Riddles in Finnegans Wake

Abstract

Riddles, strictly speaking, are descriptions of objects intended to suggest something entirely different;' they are based on analogies which are perceived between natural things: some Boeotian humorist, for example, detected the analogy between the life of humanity-the child on all fours, the man erect on two legs, old age with its staff-on one side, and on the other the conception of an animal with a varying number of limbs. Put this in a question and it is the riddle of the Sphinx.2 True riddles exist now only in folklore and what are generally thought of as riddles today are really conundrums, puns in interrogative form. Both riddles and conundrums are based, however, on analogies, whether between things in nature (riddles) or words (conundrums), and both depend on ambiguities in language, words applied to one thing can also be applied to something else. When one considers Joyce's propensity for finding correspondences between various orders of nature and his interest in mirroring these in verbal ambiguity, it is not surprising to find in his work, and in Finnegans Wake especially, a considerable use of riddle material.