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VN and Finnegans Wake
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From: Galya Diment <galya@u.washington.edu>
I actually find it more surprising that VN considered Joyce's
_Portrait_ "a feeble and garrulous book" (the same interview with
Appel; SO 71) than that he didn't like _Finnegans Wake_.
VN's objections to FW -- and, in particular, Joyce's punning there -- are
also recorded in his Joyce Lecture, when he compares the end of the
Maternity Hospital chapter -- where everyone ends up in Burke's --
to the later novel: "The hullabaloo at the bar is rendered in a manner
where I find reflected the grotesque, inflated, broken, mimicking,
and punning style of the author's next and last novel, _Finnegans
Wake_ (1939), one of the greatest failures in literature" (LL, 349).
I suspect he considered FW too excessive and not controlled tightly
enough for his own artistic sensibilities. One can disagree with this
point of view but it does fit within his overall sense of "worthy" art.
His objection to _A Portrait_ is -- to me, at least -- harder to
comprehend.
Galya Diment
I actually find it more surprising that VN considered Joyce's
_Portrait_ "a feeble and garrulous book" (the same interview with
Appel; SO 71) than that he didn't like _Finnegans Wake_.
VN's objections to FW -- and, in particular, Joyce's punning there -- are
also recorded in his Joyce Lecture, when he compares the end of the
Maternity Hospital chapter -- where everyone ends up in Burke's --
to the later novel: "The hullabaloo at the bar is rendered in a manner
where I find reflected the grotesque, inflated, broken, mimicking,
and punning style of the author's next and last novel, _Finnegans
Wake_ (1939), one of the greatest failures in literature" (LL, 349).
I suspect he considered FW too excessive and not controlled tightly
enough for his own artistic sensibilities. One can disagree with this
point of view but it does fit within his overall sense of "worthy" art.
His objection to _A Portrait_ is -- to me, at least -- harder to
comprehend.
Galya Diment