they been gifted with fore- sight). But even Joyce's conversion of fiction into an artificial field of knowledge may be seen to in- spire and demand an autodidac- ticism which is one of the remain- ing links between literature and non-specialist readers. Joyce had studied English literature, and his 'funeral' is nowhere more re- markable than in its total refusal of the status of a Prescribed Text.
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