|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
During the seventeen years which Joyce spent working on Finnegans Wake, he underwent
frequent eye surgeries, lost long-time supporters, and dealt with personal
problems in the lives of his children. How much of a factor this played in
the formation of the final product is hard to say, but Wake is
undoubtedly Joyce’s most cryptic writing to date, making it impossible to definitively decipher. When Wake first debuted, many admirers of Joyce’s
previous work were hoping to see its characters resurface in the new novel.
Instead, they were treated to a book so steeped in complex linguistic
experiments that no casual reader could ever hope to pick out a continuous
thread of a plot. Many people believed that Joyce was simply playing a
prank on the entire literary community: His own brother said that Wake was
either "the work of a psychopath or a huge literary fraud," while
Joyce’s friend and literary critic Oliver Gogarty called it "the most
colossal leg pull in literature." Ezra Pound, when asked for his opinion
on the text, wrote: "Nothing so far as I can make out, nothing short of
divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all that
circumambient peripherization." Because the novel was released in the middle of World War
II, very few questions about it were asked to the author before his death two
years later. As a result, literary analysts have been forced to interpret Finnegan’s
Wake with no central authority to check their theories. For most other
books, this would not be a problem, but Wake is so steeped in obscure
references to countless fields of study that even the most comprehensive analyses
to date cannot pin down an absolute plot. |
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
