Finnegan’s Wake. By James Joyce. The Viking Press. $5.00
A generation ago J. M. Synge pointed out that writers had been content for too long too make a mutually exclusive choice between richness and reality. On the one hand lay life itself, darkly reflected through the naturalism of Ibsen and Zola. In the opposite direction lay beauty, petulantly glimmering through the symbolism of Mallarmé and Huysmans. Ireland, Synge proposed, was the natural setting for a glad reunion between reality and richness, a dialectical synthesis of the naturalistic tradition and the symbolistic reaction. In Irish life, he indicated, writers would find both a vital theme and an expressive medium. With the Irish literary movement—particularly with the achievements of Synge himself in the drama, of Yeats in poetry, and Joyce in fiction—these indications have been filled out. It would be hard to find a comparable body of writing, without going all the way back to the Elizabethans, in which the qualities of highly imaginative expression and closeness to familiar experience are so profusely intermingled.
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