‘Alphybettyformed verbage’: the shape of sounds and letters inFinnegans Wake

Abstract

Abstract The semiotic approach to such untractable masterpieces of modernist or post-modernist writing as Pound's Cantos, Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Arno Schmidt's Zettels Traum, to name but a few of this century's literary monsters, often proves awkward, disappointing and ill-adapted to the experimental quality of their idioms. When experimenting with language these texts create a language of their own, they displace all conventional norms of creation as well as of reception, and become ‘idiolects’ properly speaking which cannot easily be reduced to a set of codes underlying them.1 But if, having realized the idiolectal quality of the work, one refuses to apply exterior concepts and remains within the confines of its specificity, then the commentary will hardly avoid turning into a repetitive and sanctifying gloss, running the risk of forfeiting any critical leverage it could bring to bear on the text. Besides, when the text seems to anticipate whatever critical discourse can be elaborated about it by constantly writing about itself, as is clearly the case with Finnegans Wake, when the parade of parodic exegesis debunks all the notions of ‘code’, ‘discourse’, ‘semantics’, all understood in their metaphysical naivety and mythical candour as the tools of a traditional language which the new idiolect aims at subverting,2 it becomes extremely difficult to situate an adequate exegesis: it cannot be ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’ the text — but it can attempt to describe the loops of the text with its ideal or real reader, and appreciate the subversive power of its renewed semantics.