Content area
Full Text
Finn Fordham. Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 270 pp.
For most readers there is not a lot of fun to be had at Finnegans Wake. Even those hardy souls who have overcome the mighty Ulysses often give up on Joyce's final novel within the first few pages. If the combination of portmanteau words, irregular grammar, and vast allusive breadth is not sufficient to discourage the reader, the knowledge that there are another 625 pages of this stuff lying ahead almost certainly will. To read any, let alone all, of Finnegans Wake is a challenge. Perhaps the one thing more difficult than reading this text is writing about it.
As Finn Fordham demonstrates in the introduction to his excellent Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals, one can identify a number of different approaches to Joyce's novel within the vast quantity of criticism it has inspired. Choosing which approach to take is not, however, an easy matter. Rigorous structuralist analysis of the text or its composition seems to go against the ethos of this fluid, unstable work. Yet to move too far in the opposite direction risks a descent into critical despair or, worse, inane sub-Joycean wordplay. Fordham's book is an attempt at a responsible analysis of the Wake. It combines the genetic and the exegetical in order to create a new method of reading: "I take a short, relatively self-contained passage of between half a page to three pages, and trace how it grew from its earliest draft of perhaps just fifteen to twenty words, through the many draft levels, up to the form of its appearance in the final version, the third edition of 1975" (33). By reading the text in this way, Fordham...