I’m not sure, Jon, what you mean by ‘rhetorical writing’ & how it differs from the task facing the writer of fiction. The latter still has to have a clear idea in his mind of the images, the conversations, the actions of his story & how to set them down in the most transmissable way. Finnegans Wake may be the delight of American academics but who else ? The very idiosyncratic nature of the language makes it rapidly wearisome to most of us & finally inaccessible to all but the most obsessional Joyceans. As a practising shrink I remember how diverting I initially found the language of schizophrenics with all its charming distortions, clang associations & so on. And much of Joyce’s language is like that. But quite soon one becomes aware of its essential emptiness & banality. Its extreme self-centredness makes it, after a while, extraordinarily boring. Which is what, for me at least, Joyce’s later stuff also becomes. Without subscribing to any Jungian nonsense about a collective unconscious I feel there *is* a deep pool of common experiences shared by most people in our culture & that it is into this that the great writer taps. I still cannot see how individual, private projections do anything but dissipate the writer’s original vision. Scottie B.