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TECHNIQUE 
DECONSTRUCTION 
 When Samuel Beckett wrote of Work in Progress, "Here form is content, content
is form," he seemed to beg the same question that Yeats so wisely left in
rhetorical form at the end of "Among Schoolchildren." Beckett goes on to
support his comment by noting, "His writing is not about something; it is
that something itself. . . When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep.
. . . When the sense is dancing, the words dance." True, of course, but the
same could be said even more convincingly about Ulysses, particularly the
tour de force of "Oxen in the Sun," and the musical form of "Sirens." Questions
of content and form in Finnegans Wake must at least explain its difference
from Ulysses, and this difference is quite simple. Whatever its mythical
underpinnings, Ulysses is about three people, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom,
and Molly Bloom, in Dublin, Ireland on 16 June 1904. On Bloomsday, every
16 June, we can take Bloomsday pilgrimages in Dublin because we know exactly
where Bloom spent his entire day. In fact, we know Bloom as well as we are
ever likely to know any fictional character. On the other hand, Nathan Halper
notwithstanding, we don't know when Earwicker dreams, or if he dreams, or
if his name is really Humphrey (it could be Harold) Chimpden Earwicker (it
could be Porter or Coppinger or O'Reilly). We know that Molly is voluptuous,
but