Language as Prayer in Finnegans Wake

Abstract

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake abounds with prayers from all traditions, and their echoes and cadences may be found on almost every page. Bringing together thinkers from antiquity, the Middle Ages, early Enlightenment, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book argues that Joyce views prayer as theory of language. It gives Joyce a verbal strategy for discussing immaterial things from which he composes his book of the night: image, magic, dreams, and speech. Beginning with the second-century theologian Origen’s treatise On Prayer, as well as the eighteenth-century philosopher and rhetorician Giambattista Vico’s theories of the formation of language and culture, the book argues that Joyce’s use of language as prayer works progressively across the four sections of the novel, creating meaning from its otherwise discrete and associative arrangement. Since Plato, the culture has recognized that religious utterances possess unique characteristics, yet analytical philosophy and literary scholarship have not produced a focused study of prayer. And although brilliant and essential work in the field of genetic criticism shows us Joyce’s building blocks and methods of creation, no book suggests why Finnegans Wake follows the finished order it does. This work meets those needs.