DANTE... BRUNO... VICO... JOYCE BY Samuel Beckett.
http://dustyhope.com/bel/dante-bruno-vico-joyce-by-samuel-beckett/
In 1929, date of publication of Our Exagmination, the future Finnegans Wake was appearing in transition and its readers were following it with excitement, though often losing their way in the dark of this night piece. They needed help : the articles contributed to transition by writers who had penetrated deeply into the mysteries of Work in Progress, and other essays on the subject, were assembled in the volume entitled (by Joyce) Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, and brought out by Shakespeare and Company.
Sylvia Beach.
The danger is in the neatness of identifications. The conception of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of blackfaced minstrels out of the Teatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation of a carefully folded ham-sandwich.
Giambattista Vico himself could not resist the attractiveness of such coincidence of gesture.
He insisted on complete identification between the philosophical abstraction and the empirical illustration, thereby annulling the absolutism of each conception — hoisting the real unjustifiably clear of its dimensional limits, temporalising that which is extra temporal.
And now here am I, with my handful of abstractions, among which notably : a mountain, the coincidence of contraries, the inevitability of cyclic evolution, a system of Poetics, and the prospect of self- extension in the world of Mr. Joyce’s 'Work in Progress"…