5/16/2023 0 Comments Finnegans wake![]() ![]() And this concern with the word has brought him far as a literary Joyce approached the problem of the word not only as a writer but as a musician, a linguist, a man trained in scholastic philosophy in which definition and rigorous literalness are insisted on. ![]() Not their colors: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Was it their colors? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the gray-fringed fleece of clouds. The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. We have the youth of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" meditating upon a sentence he has read: From his early days Joyce has exercised his imagination and intellect upon the significance Today look to James Joyce, who has proved himself the most learned, the most subtle, the most thorough-going exponent of the value-making word. They must move for him like pigeons in flight that make a shadow on the grass, not like corn popping. The problem of the writer of today is to possess real words, not ectoplasmic words, and to know how to order them. There are great writers today who do not put us off with destitute words: Yeats's "The dolphin-torn, the gong-tormented sea" are value-making words. "Ranger" is a real word, holding a sense of distance, suggesting mountains "lone" beside it makes the distance inner. ![]() I think that there is more verbal creation in these words than in chapters of Galsworthy's. As I write this sentence I see the title of a moving picture before me: it is "The Lone Ranger" I am not speaking now of magazine writing, but of the writing of authors of status- John Galsworthy, for instance. Language, nothing less than the problem of conveying meaning through words, is the first term we have to discuss in connection with "Finnegans Wake." Let us get away from the book for a moment and begin by saying that writing today- I mean whatĬan be described as imaginative writing- is dissociated from the value-making word: that is, it is writing, passing from the brain through the hand to the paper without ever coming out on the lips to be words that a man would say in passion I say lessened perplexity, for aĬertain perplexity cannot wholly be removed from a reading of it and the present reviewer freely acknowledges that there is much in the book that he is still seeking explanation for. Ow, in two thousand words or less, is one to review a book which even a cursory examination shows to be unprecedented, a book of considerable length by a thoughtfulĪnd tremendously equipped man who has spent sixteen years writing it? The only thing one can do is to indicate the value of the work and to show a way of approaching it with lessened perplexity. A New Work by James Joyce By PADRAIC COLUM ![]()
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