His writing is not about something it is that something itself. It is not to be read-or rather it is not only to be read. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. Joyce has a word to say to you on the subject: “Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as harmful etc.” And another: “Who in his hearts doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the orther? Or that both may be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up in turn and considered apart from the other?” The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation.

You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. Wells told Joyce, You have turned your back on common menon their elementary needs What is the result Vast riddles. It has lines like, What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods In some ways, this makes the book almost impossible to read. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake doesn’t work like other novels.

Here is direct expression-pages and pages of it. The text here is taken directly, presented with its original spellings in subtitle form, and spoken almost verbatim by the actors. “On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Abstract animation pioneer Mary Ellen Butes longtime passion project and only feature, Passages from James Joyces Finnegans Wake, confidently dives, headfirst, into the dreamworld.

Passages from finnegans wake