Finnegans Wake & Narrative Design

BOOK REVIEWS or a precise cultural allusion that might bewilder readers of other nationalities and backgrounds. The experienced Woolfian will benefit from a host of new perspectives, including the revaluation of The Waves and the repercussions of scientific inquiry on the last novels. As might be expected from the body of her work, Gillian Beer beats no fashionable drum and is mesmerized by no particular theory, opting instead to tease out meanings in context and to discover multiple possibilities. One of the further pleasures on offer here is that she manages to achieve her aims and to convey her enthusiasm in prose that is consistently lucid and elegant. J. H. Stape ---------------------- Kyoto University Finnegans Wake & Narrative Design Harry Burrell. Narrative Design in Finnegans Wake: The Wake Lock Picked. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. xiii + 226 pp. $49.95 TWO CHEERS for Harry Burrell's Narrative Design in Finnegans Wake. First, for the style. It is uncomplicated and unpretentious, unexceptional and unexceptionable. Can you appreciate, gentle reader, how welcome these qualities might make it, to someone long inured to 80s and 90s literary criticism, Joycean and otherwise? Reading it, I felt like the satisfied customers cited in Leopold Bloom's advertising prospectus for Wonderworker, a mechanical medical device for the relieving of excess gas: "They note delightful result like a cool drink of fresh spring water on a sultry summer's day." Along with the cheer for style, another for substance. Burrell has chosen a theme, Biblical narrative in Finnegans Wake, which though long recognized as central to the subject, has, with the partial exception of Virginia Moseley's not-very-good 1967 study Joyce and the Bible, gone without the full-length treatment it merits. What is more, his approach to the subject is strongly focused throughout, never losing sight of its central argument. That argument is that Finnegans Wake is built on the gnostic heresy that the God of the Creation was also the Original Sinner. Again, this reading is not new. James S. Atherton long ago advanced essentially the same thesis, and others, myself included, have followed Atherton's lead in our commentaries. But Burrell's is the first full-length exploration of Atherton's insight. Good things follow from this enterprise of clear-headed single-mindedness . Any Joycean reader will learn much of interest on the subject of 101 ELT 41: 1 1998 theology in general and Gnosticism in particular. Perhaps arising from his determination to make his case for as much of Finnegans Wake as possible, Burrell frequently follows the admirably forthright method of citing long consecutive sections from the book, accompanied with pointby -point explanations of how they fit into the central gnostic story he discerns. The reader is thereby given many hundreds of instances by which to test his thesis. If you believe, as I do, that after decades of high theory we are still left with the old close-reading truth that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, that the best method—excuse me: methodology —is the one which winds up showing you the most new, tenably true things about a given text, then this is the way to do it. Burrell is not afraid to lay his cards on the table, bravely leaving it up to us to take or leave from among his myriad urgings. The problem, and the main reason that Narrative Design in Finnegans Wake is not the book it might have been, is that far too many of those offerings deserve to be left rather than taken. Without venturing an estimate of what percentage of readings need to be plausible for a book of this sort to prevail, I have to say, regrettably, that the percentage achieved here is too low, by a wide margin: of its many hundreds of assertions, hundreds are probably right, but other hundreds are just as probably—certainly, in too many cases—wrong. And I have to also add, again with regret, that in pursuing the virtues of clarity and singlemindedness Burrell is not always able to avoid the corresponding vices of over-simplification and tunnel vision. If Finnegans Wake has sometimes proven a siren-song for those given...