The proof, if proof be needed, of the transference may be found in a quality this new novel, at its worst as well as at its best, shares with poetry and that is conspicuously absent from the story-telling novel of whatever kind. Opening, just anywhere, its pages, the reader is immediately engrossed. Time and place, and the identity of characters, if any happen to appear, are relatively immaterial. Something may be missed. Incidents may fail of their full effect through ignorance of what has gone before. But the reader does not find himself, as inevitably he would in plunging thus carelessly into the midst of the dramatic novel complete with plot, set scenes, beginning, middle, climax, and curtain, completely at sea. He finds himself within a medium whose close texture, like that of poetry, is everywhere significant and although, when the tapestry hangs complete before his eyes, each potion is seen to enhance the rest and the shape and the intention of the whole grows clear, any single strip may be divorced from its fellows without losing everything of its power and of its meaning.
Particularly is this true of the effusions of Marcel Proust and of James Joyce. For while every novel, taken as a whole, shares with every other species of portrayal the necessity of being a signed self-portrait and might well be subtitled Portrait of the Artist at the Age of- where, in the long line of novelist preceding this two, save, perhaps, in Henry James as represented by the work of his maturity, shall we find another whose signature is clearly inscribed across his every sentence?
Reaching Finnegans Wake we discover its author’s signature not only across each sentence, but upon almost every word. And since, upon the greater number of its pages, nearly every other word is either wholly or partially an improvisation, the would-be reader must pay, in terms of sheer concentration, a tax far higher even than that demanded by Imagist poetry. And be he never so familiar with the author’s earlier work, and in agreement with those who approve his repudiation of the orthodoxies of grammar and syntax, finding, when doubt assails, reassurance in the presence of similar effective and, doubtless, salutary heresies in the practice of the arts other than literature, the heavily-burdened reader of Finnegans Wake, hopefully glissading, upon the first page, down a word of a hundred letters – representing the fall that carried Finnegan to his death – into pathless verbal thickets, may presently find himself weary of struggling from thicket to thicket without a clue, weary of abstruse references that too often appear to be mere displays of erudition, weary of the melange of languages ancient and modern, of regional and class dialects, slangs and catchwords and slogans, puns and nursery rhymes, phrases that are household words phonetically adapted to fresh intentions, usually improper, sometimes side-splitting, often merely facetious, incensed in discovering that these diverse elements, whether standing on their heads or fantastically paraphrased, apparently succeed each other as the sound of one suggests that of the next rather than by any continuity of inward meaning, and are all too frequently interspersed by spontaneous creations recalling those produced by children at a loss, bored to desperation by lack of interest and seeking relief in shouting a single word, repeating it with a change of vowel, with another change and another, striving to outdo themselves until the reach, with terrific emphasis , onomatopoeia precipitating adult interference.
Meanwhile the author, presumably foreseeing the breakdown of even the most faithful Joyceian as likely to occur in the neighbourhood of the hundredth page, comes to the rescue in the name of Anna Livia, invoked by a parody of a well-known prayer (“Annah the Allmaziful, the everliving, Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, un hemmed as it is uneven.”), with a chapter on the allied arts of writing and reading, here and there exceptionally, and most mercifully, explicit, preluded by a list of the hundred and sixty-three names given to Annah’s “untitle mamafesta memorializing the Mosthighest” (including Rockabill Boobu in the Wave Trough, What Jumbo made to Jalice and What Anisette to Him, and I am Older nor the Roges among Whist I Slips and He calls me his Dual of Ayessha), and one day perhaps to be translated, annotated, and issued as a Critique of Pure Literature and an Introduction to the Study of James Joyce.
The impact of this chapter, a fulfilment of the author’s prescription – “Say it with missies, and thus arabesque the page” – is tremendous, its high purpose nothing less than the demand that the novel shall be poetry. A grouped selection of caught missiles and fragments of missiles produces the following relatively coherent mosaic:” About that original hen…the bird in this case was Belinda of the Dorans, a more than quinque-genrarian…and what she was scratching looked like a goodish-sized sheet of letter paper…Well, almost any photoist…will tip anyone asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying…what you get is…a positively grotesque distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values…well, this freely is what must have occurred to our missive….by the sagacity of a lookmelittle likemelong hen…Lead, kindly Fowl!...No, assuredly they are not justified these gloompourers who grouse that letters have never been quite their old selves again since Biddy Doran looked ad literature…Who, at all this marvelling, but will press…to see the vaulting feminine libido…sternly controlled…by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering masculine fist?...To concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document….is…hurtful to sound sense.”
Quite as far goes Mr.Walter de la Mare, who has recently declared that “When poetry is most poetic, when it sounds, that is, and the utterance of them, and when is rhythms rather than the words themselves are its real if cryptic language, any other meaning, however valuable it may be, is only a secondary matter.”
Primarily, then, are we to listen to Finnegans Wake? Not so much to what Joyce says, as to the lovely way he says it, to the rhythms and undulating cadences of the Irish voice, with its capacity to make of every spoken word a sentence with parentheses and to arouse, in almost every English breast, a responsive emotion?