The wider literary community were equally disparaging, with D. H. Lawrence declaring in a letter to Maria and Aldous Huxley, having read sections of the Wake appearing as «Work in Progress» in transition, «My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate journalistic dirty-mindedness – what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!» Vladimir Nabokov, who had also admired Ulysses, described Finnegans Wake as «nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room […] and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity.» In response to such criticisms, transition published essays throughout the late 1920s, defending and explaining Joyce’s work. In 1929, these essays (along with a few others written for the occasion) were collected under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress and published by Shakespeare and Company. This collection featured Samuel Beckett’s first commissioned work, the essay «Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce», along with contributions by William Carlos Williams, Stuart Gilbert, Marcel Brion, Eugene Jolas and others. As Margot Norris highlights, the agenda of this first generation of Wake critics and defenders was «to assimilate Joyce’s experimental text to an already increasingly established and institutionalized literary avant-garde» and «to foreground Joyce’s last work as spearhead of a philosophical avant-garde bent on the revolution of language».
Upon its publication in 1939, Finnegans Wake received a series of mixed, but mostly negative reviews. Louise Bogan, writing for Nation, surmised that while «the book’s great beauties, its wonderful passages of wit, its variety, its mark of genius and immense learning are undeniable […], to read the book over a long period of time gives one the impression of watching intemperance become addiction, become debauch» and argued that «Joyce’s delight in reducing man’s learning, passion, and religion to a hash is also disturbing.» Edwin Muir, reviewing in Listener wrote that «as a whole the book is so elusive that there is no judging it; I cannot tell whether it is winding into deeper and deeper worlds of meaning or lapsing into meaningless», although he too acknowledged that «there are occasional flashes of a kind of poetry which is difficult to define but is of unquestioned power.» B. Ifor Evans, writing in the Manchester Guardian, similarly argued that, due to its difficulties, the book «does not admit of review», and argued that, perhaps «in twenty years’ time, with sufficient study and with the aid of the commentary that will doubtless arise, one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it.» Taking a swipe at many of the negative reviews circulating at the time, Evans writes: «The easiest way to deal with the book would be […] to write off Mr. Joyce’s latest volume as the work of a charlatan. But the author of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses is not a charlatan, but an artist of very considerable proportions. I prefer to suspend judgement…»
In the time since Joyce’s death, the book’s admirers have struggled against public perception of the work to make exactly this argument for Finnegans Wake. One of the book’s early champions was Thornton Wilder, who wrote to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in August 1939, a few months after the book’s publication: «One of my absorptions […] has been James Joyce’s new novel, digging out its buried keys and resolving that unbroken chain of erudite puzzles and finally coming on lots of wit, and lots of beautiful things has been my midnight recuperation. A lot of thanks to him». The publication in 1944 of the first in-depth study and analysis of Joyce’s final text—A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by mythologist Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson—tried to prove to a skeptical public that if the hidden key or «Monomyth» could be found, then the book could be read as a novel with characters, plot, and an internal coherence.
As a result, from the 1940s to the 1960s critical emphasis moved away from positioning the Wake as a «revolution of the word» and towards readings that stressed its «internal logical coherence», as «the avant-gardism of Finnegans Wake was put on hold [and] deferred while the text was rerouted through the formalistic requirements of an American criticism inspired by New Critical dicta that demanded a poetic intelligibility, a formal logic, of texts.» Slowly the book’s critical capital began to rise to the point that, in 1957, Northrop Frye described Finnegans Wake as the «chief ironic epic of our time» and Anthony Burgess lauded the book as «a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page.» Concerning the importance of such laughter, Darragh Greene has argued that the Wake through its series of puns, neologisms, compounds, and riddles shows the play of Wittgensteinian language-games, and by laughing at them, the reader learns how language makes the world and is freed from its snares and bewitchment.
In 1962, Clive Hart wrote the first major book-length study of the work since Campbell’s Skeleton Key, Structure and Motif in «Finnegans Wake» which approached the work from the increasingly influential field of structuralism. However through the 1960s it was to be French post-structuralist theory that was to exert the most influence over readings of Finnegans Wake, refocussing critical attention back to the work’s radical linguistic experiments and their philosophical consequences. Jacques Derrida compared his ideas of literary «deconstruction» with the methods of Finnegans Wake (as detailed in the essay «Two Words for Joyce»), and more generally post-structuralism has embraced Joyce’s innovation and ambition in Finnegans Wake.[208] Derrida tells an anecdote about the two books’ importance for his own thought; in a bookstore in Tokyo,
an American tourist of the most typical variety leaned over my shoulder and sighed: «So many books! What is the definitive one? Is there any?» It was an extremely small book shop, a news agency. I almost replied, «Yes, there are two of them, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake».
The text’s influence on other writers has grown since its initial shunning, and contemporary American author Tom Robbins is among the writers working today to have expressed his admiration for Joyce’s complex last work:
the language in it is incredible. There’s so many layers of puns and references to mythology and history. But it’s the most realistic novel ever written. Which is exactly why it’s so unreadable. He wrote that book the way that the human mind works. An intelligent, inquiring mind. And that’s just the way consciousness is. It’s not linear. It’s just one thing piled on another. And all kinds of cross references. And he just takes that to an extreme. There’s never been a book like it and I don’t think there ever will be another book like it. And it’s absolutely a monumental human achievement. But it’s very hard to read.
More recently, Finnegans Wake has become an increasingly accepted part of the critical literary canon, although detractors still remain. As an example, John Bishop described the book’s legacy as that of «the single most intentionally crafted literary artifact that our culture has produced […] and, certainly, one of the great monuments of twentieth-century experimental letters.» The section of the book to have received the most praise throughout its critical history has been «Anna Livia Plurabelle» (I.8), which Parrinder describes as being «widely recognized as one of the most beautiful prose-poems in English.»
In October 2023, a California book club marked the milestone of finishing the book 28 years after they started reading it in 1995. The group spent longer reading it than the 17 years James Joyce spent writing it. The group didn’t opt for a next book, deciding to return to the beginning again, following the last sentence’s finish mid sentence.
Publication and translation history
Throughout the seventeen years that Joyce wrote the book, Finnegans Wake was published in short excerpts in a number of literary magazines, most prominently in the Parisian literary journals Transatlantic Review and Eugene Jolas’s transition. It has been argued that «Finnegans Wake, much more so than Ulysses, was very much directly shaped by the tangled history of its serial publication.» In late October 1923 in Ezra Pound’s Paris flat, Ford Madox Ford convinced Joyce to contribute some of his new sketches to the Transatlantic Review, a new journal that Ford was editing.
The eight-page «Mamalujo» sketch became the first fragment from the book to be published in its own right, in Transatlantic Review 1.4 in April 1924. The sketch appeared under the title «From Work in Progress», a term applied to works by Ernest Hemingway and Tristan Tzara published in the same issue, and the one by which Joyce would refer to his final work until its publication as Finnegans Wake in 1939. The sketch appeared in the final published text, in
