If there is a more disorienting kind of reading than one encounters with Finnegans Wake, it is found in Joyce's Wake notebooks, and the differences between these two forms of reading are worth investigating. To the much-asked and muchfumbled question of how we read Finnegans Wake, Finn Fordham has outlined seven different interpretive approaches to the book: Structural, Narrational, Theoretical, Inspirational, Philological, Genetic, and Exegetical. As helpful as these (sometimes porous) categorizations are, these are distant evaluations, perceived by standing back from the text. In other words, they are “macro” views of reading, implicitly predicated on the text's being a functional object (a book, literary in character, perhaps a novel) rather than, say, an indeterminate thing (some sort of “writing”) or even a kind of cognitive environment, while what I am asking about here is the “micro” view, the immediate predicament of a reader faced with an unusual and often bewildering form of writing. The difference is between seeing the forest and seeing the trees. Let us, for the duration of this discussion, insofar as it is possible, be arborists rather than forest inspectors.

On this “micro” level, Finnegans Wake requires its reader to suspend if not abandon recognition as a reliable operating principle. A more or (often) less familiar sequence of letters or sounds will provoke a reaction of “almost— but not quite,” and after a while, as Clive Hart has remarked, “the mind's ear takes part-writing for granted, the mind's eye is fixed in a permanent state of multiple vision.” Positive identification (X = Y) is supplanted by negative correspondence (X ≠ Y, but X is not altogether unlike Y). A sentence found in some other book, a sentence such as “Napoleon was imprisoned on the island of St. Helena until his death,” causes a reader to directly associate each word with some workable definition within a field or cluster of personal associations with that word (“Napoleon” might well be the painted profile of the Emperor for one reader, or a Bugs Bunny character to another, while “imprisoned” may require more imagination than memory for anyone who has never been incarcerated, and so on).