"The question so often asked of modern painting, “What is it?”, contains more than the dull skepticism of the man who is not going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It speaks of a fundamental placement in relation to the work, that of a voyager in the world coming upon a strange object. The reader reconstitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within. It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naïveté. Joyce enforces the way in which Finnegans Wake is to be read. He conceived the reading to be a lifetime project, the book remaining always there, like the landscape surrounding the reader’s home or the buildings bounding the reader’s apartment. The book remains problematic, unexhausted."
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“After Joyce” (1964), p. 4
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Not-Knowing%3A_The_Essays_and_Interviews_of_Donald_Barthelme
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Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme
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