Skipping ahead a bit – to the publication of Finnegans Wake. I have read it out loud to myself. It is meant to be read out loud, it makes much more sense that way. But … “sense”?? It really makes no sense anyway – and whatever sense you can make of it appears to come from the SOUND, rather than the actual words.
James Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake for 17 years.
Nora, looking at the gibberish pages, the ciphers, the codes, said, “Why don’t you write books people can read?”
Ha!
However: Nora always thought that Finnegans Wake – which pretty much the entire world thought was incomprehensible – was his best book. She understood it. She understood the language.
Years after his death, she was still pestererd by reporters about James Joyce. And nobody ever asked about Finnegans Wake – which confused her. It was always Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses.
She commented once, “What’s all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book.”
Yes, that’s right; it was seventeen years. Eleven for “Ulysses”. Anthony Burgess asserted that Joyce worked too long on “Ulysses”, and when he was challenged on the grounds that Joyce took seventeen for “Finnegans Wake”, Burgess replied that the problem with “Ulysses” was the inconsistency of style.
Interesting judgment…
Nora was definitely right, though. “Finnegans Wake” is the much more important work by far.