Finnegans Wake & Dreaming of the ‘Everything Novel’ / Robert Fay. In: 3 Quarks Daily Feb 4, 2019

In the winter of 1927 James Joyce was in desperate need of a kind word. It didn’t seem to matter that he was a genius, the man who’d published Ulysses five years earlier, an artist of such magnitude that another Irish genius—a young Samuel Beckett—worshipped him and acted as his personal secretary. Joyce was completing a new novel under the working name, Work in Progress (Finnegans Wake), and nearly everyone who had read drafts hated it.

James Joyce in Paris.

His wife, Nora Joyce, badgered him: “Why don’t you write sensible books that people can understand?” while his longtime patron, the sophisticated Harriet Shaw Weaver, wrote him scathing letters. She found the work nearly indecipherable. “I am made in such a way that I do not care much for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darkness and unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language system,” she wrote. Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann in his definitive chronicle James Joyce (1959), tells us that Joyce was so upset by this letter he “took to his bed.”
In Joyce’s three previous books he had explored and mastered the limits of the short story and the autobiographical novel, and then proceeded to write a maximalist “avant-garde” novel,  Ulysses (1922), that was arguably three-to-four decades ahead of its time. In baseball terms, Ulysses remains the equivalent of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941. A record of human achievement that is unassailable and will forever remain a sacred Mount Sanai for writers across the globe.
Yet this great book burdened Joyce too. Like DiMaggio, he had to know his achievement was not repeatable. “In Dubliners he had explored the waking consciousness from outside, in A Portrait and Ulysses from inside,” Ellmann wrote. “He had begun to impinge, but gingerly, upon the mind of sleep…that the great psychological discovery of the century was the night world he was, of course, aware.”
Ellmann, we can’t forget, is referring to the writings and work of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theory, which was an intellectual bombshell of the early 20^th Century that was only rivaled by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. In Finnegans Wake Joyce was looking to create an entirely new language for the new territory of the unconscious, of sleep, of the dream world. ... [mehr] https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2019/02/finnegans-wake-dreaming-of-the-everything-novel.html