What do you think?
Rate this book
James Joyce/Finnegans Wake: Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress is unique among the many books Finnegans Wake has evoked from other writers. This symposium was published in Paris ten years before Joyce's work in progress was completed and the contributors were all friends or acquaintances of the author: Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams. There are also "Letters of Protest" from G.V.L. Slingsby and Vladimir Dixon.
210 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1929
6 people are currently reading
325 people want to read
About the author
Samuel Beckett
915 books6,552 followersNovels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include
Murphy
in 1938 and
Malone Dies
in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as
Waiting for Godot
in 1952 and
Krapp's Last Tape
in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.
Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.
People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first postmodernists. He is one of the key in what Martin Esslin called the "theater of the absurd". His later career worked with increasing minimalism.
People awarded Samuel Barclay Beckett "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".
In 1984, people elected Samuel Barclay Bennett as Saoi of Aosdána.
Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.
People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first postmodernists. He is one of the key in what Martin Esslin called the "theater of the absurd". His later career worked with increasing minimalism.
People awarded Samuel Barclay Beckett "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".
In 1984, people elected Samuel Barclay Bennett as Saoi of Aosdána.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
July 15, 2014
~
The Wake is above, around, inside, outside, and through the temporal and spatial essences of language. Language is what gave us time and space- without it one would only see and never know, and so never see.
It is a life-tree and a time-stone, in an idyll beside a river. It grows while it decomposes and traverses the Spheres while it stays absolutely still. It is a quivering monolith inscribed in wriggling runes.
It is the novel that no one and everyone wrote all together, that no one and everyone might read and understand all together.
The Wake is infinity’s singsong, if one remembers that infinity is something only imagined by human beings, so it is every little finite life’s singsong lovesong out to rich, pulsing, strangely comprehensible infinity.
What might be attained through imagination... To those of us (I’m speaking to you, reader) who love and nurture our imagination above almost all else, isn’t the ultimate goal to surpass our current limits, and thus increase our imaginative grandeur, our knowledge, our ability to grasp and hold things in their purest form of thought? Isn’t this the highest form of adoration? How does one leap the bars and walls of our word-prison to properly adore the universe?
Let me be with my own personal infinity, it dies soon enough and disappears, and you will see me ascend and disperse like smoke from dulling coals. Let me take with me what I’ve loved: a few people, a few words, a few pictures, feelings, moments, scents, plays of light and leaves that meant sadness or happiness or astonishment. When thought upon as I rise and spread in the bluest sky, they become transcendent celestial music. I rise and spread and circle earthward again. Rising up is falling down; becoming ocean is becoming rain; becoming bone is becoming air.
~~
here.
The Wake is above, around, inside, outside, and through the temporal and spatial essences of language. Language is what gave us time and space- without it one would only see and never know, and so never see.
It is a life-tree and a time-stone, in an idyll beside a river. It grows while it decomposes and traverses the Spheres while it stays absolutely still. It is a quivering monolith inscribed in wriggling runes.
It is the novel that no one and everyone wrote all together, that no one and everyone might read and understand all together.
The Wake is infinity’s singsong, if one remembers that infinity is something only imagined by human beings, so it is every little finite life’s singsong lovesong out to rich, pulsing, strangely comprehensible infinity.
What might be attained through imagination... To those of us (I’m speaking to you, reader) who love and nurture our imagination above almost all else, isn’t the ultimate goal to surpass our current limits, and thus increase our imaginative grandeur, our knowledge, our ability to grasp and hold things in their purest form of thought? Isn’t this the highest form of adoration? How does one leap the bars and walls of our word-prison to properly adore the universe?
Let me be with my own personal infinity, it dies soon enough and disappears, and you will see me ascend and disperse like smoke from dulling coals. Let me take with me what I’ve loved: a few people, a few words, a few pictures, feelings, moments, scents, plays of light and leaves that meant sadness or happiness or astonishment. When thought upon as I rise and spread in the bluest sky, they become transcendent celestial music. I rise and spread and circle earthward again. Rising up is falling down; becoming ocean is becoming rain; becoming bone is becoming air.
~~
here.
Read
March 7, 2015The review of Finnegans Wake from July 1939 (two months after pub of FW) by Dorothy M. Richardson has been posted by our Faithful Finnegan, Nathandjo at an disclosed location ::
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
__________________
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress is a collection of essays assembled and published in 1929, ten years prior to the eventual publication of Finnegans Wake. Selections from Work in Progress had for several years been appearing in the journal transition and had been met by misunderstanding and disapproval by literary barbarians and philistines, among whom were many of Joyce’s former supporters. To counter these criticism Our Exagmination was organized by Joyce’s friends and remaining supporters in order to begin the centuries long project of explicating and coming to an understanding of what exactly was going on in this most linguistically sophisticated work.
Our Exagmination is to be recommended to any reader of The Wake, to anyone beginning The Wake or contemplating beginning it, and even to those who will never in their life read it but have enjoyed Ulysses and would appreciate an informed analysis of where Joyce went next. Myself having completed only the first five chapters of The Wake the explicators of this short volume reflected back to me much of what I had already begun to suspect and hypothesize about how Joyce’s language functions and how the novel is structured. This experience was very similar to my reading of sympathetic critics of Women and Men after finding myself stunned and astounded by Joseph McElroy’s own expansion of novelistic narrative possibilities. To read a difficult and profoundly affecting book and then to see one’s own thoughts reflected back by a critical reading community is itself a profound pleasure.
One highlightable bit of trivia is a convincing hypothesis accounting for the lack of an apostrophe in the novel’s title.
The Tbel-rasa der Continents [mineown invointion, that]:
Introduction, by Sylvia Beach.
Dante... Bruno. Vico... Joyce, by Samuel Beckett.
The Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce, by Marcel Brion.
James Joyce’s Work in Progress and Old Norse Poetry, by Frank Budgen.
Prolegomena to Work in Progress, by Stuart Gilbert.
The Revolution of Language and James Joyce, by Eugene Jolas.
I Don’t Know What to Call It But Its Mighty Unlike Prose, by Victor Llona.
Mr. Joyce Directs an Irish Word Ballet, by Robert McAlmon
The Catholic Element in Work in Progress, by Thomas McGreevy.
Mr. Joyce’s Treatment of Plot, by Elliot Paul.
Joyce and His Dynamic, by John Rodker.
Before Ulysses -- And After, by Robert Sage.
A Point for American Criticism, by William Carlos Williams.
And bringing us a commodius vicus: “Two Letters of Protest”:
Writes a Common Reader, by G. V. L. Slingsby.
A Litter to Mr. James Joyce, by Vladimir Dixon.
I offer a brief quotation from the inimitable Mr. Beckett, his essay in which the marriage of form and content is discussed, with the following result:
And because it is such a wunderful litter I reproduce in full, in the interest of a Wakean dissemination, Vladimir Dixon’s to Mr. Joyce:
A Brand New Hypothosis That Is as Original as a Recipe! --
Pretty sure that litter is knot by Joyce. His puns are much=more sofa stick a kada’d.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
__________________
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress is a collection of essays assembled and published in 1929, ten years prior to the eventual publication of Finnegans Wake. Selections from Work in Progress had for several years been appearing in the journal transition and had been met by misunderstanding and disapproval by literary barbarians and philistines, among whom were many of Joyce’s former supporters. To counter these criticism Our Exagmination was organized by Joyce’s friends and remaining supporters in order to begin the centuries long project of explicating and coming to an understanding of what exactly was going on in this most linguistically sophisticated work.
Our Exagmination is to be recommended to any reader of The Wake, to anyone beginning The Wake or contemplating beginning it, and even to those who will never in their life read it but have enjoyed Ulysses and would appreciate an informed analysis of where Joyce went next. Myself having completed only the first five chapters of The Wake the explicators of this short volume reflected back to me much of what I had already begun to suspect and hypothesize about how Joyce’s language functions and how the novel is structured. This experience was very similar to my reading of sympathetic critics of Women and Men after finding myself stunned and astounded by Joseph McElroy’s own expansion of novelistic narrative possibilities. To read a difficult and profoundly affecting book and then to see one’s own thoughts reflected back by a critical reading community is itself a profound pleasure.
One highlightable bit of trivia is a convincing hypothesis accounting for the lack of an apostrophe in the novel’s title.
The Tbel-rasa der Continents [mineown invointion, that]:
Introduction, by Sylvia Beach.
Dante... Bruno. Vico... Joyce, by Samuel Beckett.
The Idea of Time in the Work of James Joyce, by Marcel Brion.
James Joyce’s Work in Progress and Old Norse Poetry, by Frank Budgen.
Prolegomena to Work in Progress, by Stuart Gilbert.
The Revolution of Language and James Joyce, by Eugene Jolas.
I Don’t Know What to Call It But Its Mighty Unlike Prose, by Victor Llona.
Mr. Joyce Directs an Irish Word Ballet, by Robert McAlmon
The Catholic Element in Work in Progress, by Thomas McGreevy.
Mr. Joyce’s Treatment of Plot, by Elliot Paul.
Joyce and His Dynamic, by John Rodker.
Before Ulysses -- And After, by Robert Sage.
A Point for American Criticism, by William Carlos Williams.
And bringing us a commodius vicus: “Two Letters of Protest”:
Writes a Common Reader, by G. V. L. Slingsby.
A Litter to Mr. James Joyce, by Vladimir Dixon.
I offer a brief quotation from the inimitable Mr. Beckett, his essay in which the marriage of form and content is discussed, with the following result:
On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension. . . Mr. Joyce has a word to say to you on the subject: “Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as harmful; etc.” And another: “Who in his hearts doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the orther? Or that both may be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up in turn and considered apart from the other?”
Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.
And because it is such a wunderful litter I reproduce in full, in the interest of a Wakean dissemination, Vladimir Dixon’s to Mr. Joyce:
Dear Mister Germ’s Choice,
in gutter dispear I am taking my pen toilet you know that, being Leyde up in bad with the prewailent distemper (I opened the window and in flew Enza), I have been reeding one half ter one other the numboars of “transition” in witch are printed the severeall instorments of your “Work in Progress”.
You must not stink I am attempting to ridicul (de sac!) you or to be smart, but I am so disturd by my inhumility to onthorstand most of the impslocations constrained in your work that (although I am by nominals dump and in fact I consider myself not brilliantly ejewcatered but still of above Averroëge men’s tality and having maid the most of the oporto unities I kismet) I am writing you, dear mysterre Shame’s Voice, to let you no how bed I feeloxerab out it all.
I am überzeugt that the labour involved in the compostition of your work must be almost supper humane and that so much travail from a man of your intellacked must ryeseult in somethink very signicophant. I would only like to know have I been so strichnine by my illnest white wresting under my warm Coverlyette that I am as they say in my neightive land “out of the mind gone out” and unable to combprehen that which is clear or is there really in your work some ass pecked which is Uncle Lear?
Please froggive my t’Emeritus and any inconvince that may have been caused by this litter.
Yours veri tass
Vladimir Dixon
A Brand New Hypothosis That Is as Original as a Recipe! --
Pretty sure that litter is knot by Joyce. His puns are much=more sofa stick a kada’d.
November 4, 2017
The legend of this collection of essays led me to expect something other than what I found here.
Quick rewind. In the wake of ULYSSES finally being widely published and the name of James Joyce finally becoming well-known, fragments of his next WORK IN PROGRESS (WIP) began appearing in transition magazine, and elsewhere, during the 1920s to less-than-universal acclaim. Desiring to alter this perilous arc of public opinion against him and his book, Joyce personally arranged for a dozen friendly essays to be written and collated and published in order to attempt to corral his critics into taking a second look at WIP, which a decade later would be published as FINNEGANS WAKE (FW). It was a brazen literary PR stunt, but was it successful?
I'll say first that I read the PDF version on the James Joyce Scholars' Collection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries website. An exercise in scanning with text recognition software without subsequent copy-editing before publication, the text is littered with typographical errors. Reading this particular version is not entirely unlike reading WIP/FW.
I might have expected a mixed bag with a dozen essays from a dozen different writers, but despite inevitable differences in tone and emphasis, the package works surprisingly well as a unified whole. There are exceptions of course. But now with eighty-eight years of hindsight, what strikes me most about this collection is how it is an artifact of its time. It's not that hasn't aged well ― it's certainly required reading for anyone interested in FW ― but it comes to us like a small, tightly-bundled care package delivered through time direct from the interwar period, a now almost unrelatable era when the Lost Generation, which had survived the horrors of the Great War, had come into full flower in the 1920s, not knowing they were on the brink of ruinous trauma that would render any lessons learned or hardships endured obsolete.
The fate of FW too, one discerns from this collection, with a view to its own later established history, is a direct consequence of the catastrophes of the two decades immediately following publication of OUR EXAGMINATION . . . Not only did none of the prognostications lodged here regarding the destiny of the English language being forever altered by FW ever come to pass, but FW itself was essentially plunged into a literary black hole upon its publication in 1939 for everyone except the professors who escaped the ravages of the war years. FW is a book of light, and the recently tormented world, reaching for whatever light it could find in the 1920s, had now been plunged into an even more dreadful darkness. There was simply no place in the WWII world for FW.
I'm impressed by how seldom the essayists here avoid being blown too far astray from the course James Joyce has set despite the fact that FW itself wouldn't be published for another decade. I'm also encouraged by Joyce's own implied endorsement of the opinions expressed herein that often reflect or underscore my own attempts to read FW. My own interpretations and understandings of the book have, in effect, received the imprimatur of Joyce himself, or the closest I can ever get to receiving the same.
In spite of the darkness of our own times, I have some notion that our own digital era does much to make FW far more accessible today than at any time in the past. At some point darkness does yield to light, and I have some hope that the optimistic predictions about the literary influence of FW on the collective literary scene may yet come to pass.
(P.S. I was pleased to confirm that "Vladimir Dixon" was indeed not a pen name for Joyce. When I read his letter at the end of this collection I found it far inferior to Joyce's writing and my skepticism was considerable.)
Quick rewind. In the wake of ULYSSES finally being widely published and the name of James Joyce finally becoming well-known, fragments of his next WORK IN PROGRESS (WIP) began appearing in transition magazine, and elsewhere, during the 1920s to less-than-universal acclaim. Desiring to alter this perilous arc of public opinion against him and his book, Joyce personally arranged for a dozen friendly essays to be written and collated and published in order to attempt to corral his critics into taking a second look at WIP, which a decade later would be published as FINNEGANS WAKE (FW). It was a brazen literary PR stunt, but was it successful?
I'll say first that I read the PDF version on the James Joyce Scholars' Collection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries website. An exercise in scanning with text recognition software without subsequent copy-editing before publication, the text is littered with typographical errors. Reading this particular version is not entirely unlike reading WIP/FW.
I might have expected a mixed bag with a dozen essays from a dozen different writers, but despite inevitable differences in tone and emphasis, the package works surprisingly well as a unified whole. There are exceptions of course. But now with eighty-eight years of hindsight, what strikes me most about this collection is how it is an artifact of its time. It's not that hasn't aged well ― it's certainly required reading for anyone interested in FW ― but it comes to us like a small, tightly-bundled care package delivered through time direct from the interwar period, a now almost unrelatable era when the Lost Generation, which had survived the horrors of the Great War, had come into full flower in the 1920s, not knowing they were on the brink of ruinous trauma that would render any lessons learned or hardships endured obsolete.
The fate of FW too, one discerns from this collection, with a view to its own later established history, is a direct consequence of the catastrophes of the two decades immediately following publication of OUR EXAGMINATION . . . Not only did none of the prognostications lodged here regarding the destiny of the English language being forever altered by FW ever come to pass, but FW itself was essentially plunged into a literary black hole upon its publication in 1939 for everyone except the professors who escaped the ravages of the war years. FW is a book of light, and the recently tormented world, reaching for whatever light it could find in the 1920s, had now been plunged into an even more dreadful darkness. There was simply no place in the WWII world for FW.
I'm impressed by how seldom the essayists here avoid being blown too far astray from the course James Joyce has set despite the fact that FW itself wouldn't be published for another decade. I'm also encouraged by Joyce's own implied endorsement of the opinions expressed herein that often reflect or underscore my own attempts to read FW. My own interpretations and understandings of the book have, in effect, received the imprimatur of Joyce himself, or the closest I can ever get to receiving the same.
In spite of the darkness of our own times, I have some notion that our own digital era does much to make FW far more accessible today than at any time in the past. At some point darkness does yield to light, and I have some hope that the optimistic predictions about the literary influence of FW on the collective literary scene may yet come to pass.
(P.S. I was pleased to confirm that "Vladimir Dixon" was indeed not a pen name for Joyce. When I read his letter at the end of this collection I found it far inferior to Joyce's writing and my skepticism was considerable.)
Read
January 6, 2016I've only read the Beckett essay, Dante...Bruno...Vico...Joyce
Some quotes:
Mr Joyce has desophisticated language. And..no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death. Take the word "doubt": it gives us hardly any sensuous suggestion of hesitancy, of the necessity for choice, of static irresolution. Whereas the German "Zweifell" does, and, in lesser degree, the Italian "dubitare". Mr Joyce recognises how inadequate "doubt" is...and replaces it by "in twosome twiminds".
"Shakespeare uses fat, greasy words to express corruption. We hear the ooze squelching all through Dicken's description of the Thames. This writing (FW) that you (the critics) find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture..Here words are not the polite contortions of printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear."
Some quotes:
Mr Joyce has desophisticated language. And..no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death. Take the word "doubt": it gives us hardly any sensuous suggestion of hesitancy, of the necessity for choice, of static irresolution. Whereas the German "Zweifell" does, and, in lesser degree, the Italian "dubitare". Mr Joyce recognises how inadequate "doubt" is...and replaces it by "in twosome twiminds".
"Shakespeare uses fat, greasy words to express corruption. We hear the ooze squelching all through Dicken's description of the Thames. This writing (FW) that you (the critics) find so obscure is a quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture..Here words are not the polite contortions of printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear."
April 20, 2019
The essay by Samuel Beckett ("Dante... Bruno. Vico... Joyce" first essay in this collection of literary critical essays) makes an outlandish comparison, attempting to liken Joyce to Dante. It’s almost offensive to consider the irregular doggerel and industrially-manufactured prose of Joyce, uneven throughout, to the disciplined poetry of Dante’s terza rima, maintained throughout. The essay in this collection that is spot on, however, is the one by Victor Llona (“I Don’t Know What to Call It But It’s Mighty Unlike Prose”, sixth essay) that compares Joyce to Rabelais; these two did have something of the same ambition, to parody and to provide a full anatomy of the world’s ills, as satirists will do. Rabelais’ Pantagruel is likely the inspiration for the sleeping giant, H.C.E. But as much as Llona was on the right track, he too concedes that it may all just be “babblings and mutterings” (p.101) in Finnegans Wake; the much expected long anticipated “revelation” (p.102) that Llona hoped for, in the finished work (or at least with its “last fragments”) never arrived, and will forever be infinitely deferred. As another critic put it, with the full article in front of him to consider and with the benefit of hindsight (writing a generation later): “Joyce’s HCE struggles for pages toward wakening, but just as we seem on the point of grasping something tangible we are swung around to the first page of the book again.” (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p.236)
November 20, 2024
Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, in Our Exagmination Round His Incamination of Work in Progress (1929)
“What is of ultimate importance is the recognition that the passage from Scipio to Caesar is as inevitable as the passage from Caesar to Tiberius, since the flowers of corruption in Scipio and Caesar are the seeds of vitality in Caesar and Tiberius. Thus we have the spectacle of a human progression that depends for its movement on individuals, and which at the same time is independent of individuals in virtue of what appears to be a preordained cyclicism.” Dialectical history in Vico.
Vico rejected the three popular interpretations of the poetic spirit, which considered poetry as either an ingenious popular expression of philosophical conceptions, or an amusing social diversion, or an exact science within the reach of everyone in possession of the recipe. Poetry, he says, was born of curiosity, daughter of ignorance. The first men had to create matter by the force of their imagination, and ‘poet’ means ‘creator’. Poetry was the first operation of the human mind, and without it thought could not exist. Barbarians, incapable of analysis and abstraction, must use their fantasy to explain what their reason cannot comprehend. Before articulation [9] comes song; before abstract terms, metaphors. The figurative character of the oldest poetry must be regarded, not as sophisticated confectionery, but as evidence of a poverty-stricken vocabulary and of a disability to achieve abstraction. Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passion and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when most concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.
“Mr. Joyce has desophisticated language. And it is worth while remarking that no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death.”
July 14, 2022
It is extraordinary that this book of literary criticism appeared in print in 1929, 10 years before the final form of the work itself: Finnegans Wake. Most notable of the contributors is Samuel Beckett (his first publication) who points out the influence of the philosopher Vico and the poet Dante on Joyce's work. There is a nasty and unfair attack on Rebecca West (and more generally English literary criticism) by William Carlos Williams. The best thing however is 'A Letter to Mr. James Joyce' by Vladimir Dixon (almost certainly Joyce himself) who writes:
'You must not stink I am attempting to ridicul (de sac!) you or to be smart, but I am so disturd by my inhumility to onthorstand most of the impslocations constrained in your work that (although I am by nominals dump and in fact I consider myself not brilliantly ejewcatered but still of above Averroëge men’s tality and having maid the most of the oporto unities I kismet) I am writing you, dear mysterre Shame’s Voice, to let you no how bed I feeloxerab out it all. '
This book is very difficult (and expensive) to find now in print form, even though, in 1972, Faber re-issued it in paperback. However, it is possible to find it in pdf form on the Internet though, unfortunately, this version is peppered with typos caused by OCR software.
'You must not stink I am attempting to ridicul (de sac!) you or to be smart, but I am so disturd by my inhumility to onthorstand most of the impslocations constrained in your work that (although I am by nominals dump and in fact I consider myself not brilliantly ejewcatered but still of above Averroëge men’s tality and having maid the most of the oporto unities I kismet) I am writing you, dear mysterre Shame’s Voice, to let you no how bed I feeloxerab out it all. '
This book is very difficult (and expensive) to find now in print form, even though, in 1972, Faber re-issued it in paperback. However, it is possible to find it in pdf form on the Internet though, unfortunately, this version is peppered with typos caused by OCR software.
May 13, 2023
Critical essays about Joyce's Finnegans Wake written when the book was a work in progress. The essays hit on the major themes you'd expect (language, philology, mythology, cyclical history, dreams/unconscious), overlap a bit. Overall, a spectacular amount of dick-riding. William Carlos Williams, writing a rebuttal to another more negative author, is the only one who finds faults with Joyce, and the two protest letters at the end, one of which seems to be a joke possibly penned by Joyce himself, are the shortest works included. The first essay by Beckett (looking at influence of Giambattista Vico's philosophy) stood out, as did Stuart Gilbert's (author of a good guide to Ulysses) close philological analyses. One essay also looked at the evolution of a passage through multiple published drafts which was a unique vantage point, I wish there had been more of that and less vapid celebration.
June 6, 2021
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later
on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the
offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan,
erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends
an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:
and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-
linsfirst loved livvy.
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later
on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the
offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan,
erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends
an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes:
and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park
where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-
linsfirst loved livvy.
November 26, 2024
Interesting as a document in literary history, but a little haphazard in the execution (compounded by a billion printing errors). Many of the essays overlap and are rather basic attempts to explain a slice of Finnegans Wake (which would require much more attention than 10-15 pages) or to insist rather dubiously on its universal communicative power. Beckett’s essay is a clear highlight, tackling the recurring themes (Vico, language, etc) with flair, while McGreevy, Brion and an unhinged William Carlos Williams also at least provide some originality. The rest you sense is an attempt at strength in numbers on Joyce’s part!
January 4, 2026
The collection opens with an essay by Samuel Beckett "Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read - or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself." and includes essays by such Joyce luminaries as Frank Budgen and Stuart Gilbert, who gives a practical example of how to read a specific passage. It also includes defences of Joyce from critical reviews (Eugene Jolas defending him from Sean O'Faolain and William Carlos Williams defending his revolutionary writing from the hidebound English criticism of Rebecca West). There's also a fascinating essay on Catholicism in his work by Thomas McGreevy. The odd essay or parts of some essays are impenetrable, but the book is largely easily comprehensible even to those with an allergy to the jargon of lit. crit., and is a good introduction to Finnegan's Wake as well as an introduction to Joyce's works in general.
May 29, 2011
Readers will pick up this book for Samuel Beckett's lead essay, the idiosyncratically punctuated "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce," but the young master's contribution to this symposium is actually one of the less helpful and more antagonistic pieces. These essays were written as Joyce was publishing chapters of what would become Finnegans Wake. There are extensive passages quoted from the book in progress, and hence the reader with a slight acquaintance of Joyce can use Our Exag as a gentle introduction: an hors d'oeuvre rather than the entire banquet.
However, the lack of a unifying editorial hand is unfortunate, as there are overlaps in the material covered and in critical approach, as well as copy editing inconsistencies (all the more puzzling, since the essays originally ran in the same journal that published the Joyce source material, Eugene Jolas's transition).
However, the lack of a unifying editorial hand is unfortunate, as there are overlaps in the material covered and in critical approach, as well as copy editing inconsistencies (all the more puzzling, since the essays originally ran in the same journal that published the Joyce source material, Eugene Jolas's transition).
May 12, 2013
A book that has historical value for students of Joyce, and especially for those, like myself, who are preparing to read Finnegan's Wake in its entirety. This book came out while Joyce was still writing Finnegan's Wake (before it even had a title!) A ''committee'' (the book's authors) read installments of the book as they came out (like a Dickens novel); these excerpts were published in an obscure literary journal. The individual chapters (each by a different member of the ''committee'') are uneven, with some quite profound, others a bit more obscure, and the final chapter pretty wacky and said to have been written by Joyce himself. But all in all, an essential book for those who want to understand this amazing novel, that I would have to say is the most difficult novel in all of English (and perhaps World) literature.
January 11, 2014
There were some great pieces in here - the best was Beckett's. I'd be happy as a writer if I wrote that first paragraph, let alone the rest of the essay. This collection as a whole, though, is hit-or-miss. It's more a collection of James Joyce boosterism than meaningful or helpful criticism. I'm as big a JJ booster as anyone, but it's a little less than exciting to read essays defending Joyce from long-gone critics, critics who clearly lost the war. Now, Joyce's place in the literary pantheon is secure, perhaps to some extent to the essays in this volume. Still, they don't add a whole lot in terms of knowledge or understanding of Finnegans Wake. They more just say "this is really good" over and over again. Sometimes that's how we all feel when we read a good and misunderstood book - but then we don't all write essays and publish them either...
March 7, 2014
Q. When else have so many great critics/writers been gathered by the author of a novel far from complete to explicate and sing its praises in so delightful and lucid a fashion?
A. Never
(And the author himself makes a cameo as one "Vladamir Dixon" penning a letter of protest concerning the tome at hand)
A. Never
(And the author himself makes a cameo as one "Vladamir Dixon" penning a letter of protest concerning the tome at hand)
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews