A Methodology of Reading Finnegans Wake

Abstract

Deconstructive critics have helped readers understand that any text slips the bounds of containability laid upon it. Some texts, however, are more slippery than others. Certain of Donald Barthelme's fiction, many of John Ashbery's poems, Jacques Derrida's Glas, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, for instance, offer greater resistance to readers' efforts to comprehend them than do most other texts. Although these works belong to the twentieth century, unreadable texts are not limited to our era; witness, for example, Blake's The Four Zoas. Such texts may be problematic because their words' first allegiance is to an interiority that refuses the distinction between images of the time/space world and those of the unconscious or subconscious mind. But other conditions