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Joyce's Disciples Disciplined: A Re-Exagmination of the 'Exagmination' of 'Work in Progress'. Tim Conley, ed. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2010. Pp. xx + 185. $67.00 (cloth).
When, in 1929, Shakespeare and Company published Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress by Samuel Beckett et al., the slim volume with the long title failed to make much of an impression. It was a strange project to begin with, one that perhaps only Joyce himself could have come up with. In order to create interest in his new work, and to counter the first negative criticisms, Joyce had asked a number of his friends to write about "Work in Progress" for Eugene Jolas's modernist magazine transition, where installments of the as yet unnamed Finnegans Wake had begun to appear. In 1929, these essays were collected in a slim volume and Joyce invited/coerced some more people into contributing-among them Beckett, whose offering must have impressed very much because it became the first essay in the collection-with its justly famous opening statement ("The danger is in the neatness of identifications"). This happens to be the first sentence the young Irishman ever published. The works of the twelve apostles were completed with two extra pieces of criticism, a negative review in the name of the common reader by a clearly pseudonymous G. V. L. Slingsby and a short parody in a mild form of Wakean language by the only seemingly pseudonymous Vladimir Dixon.
Most Wake critics today agree that as pieces of literary criticism the twelve contributions were of limited value: the critics may have had the advantage of working under the author's instructions (Beckett reading Vico and Bruno for the first time), but Beckett and most...