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 What We Still Don't Know About Finnegans Wake 41 
soon to predict that Finnegans Wake will never be fully read by any reader
(no matter how ideal he may otherwise be). Fragments will be chipped away,
brought into the glare of the sun, polished to a high gloss and admired.
Conversely, generalities and broad statements will be made about the Wake,
and in many cases fairly well documented. But the replacement of piece after
piece into a reconstructed mosaic fully indicating the lines of the book's
ideas and material will probably never take place. 
 What Joyce said of Ezra Pound and his interpretation of Ulysses will be
said of many critics for years to come: there will be "brilliant discoveries
and howling blunders."34 But it is naïve to expect, in the foreseeable
future, that the mountain will come to Mohammed. Joyce, who apparently delighted
in creating his own facsimile of previous "bibles," may have provided for
many centuries of new "Talmudic" scholarship. The number of words already
printed explaining the Wake far exceeds the number of words in the Wake itself.
The role of the contemporary commentator of Finnegans Wake is not to pontificate
on "what it is all about exactly," but humbly to attempt to show, while pausing
along the route of his reading, "what's this here, Guvnor?"