WORDS OF WARNING, POINTS TO PONDER:
Sennsible reflections from Zurich

" (...) whenever we use the form ‘Finnegans Wake is...’, we might do well to remember that we are engaging in a metaphor."
‘Dogmad or Dubliboused?’, in Joyce’s Dislocutions 98

"What do we mean by [Molly Bloom] is? (...) What falsifies such sweeping characterizations is perhaps that, merely out of typographical necessity, they have to end with a period, other wise a signal of finality. The sign is grotesquely hyperbolized at the end of Ithaca, wholly absent in the body of the Penelope chapter, and pointedly missing at the end of the Wake. Our critical efforts sometimes look like dogged attempts to reintroduce the periods, full stops, where Joyce significantly utilized the potency of their absence."
‘Dogmad or Dubliboused?’, in Joyce’s Dislocutions 103-104

"Senn's rule of thumb – when we think we know what a feature of Ulysses really is we can be sure to be partially wrong."
‘Dogmad or Dubliboused?’, in Joyce’s Dislocutions 108

"Why, anyway, should we undo Joyce's handiwork and back-translate a Wakean item into what is is at such pains to evade? (...) We extract what sense we can find to rearrange it according to our needs and our categories. But let us by all means know that this is what we are doing and not confuse it with what Finnegans Wake ‘is’ (...) One way of phrasing all this is to say that in Finnegans Wake an emerging pattern tends to be discredited as soon as it becomes discerible. The text begins by unravelling its Penelopean texture at once."
‘Dogmad or Dubliboused?’, in Joyce’s Dislocutions 113-14

"If there is any quintessential formula for Ulysses, I do not think it will be contained in a resounding, world embracing YES, nor in an equally reductive nihilistic NO and rejection of our time, but in a modest, persistent, skeptical, Bloomian ‘Yes but’."
‘Book of Many Turns’, in Joyce's Dislocutions 136

"A prime characteristic of Ulysses is its lofty reluctance to conform, its resistance to any of our categories, to any kind of methodization. It still eldudes us. It is true that if you look at the assurance with which some statements about Ulysses are being put forth, you are likely to doubt the elusiveness claimed here, but the certainties academically announced tend to be mainly in the trustful eyes of the beholders: one of the things Ulysses could teach us is just how naïve eyes trained in tradition can be. Actually we do not even understand Ulysses sufficiently, on the most elementary of all possible levels, certainly not as well as some reference works blandly assert. We find ourselves faced by more questions than we thought might be there. The common professional way to deal with Ulysses is to bypass it with some glib generalizations, or theories never quite put to the test."
‘Dislocution’ in Joyce's Dislocutions 199-200

"As commentators we show and analyze underlying patterns of the text. It is also part of our job to recognize that such patterns are limited, and that there are many of them, sometimes at variance with each other, and that none of them is wholly reliable or reliably whole."
‘Weaving, Unweaving’, in Epstein (ed.) 48.

"We might need, on occasion, more awareness of our own Procrustean techniques, never quite adequate for all the Protean resilience of the works and all their kaleidoskeptic turns."
‘Weaving, Unweaving’, in Epstein (ed.) 69.