“The first four paragraphs are the suspended tick of time between a cycle just past and one about to begin”

"Introduction to a strange subject. Running riddle and fluid answer, Finnegans Wake is a mighty allegory of the fall so mankind. It is a strange book, a compound of fables, symphony and nightmare. A monstrous enigma beckoning imperiously from the shadowy pits of sleep. Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the necessities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all phases of individual and racial development into a circular design of which every part is beginning, middle and end. In a gigantic wheeling rebus, dim effigies rumble past, disappear into foggy horizons and are replaced by other images, vague but half consciously familiar. On this revolving stage, mythological heroes and events of remotest antiquity occupy the same spatial and temporal plains as modern personages and contemporary happenings. All time occurs simultaneously. Tristam, Wellington, Father Adam and Humpty Dumpty merge in a single precept. Multiple meanings are present in every line. Interlocking allusions to key words and phrases are woven like fugal themes into the pattern of the work. Finnegans Wake is a prodigious, multifaceted monolith, not only the cauchemar of a Dublin citizen but the dreamlike saga of guilt stained evolving humanity. The vast scope and intricate structure of Finnegans Wake gives the book a forbidding aspect of impenetrability. It appears to be a dense and baffling jungle, trackless and overgrown with wanton perversities of form and language. Clearly such a book is not meant to be idly fingered. It tasks the imagination, exacts discipline and tenacity from those who would march with it, yet some of the difficulties disappear as soon as the well-disposed compass clues and gets his bearings. Then enormous map of Finnegans Wake begins slowly to unfold, characters and motifs emerge, themes become recognizable and Joyce’s vocabulary falls more and more familiarly on the accustomed ear. Complete understanding is not to be snatched at greedily in one sitting or in fifty, I might add. Nevertheless the ultimate state of the intelligent reader is certainly not bewilderment. Rather it is an admiration for the unifying insight, economy of means and more than Rabelaisian humor, which has miraculously quickened the stupendous mass of material. One acknowledges at last that James Joyce’s overwhelming micro/macrocosm could not have been fired to life in any sorcerer furnace less black, less heavy, less murky than this, his incredible book. He had to smelt the modern dictionary back to protean plasma and reenact the genesis and mutation of language in order to deliver his message. But the final wonder is that such a message could be delivered at all."