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716 J A M E S [ 1936-1939 ]at those many festive dinners in Paris during the past twenty years. Oralmost so.In retrospect, it seems clear that the 'monster,' as Joyce several timescalled Finnegans Wake in these days, had to be written, and that he hadto write it. Readers may still sigh because he did not approach them moredirectly, but it does not appear that this alternative was open to him. InDubliners he had explored the waking consciousness from outside, in APortrait and Ulysses from inside. He had begun to impinge, but gingerly,upon the mind asleep. There lay before him, as in 1922 he well knew,this almost totally unexplored expanse. That the great psychological discoveryof his century was the night world he was, of course, aware, buthe frowned on using that world as a means of therapy. Joyce's purposewas not so didactic; he wished, unassumingly enough, to amuse menwith it.The night attracted him also for another reason.* He had begun hiswriting by asserting his difference from other men, and now increasinglyhe recognized his similarity to them. This point of view was more easilydemonstrable in sleeping than in waking life. Sleep is the great democratizer:in their dreams people become one, and everything about thembecomes one. Nationalities lose their borders, levels of discourse and societyare no longer separable, time and space surrender their demarcations.All human activities begin to fuse into all other human activities,printing a book into bearing a baby, fighting a war into courting a woman.By day we attempt originality; by night plagiarism is forced upon us. InA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce had demonstrated therepetition of traits in the firsttwenty years of one person's life; in Ulysseshe had displayed this repetition in the day of two persons; in FinnegansWake he displayed it in the lives of everyone.The language of the new book was as necessary to it as the verbalarrangements of his previous works to them. He had already succeededin adapting English to suit states of mind and even times of day, butchiefly by special arrangements and special kinds of words in differentchapters. Now, for Finnegans Wake, a polyglot language had to bebrought, even more daringly, to its own making-house, t To imitate thesophistication of word- and image-formation in the unconscious mind(for Joyce discarded the notion that the mind's basic movements wereprimitive), he took settled words and images, then dismembered and reconstitutedthem.* The theory that Joyce wrote his book for the ear because he could not see is not onlyan insult to the creative imagination, but an error of fact. Joyce could see; to be forperiods half-blind is not at all the same thing as to be permanently blind. The eyes areclosed in Finnegans Wake because to open them would change the book's postulate,t Joyce insisted to Jacques Mercanton that he worked strictly in accord with laws of phonetics.'The only difference is that, in my imitation of the dream-state, I effect in a fewminutes what may have taken centuries to bring about.' 97