Academia.eduAcademia.edu

Finnegans Wake at fifty

1989, Critical Quarterly

AI-generated Abstract

This analysis reflects on the significance of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake", published in 1939, highlighting its revolutionary linguistic style and contextualizing its reception amidst the English literary establishment. The work is examined not only as a literary artifact but also as a commentary on Ireland's sociopolitical landscape, particularly in relation to imperialism and nationalism. It argues that Joyce's challenging form symbolizes a struggle against the constraints of his time, while also positing that the book embodies a failed revolutionary potential that could have redefined Ireland's cultural alignment with Europe.

zy zyxwvu COLIN MacCABE zyxwv zy Finnegans Wbke at fifty JamesJoyce’sFhegans Wake was published on 4 May 1939 in both England and the United States. It must be the only example in literary history of a book which had had a work of criticism devoted to it long before it was published. In 1929 Joyce had encouraged Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams and others to bring out a book of essays which analysed the linguistic experiments which Joyce was already publishing under the title of ’Work in Progress’. Throughout the thirties Joyce had continued publishing sections from his magnum opus and indeed the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter had already achieved quasi-classicstatus. The Faber blurb was no more than accurate when it said that the book had been ‘moretalked about and written about during the period of its composition than any previous work of English literature’. From the point of view of the English literary establishment the verdict was already in and it was unfavourable. In 1933 F.R.Leavis had reviewed some of ‘Work in Progress’ in one of the first issues of Scrutiny. Joyce’s ‘wanton’linguistic experiments were condemned for being unrelated to the pressure of felt experience. In his rejection of Joyce, Leavis for once joined the Bloomsbury he so despised. Virginia Woolf was, of course, famously influenced by Ulysses - Mrs Dalloway and her subsequent fiction are unthinkable without it - but she found Joyce’s coarse materiality unpleasant. Her guarded public reservations were made startlingly clear in her diary where she referred to Ulysses as the ‘underbred’book of a ‘self-taught working man’ and said that it reminded her of a ‘queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’. If it is obvious in retrospect that Joyce’swork was not going to penetrate the heartland of English letters, literary editors still had to send it out for review. It is hard not to feel sympathetic to the poor reviewers required to cough up a thousand words at a few weeks’ notice. The only one obviously undaunted by the task was Oliver St John Gogarty. The Observer had the good sense to send the book to him and the Buck Mulligan of Vlysses continued the quarrel begun in the Martello tower in June 1904. He pronounced the book ‘the most colossal leg pull in literature since Macpherson’s Ossian’ but he saw much more clearly than any other reviewer that the book should be seen as an example of ‘literary Bolshevism’ and as a certain sort of ’revenge’. Most reviewers were much more timorous. The Manchester Guardian’s reviewer spoke for many when he said that he preferred to ‘suspend zyx zy 4 zyxwvutsr zyxwv Critical Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4 judgement’and also confessed his own incapacities to review the work. As the book had been written to demonstrate the language of the schizophrenic mind perhaps the only person properly qualified was Joyce himself. The most honest, if also the most philistine, review came from Malcolm Muggeridge in Time and Tide. Unable to make head nor tail of the book and finding Faber’s blurb unhelpful he had to turn to other critics to find out what to say. He summarised them fairly as saying that Mr Joycewas a great writer who zyx zyxwv zyxwv zyxw for reasons best known to himself has evolved a curious way of writing which bears little resemblance to the English language as commonly used, that so painstaking an effort is not to be dismissed out of hand, and that in any case gramophonerecords of passages from Finnegans Wake recited by Mr Joycehave been found by competent persons to be delectable. St Mug was going to have none of this literary humbug. ‘FinnegansWake’, he declared, ‘must be pronounced a complete fiasco.’ It is instructive to compare the short and pusillanimous English reviews of the book with its reception in the States. Both the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times published long and detailed reviews of it, by Alfred Kazin and Padraic Colum respectively, which outlined the major structures of the work and hailed it as an outstanding experiment. In many ways the immediate response by newspapers prefigures Joyce’s different reception in the two countries, dismissed in England and explicated at great length in the United States. It is perhaps not surprising that the only reviewer who really grasped the radical nature of Joyce’sproject was his fellow-IrishmanGogarty. Finnegans Wake, with its sustained dismemberment of the English linguistic and literary heritage, is perhaps best understood in relation to the struggle against imperialism. In Ireland that strugglehad foundered in the settlement of 1922. No one perhaps better analysed the mentality that contributed to that foundering than Sean O’Casey, and it was thus a deep historical irony that led the Irish Times to note Finnegans Wake in its ‘Books received’ column as written by Sean O’Casey. The impenetrability of the Wake is not simply to be read in relation to Joyce’sprofound self-analysis but to the isolation that history imposed on him. He would not dance to his English master’s tune, and Woolf’s comments demonstrate how clearly this refusal was perceived by a member of the English upper classes, but after 1922and the establishment of a Catholic state there was no one in Ireland to listen to Joyce‘s music. Joyce’s celebration of the miscegenation of elements within the Irish race was anathema to those nationalists who wished to promote doctrines of Celtic purity. zy Finnegms Wake at fifty 5 Joyce’sexile in Paris also limited him to the form of prose fiction. The man who in his youth had seen himself as a dramatist to rival Ibsen, who had opened the first cinema in Dublin and who sang and danced at every opportunity was forced to challenge the assumptions of a literary tradition within the most literary of forms. The ‘funferal’of the Wake is a curiously limited affair. Fifty years after its publication it is tempting to imagine another history of Ireland in which Yeats’s project of an Abbey Theatre became the media centre which could truly have housed a performance of Joyce’s experiments. Unfortunately that history, which would include a liberation of Ireland not only from the Roman priest and the British king but also from the myths of Gaelic nationalism, seems as utopian now as it would have in 1939. Finneguns Wake is a primer for a failed revolution, one that would have allied Ireland to Europe rather than simply separating twenty-six counties from Britain.