The Restored Finnegans Wake

Obviously this is an absurd rating to bestow upon an apotheosis of world-historical literary achievement. If I was grading it on the form or the depth of reference or the spirit of the demand it places on the reader, obviously I would be giving it five stars and I would still encourage everyone to make the attempt to, after having read Ulysses of course, read a page of this aloud every day and experience what it is to have meaning emerge from what seems at first to be nonsense in this totally singular way I haven't experienced in any other context, whether literature, poetry, music, whatever.

What I'm objecting to here is what I can scry through the murk. (My undergraduate literary-critical training, heavily inflected as it was by post-structuralist theory, might have encouraged me to put that last sentence in scare quotes because its something of a nostrum that we can't separate form from content, as though they didn't exist in a dialectical relationship but rather an ineffable Ouroborosian mush). You will get, for example, a paragraph in which every God in the Norse pantheon is name-checked, there will be a reference to the Mabinogion, some proto-anthropologist who proposed the existence of a pre-historic universal language all hanging off a paragraph which is whining about how Yeats invited him to join an academy of letters, or Wyndham Lewis, or the reception of Ulysses, or his ambivalent relationship with Ireland.

I haven't read much more than a handful of the vast amounts of criticism written on the Wake but from what I gather, I assume that there are probably two competing views of the Wake - and I here exclude works written by Irish critics that take a firmer view grounded in knowledge of Irish history and contemporary discourses on nationalism etc - the first being that it is an essentially humanist and affirmative celebration of humanity and meaning and progress and free love, the other being negative, differential networks of meaning perpetually postponed, incoherence, failure to escape Viconian or Oedipal cycles, but for me what's depressing and regressive here is that Joyce just can't escape complaining about the Scene. It would be one thing if he was doing this about late nineteenth / early-twentieth century history, but this is much more about Europe in the Napoleonic era than the interwar period. His immersion in Everything but failure to escape himself comes across as neurotic and myopic, the latter of which is perhaps fitting or some additional layer of metatext since Joyce did have problems with his eyesight.

On the one hand the commitment to collapsing the boundaries between the high and the low, this great historical arc overlaying a petit-bourgeois family in Dublin, references to Shinto Deities alongside a general who wiped his arse on a sod of earth is increidble in its capacity to pull off a fractilic structure wherein the closer you look at the micro details the more they replicate the macro but ultimately I found both devices used too and to their detriment.

Do not get me wrong, there are truly singular and impressive sections that everyone should read, the ending, the beginning, chapter 1.7, but I think that if this work was cut in half it would be so much better than it is.