Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Mark H Ingraham Prize)

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 496 pages
• Published by: University of Wisconsin Press June 15, 1993
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0299108244
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0299108243
• Book Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.8 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 2.1 pounds

Reader Reviews
Unlike any other book in English literature, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) is written entirely on the level of dream consciousness. Joycean scholar John Bishop has tightly focused his attention on the *sleep* aspects of Finnegans Wake. While this makes for a rather monochromatic presentation sometimes bordering the banal, the scholarship, clarity, and thrust of Bishop's presentation are indisputable. At bottom, one really doesn't like to admit there's so much in Finnegans Wake that such restrained scholarship is required to understand just one aspect of it. But then again, this work was the mature James Joyce's magnum opus. From the text, pages 4-7: "Suppose we charged ourselves with the task of providing in chronological order a detailed account of everything that occurred to us NOT last night ... but in the first half-hour of last night's sleep. The 'hole affair' [535.20], (and a 'hole', unlike a 'whole', has no content), will likely summon up a sustained 'blank memory' [515.33]: 'You wouldn't should as youd remesner, I hypnot' [360.23-24]. What would become equally obscure, even questionable, is the stability of identity... No one remembers the experience of sleep at all as a sequence of events linked chronologically in time by cause and effect." Joyce remarked to his friend William Bird: "About my new work - do you know, Bird, I confess I can't understand some of my critics, like Pound or Miss Weaver, for instance. They say it's *obscure*. They compare it, of course, with Ulysses. But the action of Ulysses was chiefly in the daytime, and the action of my new work takes place chiefly at night. It's natural things should not be so clear at night, isn't it now?" Superb scholarship and a major key to understanding the deep strata of Finnegans Wake.