Books 1939: Finnegans Wake By James Joyce

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Night Thoughts

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. 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.

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 added a cubit to her stature, she will never be quite the same again.