Finnegans Wake Research Articles

The Wake of HCE in Shaun the Postman: Duality, Sameness and Universality in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake constitutes one of the highest artistic expressions of modernist literature in the English language. The novel’s departure from realist conventions and its intricate language invite challenging interpretations, fostering an exploration of the narrative in terms of an imitation or reimagination of reality. The distinctive nature of the protagonist’s family, embodying real and metaphorical elements, suggests a potential fusion among the different members. In this regard, this paper focuses on the interpretation of the main male characters – father and sons – as both diverse entities and a unified presence simultaneously, and on the potential rebirth of HCE into Shaun, revealing this fatherly-filial connection especially in the concluding chapters. Central to this exploration is the examination of the concept of “duality”, shedding light on the amalgamation and reimagining of characters into these separate and unified identities. The interplay of characters, particularly the twins, is interpreted as facets of a singular entity, portraying HCE embodying both and affiliating with various characters representing Shaun. Ultimately, the paper aims to unravel the complexities of HCE’s transformation into his son by dissecting the intricacies of duality, sameness and universality throughout the novel.

Statistics of punctuation in experimental literature-The remarkable case of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

As the recent studies indicate, the structure imposed onto written texts by the presence of punctuation develops patterns which reveal certain characteristics of universality. In particular, based on a large collection of classic literary works, it has been evidenced that the distances between consecutive punctuation marks, measured in terms of the number of words, obey the discrete Weibull distribution-a discrete variant of a distribution often used in survival analysis. The present work extends the analysis of punctuation usage patterns to more experimental pieces of world literature. It turns out that the compliance of the the distances between punctuation marks with the discrete Weibull distribution typically applies here as well. However, some of the works by James Joyce are distinct in this regard-in the sense that the tails of the relevant distributions are significantly thicker and, consequently, the corresponding hazard functions are decreasing functions not observed in typical literary texts in prose. Finnegans Wake-the same one to which science owes the word quarks for the most fundamental constituents of matter-is particularly striking in this context. At the same time, in all the studied texts, the sentence lengths-representing the distances between sentence-ending punctuation marks-reveal more freedom and are not constrained by the discrete Weibull distribution. This freedom in some cases translates into long-range nonlinear correlations, which manifest themselves in multifractality. Again, a text particularly spectacular in terms of multifractality is Finnegans Wake.

Semantic Instability and Philosophical Pessimism: Reading ‘De Profundis’ and <em>Finnegans Wake</em> with Schopenhauer

The following article explores Oscar Wilde’s and James Joyce’s different approaches to language. To offer a new perspective on the authors’ distinct approaches to words and syntax, I incorporate the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer that connects the deficiencies of established languages with the somber realization that the world is beyond understanding. Schopenhauer maintains that despite our deep desire to understand actuality, the only knowledge afforded to humans is mediated by the senses and filtered by subjective perception. The idea of a futile pursuit of knowledge is central to the pessimistic underpinnings of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, offering a lens through which to examine the divergent perspectives on language and human experience in ‘De Profundis’ and in Finnegans Wake. Among the numerous allusions to Wilde in the Wake, one can find direct references to Wilde’s particular way of reading Queensbury’s note by imposing an intelligible word (‘sodomite’) upon a misspelling (‘somdomite’). These allusions provide, on the level of plot and through linguistic experimentations, commentary on the contingency of words and grammatical structures, and the impossibility of absolute and objective knowledge. I conclude that the non-representational features of the Wake emphasizing the material properties of letters more than the denotations of words align with Schopenhauer’s pessimistic vision by hindering the search for knowledge, while offering an aesthetic delight that, in a Schopenhauerian fashion, affords a respite from the sufferings of existence.

The Role of Ambiguity in Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake karya James Joyce berdiri sebagai salah satu teks yang paling misterius dan menantang dalam sejarah sastra, ditandai dengan bahasanya yang padat, struktur inovatif, dan segudang referensi. Penelitian ini mengeksplorasi sifat beragam interpretasi dan keterlibatan pembaca dengan novel yang berjudul Finnegans Wake. Dengan mengkaji kompleksitas linguistik novel, termasuk penggunaan permainan kata-kata multibahasa dan neologisme, penelitian ini berupaya mengungkap bagaimana elemen-elemen ini berkontribusi terhadap tantangan penafsiran yang dihadapi pembaca. Selain itu, penelitian ini menyelidiki peran ambiguitas dan polisemi dalam membentuk pengalaman dan interaksi pembaca dengan teks. Melalui analisis terperinci atas bagian-bagian terpilih dan tinjauan terhadap berbagai pendekatan kritis, penelitian ini menyoroti interaksi dinamis antara teks dan pembacanya. Penelititan ini juga menunjukkan bahwa Finnegans Wake tidak hanya menuntut partisipasi aktif pembaca, tetapi juga menawarkan bentuk keterlibatan sastra unik yang melampaui pemahaman naratif konvensional. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk memberikan wawasan baru mengenai strategi interpretasi yang dapat digunakan untuk menavigasi karya Joyce yang begitu kompleks, sehingga memperkaya keterlibatan dan apresiasi pembaca terhadap novel tersebut.

'A Joycean Smutmonger': Echoes of Joyce in Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Rural Modernism

Since its publication, critics of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish-language masterpiece Cré na Cille (1949; Graveyard Clay) have consistently namechecked James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), usually for the sole purpose of conveying its perceived difficulty and/or vulgarity. Indeed, Cré na Cille was first refused publication because, in Ó Cadhain’s words, it was too long and too ‘Joycean’. Ó Cadhain himself evidently saw his work as existing in dialogue with his renowned progenitor and during a late lecture revelled in retelling an overheard conversation in which he was described as nothing more than a ‘Joycean smutmonger’. This article goes beyond such surface-level comparisons to unpick how Ó Cadhain proffers a radical portrayal of rural Irish modernity to compare with Joyce’s predominantly urban equivalent. It argues that Ó Cadhain’s characters, like those found in Joyce’s oeuvre, are consistently forced to navigate the forces of tradition and modernity, which existed at the heart of rural Irish society in the mid-twentieth century. This essay will first compare how Ó Cadhain and Joyce treat the predicaments of a young woman preparing for emigration in their respective short stories ‘An Bhliain 1912’ and ‘Eveline’, before moving on to treat Ó Cadhain’s experiments in form and language in Cré na Cille. In particular, it will examine such experimentation in the context of his lasting obsession with Finnegans Wake (1939), as evidenced by his stated belief that he ‘could write a work like Finnegans Wake’. Informed by recent developments in ‘alternative modernities’, this essay attempts to offer a nascent definition of what might be signified by ‘rural modernism’ in an Irish context.

‘Slavic Irishness’ and the Fluidity of National Identity in Finnegans Wake

ABSTRACT This article adopts a sociolinguistic approach to multilingualism within James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), paying attention to how, in Book 2, Chapter 3, two Irish soldiers called Butt and Taff extensively code-switch into numerous Slavonic languages (for which Bulgarian serves as the focus of this study), and how they do so for the purposes of bonding (through humour) and expressing their complex identities as ‘Slavic Irishmen’. The study looks in depth at the Wake’s extreme levels of multilingualism (with more than 70 languages present within the work) and how a sociolinguistic approach to reading it – one which specifically employs terminology and research drawn from the academic field of sociolinguistics – can provide fresh and intriguing academic perspectives on it. Within this article, I argue that this unique approach may ‘humanize’ Butt and Taff for the reader and that these figures may even be seen to acquire identities akin to ‘real-life’ personas through their use of code-switching. This makes them unlike the ‘avatars’ or ‘siglas’ that critics in Wake studies normally identify in the work.

Gabriel Renggli, Joyce as Theory: Hermeneutic Ethics in Derrida, Lacan, and ‘Finnegans Wake’

Gabriel Renggli, <i>Joyce as Theory: Hermeneutic Ethics in Derrida, Lacan, and ‘Finnegans Wake’</i>

Finnegans is the Tolstoy of the Uitoto

The Word, as the creative principle of life, is a concept found in many cultures, from the Hebraic to the Uitotos (or Murui) of the Colombian Amazon. The author finds parallels between the immersion of Joyce´s Finnegans Wake in the Word as the key to unlocking different but interrelated dimensions of reality, and the cosmo-vision of the Murui. Finnegans Wake presents a panoptic view of practically the whole of life and history in the form of the dream world of a Dublin tavern owner. It deploys a complex use of word play, hidden meanings and mutations of language to depict both the conscious and subconscious perceptions of our primal humanity. Similarly, virtually every word of the Murui myths has multiple meanings and they embody a manual of correct thought and behavior ranging from spirituality to the practicalities of daily life. Their premier shamanic plants, mambe and ambil, derivatives of coca and tobacco, respectively, are the inspiration for the nightly colloquiums in their malocas (longhouses) where the meanings of their myths are teased out by the participants, guided by their medicine man, in a free-ranging conversation that, while it seems to be digressive, adheres, as does Joyce, to the inner logic of the Word. The author ends with some reflections on his own struggles, as a writer to grapple with the Word, which, as it communicates, also mystifies. For the Murui, this urge towards omniscience may have arisen because their survival depended on articulating all of the interrelated nuances of their environment.

Finding the Qur’an in Imitation: Critical Mimesis from Musaylima to Finnegans Wake

Certain formulations of Islamic theology place considerable weight on the doctrine of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān: the miraculous impossibility of imitating the Qur’an. The prevalence of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān doctrines, however, has not prevented many Muslims and non-Muslims from interpreting iʿjāz al-Qur’ān less as a concluded statement of mimetic impossibility and more as a dare to engage the Qur’an in ways that elude conventional academic habits of classifying the Qur’anic sciences. In short, there are dozens of Qur’anic imitations throughout Islamic history, and this article argues that they are not mere provocations but variously represent efforts to participate in the revelation of God, to embody the Qur’an while annihilating the self, and to re-open the messianic moment of God’s direct, linguistic communication with humankind. As a conclusion, this article follows the lead of examples of Qur’anic imitation to develop a literary hermeneutic of the Qur’an in which we can read the Qur’an into various literary texts and linguistic philosophies.

The Fragmentary Chinese History in Finnegans Wake

The Fragmentary Chinese History in Finnegans Wake

“Three Quarks for Muster Mark!” A Slavic gloss to Joyce’s 'Finnegans Wake'

The unclear verse “Three Quarks for Muster Mark!”, introduced by James Joyce (1882–1941) to his novel entitled Finnegans Wake (first published in 1939), was a literary source for the English word quark denoting ‘an elementary particle with a fractional electric charge that is part of a proton, neutron or other interacting elementary particle’. The American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969, was the first researcher to introduce the English word quark into scientific terminology as early as in 1964. After accepting his hypothesis of quarks in the world science, most physicists adopted the English term quark as standard in the physical terminology of most international languages (e.g. French quark, German Quark, Italian quark, Polish kwark, Portugal quark, Russian кварк, Spanish cuark, Turkish kuark, Ukrainian кварк ‘an elementary particle’) and it quickly became a widely recognized internationalism. It is not commonly known that Joyce’s verse facetiously imitated loud cries of German dairy women: Drei Mark für muster Quark! (literally “Three Marks for an excellent curd!”). In other words, E. quark ‘an elementary particle’ is motivated by the German term Quark m. ‘weiser Käse / curd, white cheese’, metaphorically ‘trifle, nonsense, trash, worthless thing’, which – according to most German and Slavic etymologists – represents an obvious Slavic borrowing (especially a Polish or Lower Sorbian loanword), cf. Pol. twaróg, dial. kwaruk m. ‘curd, white cheese’ (&lt; Proto-Slavic *tvarogъ m. ‘id.’). It is suggested that the specialized term kwark represents the so called back-borrowing in the Polish language.

“What I lack is myself”: The Fluid Text and the Dialogic Subjectivity in Susan Howe’s Debths

James Joyce’s neologism “debths” (Finnegans Wake) that Susan Howe elects for the title of her 2017 volume of poetry points to at least three semantic coordinates of “obligation,” “trespass,” and “demise,” never—due to its implied transaction between the sound and the spelling—fully yielding to or being appropriated by any stable signification. In Debths, the end of life, writing, and, perhaps, literature are palpable, if overtly manifested, currents of poetic discourse. In my article, I advance the idea of recognizing this tripartite taxonomy as a variant of what Divya Victor calls “extremity.” Within this context, I demonstrate the emergence of a dialogic, intertextual, and appropriative subjectivity of the poet.

We Can’t Change the World, but We Can Change the Subject. James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake on the Polish Stage

This article examines how theatrical adaptations of James Joyce’s novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, during the 1970s became integral to the avant-garde movement in Poland. Other adaptations would evolve in the post-transition period from the 1990s to the present day, which not only explored the themes presented in Joyce’s works but also hinted at the universality of personal crises, national grievances, and the yearning for a sense of home and homeland.

Staging Joyce’s Prose – Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik’s Finnegans Make

The purpose of the paper is to examine Finnegans Make, Zenkasi Theatre Company’s adaptation of Joyce’s prose devised and directed by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik, staged in the 1990s. It aims to demonstrate how by employing avant-garde compositional ideas and language games, they translate the structural and linguistic complexity characteristic of the Irish author to the idiom of the stage. demonstrate the thematic coherence of Joyce’s work, accompanied by compositional and. It analyses in detail the play’s circular structure that draws on excerpts from Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It also discusses how Fajfer and Bazarnik engage the audience and explore the theatre space. Finally, it examines how they use the space of the book and typographical devices to translate the live performance into a spatialised score of the play.

Wilder’s Joyce: Inspiration, Borrowing, Appropriation, Plagiarism

American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder’s lifelong attraction to and passion for if not obsession with the work of James Joyce has led to unintended consequences. Wilder was writing what would become his second Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth, while in the midst of “unriddling” Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake. Accusations of plagiarism would subsequently arise from two major Joyce scholars, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson as they raised questions about the tipping point in creative practice, the point at which common practices of textual influence and reference cross the line into excessive borrowings and plagiarism. Such accusations, which Wilder failed to acknowledge and to fully address in a timely fashion, have lingered to his discredit and have obscured his achievements both as a playwright and a major scholar of experimental literature with a particular emphasis on James Joyce. The essay details the need to return to and to reassess the issues of Wilder’s creative practice within the current theoretical climate of intertextuality and thus to reassess Wilder’s pioneering work on both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

“that which is common to us all”: Karl Ove Knausgaard as Reader of Joyce

In his monumental autobiographical series of novels My Struggle, acclaimed Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard devotes a considerable number of pages to discuss James Joyce’s fictional works. In the last volume of the series – The End –, practically the entire body of Joyce’s fiction – from early works such as Stephen Hero and Dubliners to the modernist masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – is included in a discussion on the Irish novelist’s literature. Only one among Joyce’s major works is not tackled by Knausgaard in The End: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Nonetheless, it is precisely Knausgaard who writes the preface to a celebrated Centennial edition of Joyce’s first novel in which, amidst other topics, he ponders over what he understands to be “the very essence of literature.” The article aims at highlighting some key aspects of Knausgaard’s take on Joyce’s fictional output and provide enough evidence to support the hypothesis that the Norwegian writer’s conceptualization of the literary phenomenon, including Joyce’s work, is based upon questionable essentialist premises.

Finnegans Wake 1.1: anew begins

A full version of Finnegans Wake’s Book 1, Chapter 1, in Portuguese.

Translation of an Excerpt from Anna Livia Plurabelle’s Final Monologue

This is a translation of an excerpt from the last three pages of Finnegans Wake (FW 626.30 – 628.16), in which the river-character Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) presents a bitter farewell monologue, motivated by the abandonment of her family and the supposed betrayal of her mountain-husband Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE) with her cloud-daughter, young Issy. While remembering the past, ALP feels old, alone and without the strength to continue, disintegrating herself from a world in which she no longer fits. She, who monologues at the same time that her family sleeps, goes to meet the father-sea in a flow that closes the last page of the work with the excerpt “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” (no period). However, this absence of punctuation provokes a circular movement that takes the reader back to the initial page, which begins with the word riverrun, in lowercase, which connects itself with the incomplete sentence “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” from page 628. In this way, what seemed to be the end of the character and also of the book soon becomes the restart of both. It is as if the river-woman who disappears into the sea evaporates herself and reappears on the front page after raining from her cloud-daughter, being vigorously reborn through her rival.

Induction, Deduction, and Visual-Spatial Perception: The Finnegans Wake Intelligence Test

Abstract: Finnegans Wake makes intense demands on its readers’ intellectual energies, and I propose that the text brings our cognitive reasoning capacities to the foreground by putting them to work. In this, the Wake resembles an intelligence test, calling upon abilities of deduction, induction, and visual-spatial perception. Using deduction, readers draw upon existing linguistic paradigms in order to make sense of Joyce’s neologisms, while induction involves identifying patterns created by the text itself. Moreover, “characters” such as HCE are often denoted only by the appearance of these letters, activating pattern-recognition skills. Nevertheless, identifying these references is not the end-point of studying the Wake , since dissecting Joyce’s text into an inventory of allusions would dissolve its artistry. Instead, discerning familiar elements in Joycean innovations is a fluid and ongoing process, where the manifestation of one’s own cognitive processes constitutes an aesthetic effect.

On the Distinctions Between Spoken and Written Language in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract: Figures as diverse as Samuel Beckett and Marshall McLuhan have lauded Joyce for his unusual awareness of the distinct conventions and characteristics of language as it occurs in different forms (primarily spoken and written). Such commentary usually focuses on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake . While more formally restrained than Joyce’s two greatest works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows Joyce forging the philosophy and aesthetic which consciously treats language in these different forms, implicitly (through, for example, the strategies he develops to represent sound) and explicitly (through, for example, ruminations on the properties of writing and speech). This is shown not least by the fact the book begins not (as is sometimes claimed) at the beginning of Stephen’s life, but at the beginning of his linguistic life, and from the outset uses a variety of print-oriented techniques (such as italicization, indentation, and ellipsis points) to represent the phonic world. This implicitly demonstrates a further distinction, also crucial to Joyce’s later work, not only between speech and writing, but between handwriting and print. The distinction also looms large in A Portrait , which at various times references the manual in a way that emphasizes the labored means of production of the yet-to-be published writer, but also is written very distinctly (as Hugh Kenner observes about Ulysses ), for “technological space” or “printed pages for which it was designed from the beginning.” It is notable in this context that Joyce rejected one strategy in particular for representing the sounds of speech within the visual medium of writing: non-standard spelling. He experimented with a more phoneticized style in Stephen Hero , but this is largely abandoned by the time it becomes A Portrait . We are left with one notable dialectal spelling: “shite.” The deployment of this word speaks volumes about Joyce’s journey from sound to print.