The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

The mechanics of this passage should indicate both the virtues and the limitations of Joyce's final method. In breaking down the structure of words he overcame what had been considered an insuperable barrier to the simulation of musical form--the linear nature of language. But the costs he paid for this freedom were enormous. Narrative structure disappeared, and with it the elements of suspense and action. Moreover, the total form of Finnegans Wake lacks the precision and inevitability displayed by a major musical composition. The 'simultaneity' which marks any passage from the Wake can only be grasped after an immense labour of exegesis, not only on that passage but on the entire work. An apprehension of Joyce's polyphony is limited to those who are familiar with his method and the Wake's basic patterns. Finnegans Wake is not properly music at all but poetry of the kind Mallarmé envisaged, which reduces 'la durée à une division spirituelle propre au sujet'. In succeeding chapters we shall see how Joyce spent sixteen years fashioning a unique work of art that achieves--although at great cost--effects previously thought alien to literature.

One of the most penetrating analyses of the radical techniques Joyce employed in Finnegans Wake is that of David Daiches. Daiches recognizes that the problem of 'simultaneity' discussed in the last chapter is central to Joyce's musical intent.

In Ulysses the identity of one thing with another was indicated by the different levels on which the story was simultaneously told. In Finnegans Wake Joyce employs different levels not only within the narrative as a whole but within each word. Joyce endeavors to use words like musical chords, saying several things at once in one instant, with no one meaning subordinated to any other. Completely discarding chronology, sequence in time, as a means of expression, he seeks to replace it by a more instantaneous method, substituting for a running melody a series of staccato chords--yet not entirely giving up the running melody, for the staccato chords themselves occur in time, and themselves constitute units in a sequence. If Joyce could coin one kaleidoscopic word with an infinite series of meanings, a word which said everything in one instant yet leaving its infinity of meanings reverberating and mingling in the mind, he would have reached his ideal. Finnegans Wake, for all its six hundred pages, is meant to be thought of as an instantaneous whole; the fact that the words follow each other and do not all exist in the same place at once is due, we feel, to the exigencies of the dimensions, to the inexorable laws of existence, which even Joyce cannot defeat.