The portmanteau word challenges two myths on which most assumptions about the efficacy of language rest. Sixty years after it first started appearing, the novel-if the Wake can still be called a novel-that makes the portmanteau word a cornerstone of its method remains a troublesome presence in the institution of literature. There can be no doubt that a major reason for this negative reaction is the work’s intensive use of the portmanteau word, which is what makes the style ‘outlandish,’ demands ‘effort’ from the reader, renders the work ‘laborious’ and ‘unrewarding,’ inhibits the communication of ‘felt life.’ The portmanteau word is a monster, a word that is not a word, that is not authorized by any dictionary, that holds out the worrying prospect of books which, instead of comfortingly recycling the words we know, possess the freedom endlessly to invent new ones. That the last major work of one of the language’s most admired and influential writers-the product of some sixteen painful years’ labor-has remained on the margins of the literary tradition is an extraordinary but well-established fact.
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