Another Joyce Anecdote presented by Joyce

from "The Enigmatic Art of Self-Criticism"
in The Faith of a Writer
Joyce Carol Oates

James Joyce believed, or wished to believe, that Finnegans Wake, on which he had labored for sixteen years, was not one of the most diffiuclt, abstruse, and demanding novels in the English language, but a "simple" novel: "If anyone doesn't understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud." (Then again, in a less inflated mood, Joyce confessed: "Perhaps it is insanity. One will be able to judge in a century." Joyce offered no rejoinder to his brother Stanislaus's judgment that Finnegans Wake is "unspeakably wearisome. . . the witless wander of literature before its final extinction. I would not read a paragraph of it if I did not know you.")

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