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 10I 
READING 
FINNEGANS 
WAKE 
THE NOVELISTIC FALLACY 
In an early essay, Harry Levin wrote of Finnegans Wake: 
Concretely, there are at least three misconceptions that threaten to shape
our total impression of Finnegans Wake. The first of these is that, while
not differing greatly in kind from the books we are accustomed to read, it
happens to have been written in a rather queer language, and must therefore
undergo the process of translation to which all foreign books—including
the Scandinavian—are regularly subjected. . . . A second, and related,
fallacy is that Finnegans Wake is a novel. Herein is the real reason for
putting critical emphasis on the ' story' and brusquely attempting to extract
a quintessential content from the morass of form in which it lies embedded.'
The persistence and authority of the novelistic assumption in criticisms
of Finnegans Wake have been greater than even Harry Levin could have foreseen.
Before launching a study of the Wake as a dream-work, it might be helpful
to probe the "novelistic fallacy" by examining Finnegans Wake in the light
of the fundamental presuppositions and characteristics of the traditional
novel. 
 Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967) locates the philosophical roots of the novel in the subjectivism of
eighteenth-century thought. He cites specifically the belief in the individual's
claim to knowledge and truth through his