Volume 31, Number 9 · May 31, 1984
Scrabbling in the 'Wake'
By Robert M. Adams
Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of Finnegans Wake
by Vincent John Cheng
Pennsylvania State University Press, 271 pp., $18.75
The corridors of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake are not much thronged with visitors or investigators these days. When the book was new, and a fresh challenge to the intrepidity of mental travelers, it seemed to offer endless perspectives, an infinitely unfolding panorama of verbal delights. To some extent it still does. But exegesis, with its deadly habit of grinding up and flattening out the text on which it is deployed, has done its work on the Wake. For those who follow the literature, even from a distance, it has preempted much of the excitement of discovery; and by pushing the frontiers ever farther back, it has rendered the book more forbidding than ever to the common reader. Writing about the Wake—a multifarious, polyglot, impenetrable book—was never easy in the first place; with the years it has got harder, and the club of persistent exegetes has diminished both in numbers and, if I hear the overtones aright, in expectations.
Review, 2235 words
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