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[ Aetat. 54-57 ] J O Y C ETerence White Gervais, asked him if the book were a blending of literatureand music, and Joyce replied flatly, 'No, it's pure music' 'But arethere not levels of meaning to be explored?' 'No, no,' said Joyce, 'it'smeant to make you laugh.' 48i am only an Irish clown, a great joker atthe universe,' he told Jacques Mercanton. 49Of course, laughter and levelsof meaning were not mutually exclusive, and to someone else, adrinking companion, Joyce corrected 'In vino Veritas' to 'In risu Veritas.''Why have you written the book this way?' was another question. 'Tokeep the critics busy for three hundred years.' 50'The demand that I makeof my reader,' he said with a disarming smile to Max Eastman, 'is thathe should devote his whole life to reading my works.' 51 In FinnegansWake he gave his humorous approval to 'that ideal reader suffering froman ideal insomnia.' 52These and other remarks of Joyce were mostly directed towards thedefense of his book in terms which were not new to criticism. He justifiedits content as a third of human life—the night third. Those who objectedto his method must consider what better way there might be to representthe shiftings of dream life. He defended its theme, its view of life as arecurrence of stock characters and stock situations, another aspect in whichthe psychology and anthropology of his time did not controvert him. Hedefended the complexity of the book as necessary to the theme, a claimwhich has come to be accepted for modern poetry. He defended its techniqueor form in terms of music, insisting not on the union of the arts—although that seems to be implied—but on the importance of sound andrhythm, and the indivisibility of meaning from form, an idea which hasbecome a commonplace in the critical assessment of Eliot's later verse.Finally, he defended his language both in terms of linguistic theory, as alargely emotional medium built up by splitting and agglutination, and interms of the appropriateness of linguistic distortion to a book which tracedthe distortion of dreams and suggested that history was also paranomastic,a jollying duplication of events with slight variations.*Joyce lived more and more quietly as he worked to finish his book.He paid his weekly visits to Lucia, and on June 30, 1937, wrote MyronNutting and his wife that 'it seems that she is at last on the road torecovery.' 54But again the signs of improvement passed away. He allowedhimself only one public appearance, at a meeting of the P.E.N. Club inParis that same month. He had always insisted that the piracy of Ulysseswas a matter of international literary concern, and he brought along ashort speech to announce the important American judicial decision that,quite apart from the Bern copyright convention, an author could not bedeprived of his rights in his own property. The speech was respectfully* Joyce remarked to Mercanton that he had retained his young tenor voice unchanged,so far as he could remember. 'It's because I've not developed. If I had matured, I wouldn'tbe so committed to this folie of writing Work in Progress.' 5iThe importance attached inthe book to children's games was another instance.