The Aesthetic of Finnegans Wake

Critics who have found nothing to say for this book, and critics who have found nothing to say against it, are both uncritical. The first understand only that Joyce disdains the positive achievements of the race, and these they are prepared to defend for the sake of innumerable biological, political, moral, and material advantages; they are pensioners, not critics, of our opulent society. The others are persons of incorruptible innocence, unless they are actually in the green time of youth itself, and they believe that Joyce is really a writer with a positive attitude, and “different” only in being too difficult for ordinary readers to grasp.

A few years ago I read a poem of Mr. Archibald MacLeish’s which represented Einstein in the act of discovering relativity. It seemed that the act as Einstein himself reported it was intolerably abstract, though its effect might be of universal moment, and that the poet must redeem it by a representation which would put back into it the diffused and somewhat disorderly sensibility which makes any experience realistic. So Einstein was exhibited, as best I remember, walking in a formal garden, taking twelve paces forward and six to the left, waving an arm and placing a hand upon his brow, kicking up some gravel as he stopped and wheeled. The poet was discreet in evoking this sort of image of Einstein’s act, for it was merely external or dramatic, and behavioristic; it was harmless, but it was almost without bearing, for Einstein’s act was so strictly internal that it could not be gathered by the observer of his behavior. Drama could not handle this experience. But imaginative narrative might have done it; and especially the technique of “stream of consciousness,” which would popularize Einstein’s mind, and probably libel it, by finding marginal thoughts that formed and swelled in defiance of the calculus and the metaphysics at the center. For instance, the outer gardens, or the basement levels, of the Einstein consciousness might carry on in a bawdy manner regardless of the solemn exercises at the center; and bawdry is a universal human bond. Bawdry is the stock resource of the literary convention when it comes to deflating idealists whose intellectual or moral purity cannot be endured.