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 1INTRODUCTION 
THE 
CRITICAL 
METHOD 
 STRUCTURE AND LANGUAGE 
 Thanks to the patient toil of its dedicated explicators, the major contours
of Joyce's Finnegans Wake have gradually come into focus in the thirty-five
years since its publication. Yet while more allusions, motifs, and linguistic
details are continually coming to light, the intellectual orientation of
the work remains largely obscure. 
 The attempt to assess the teleology of Finnegans Wake has always presented
critics with a dilemma: the choice between a radical and a conservative interpretation
of the book. A radical interpretation would maintain that Finnegans Wake
subverts not only the literary status quo but the most cherished intellectual
preconceptions of Western culture as well—a position most clearly maintained
in the pioneer studies of the work. Yet in these early studies, such as Our
Exagmination,1 the weakness of the radical interpretation also becomes apparent.
While proclaiming the revolutionary nature of Work in Progress, the writers
lack scholarly pegs on which to hang their theories and finally resort to
ad hoc analogies to support their theses. In contrast, the conservative critics,
who have dominated Wake criticism for the last thirty years, possess a small
but scholarly arsenal: the stylistic and thematic conservatism of the early
manuscript drafts, the inclusion of traditional, even arcane, literary material
in the work, Joyce's admission that the