BOOKS: Night Thoughts

(See Cover) FINNEGANS WAKE—James Joyce —Viking ($5).

All children are afraid of the night; when they grow up, they are still afraid, but more afraid of admitting it. In this frightening darkness men lie down to sleep and dream. Generations of diviners, black magicians, fortune tellers and poets have made night and dreams their province, interpreting the troubled images that float through men's sleeping minds as omens of good & evil. Only of late have psychologists asserted that dreams tell nothing about men's future, much about their hidden or forgotten past. In dreams, this past floats, usually uncensored and distorted, to the surface of their slumbering consciousness.

This week, for the first time, a writer had attempted to make articulate this wordless world of sleep. The writer is James Joyce; the book, Finnegans Wake—final title of his long-heralded Work in Progress. In his 57 years this erudite and fanciful Irishman, from homes in exile all over Europe, has written two books that have influenced the work of his contemporaries more than any others of his time: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the best of innumerable novels picturing an artist's struggle with his environment; Ulysses, considered baffling and obscure 15 years ago, now accepted as a modern masterpiece.

Finnegans Wake is a difficult book— too difficult for most people to read. In fact, it cannot be "read" in the ordinary sense. It is perhaps the most consciously obscure work that a man of acknowledged genius has produced. Its four sections run to 628 pages, and from its first line:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay

to its last:

A way a lone a last a loved a long the

there is not a sentence to guide the reader in interpreting it; there is not a single direct statement of what it is about, where its action takes place, what, in the simplest sense, it means.

It is packed with jokes, plays on words; it contains nonsensical diagrams, ridiculous footnotes, obscure allusions. Sometimes it seems to be retelling, in a chattering, stammering, incoherent way, the legends of Tristan and Isolde, of Wellington and Napoleon, Cain and Abel. Sometimes it seems to be a description, written with torrential eloquence, of the flow of a river to the sea.

As a gigantic laboratory experiment with language, Finnegans Wake is bound to exert an influence far beyond the circle of its immediate readers. Whether Joyce is eventually convicted of assaulting the King's English with intent to kill or whether he has really added a cubit to her stature, she will never be quite the same again.

Title. The title of Finnegans Wake comes from an Irish music-hall ballad, telling how Tim Finnigan of Dublin's Sackville Street, a hod carrier and "an Irish gentleman very odd" who loved his liquor, fell from his ladder one morning and broke his skull. His friends, thinking him dead, assembled for a wake, began to fight, weep, dance:

Whack Huno take your partner, Well the floor your trotters shake, Isn't it the truth I tell you, Lots of fun at Finnigan's Wake.

In the uproar, a gallon of whiskey is spilled on Tim, who comes to, saying,

Whirl your liquor round like blazes, Arrah gudaguddug do you think l'm dead?