Finnegans Wake

:For the street ballad, see Finnegan's Wake.

Language and style

The language of Finnegans Wake is confounding; consider, for example:

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: "O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement!" (page 4, lines 11–14)

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The language is like that of a dream, not quite conscious or formed, shimmering with layers of possible meaning. Yet this is a return to possibility, shaped by the experiences of the world we have fallen (into sleep) from.

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In that sense, the book can be seen to have abandoned many of the conventions of the waking mind to embody the working of the sleeping mind. In dreaming, the images and plots that we perceive are not distinct or discrete – they shift and conglomerate and constantly reform. Joyce captures this protean quality of dreams through complex puns and layering of meaning (often contradictory). Though he writes "however basically English" (page 116, line 26), he universalizes the "dream" by incorporating dozens of other languages and argots.

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His use of the world's languages is part of Joyce's aim to contain the full knowledge of humanity in Finnegans Wake. The novel is packed with allusions to world myth, history, and the arts. Along with "high" culture, Joyce did not ignore the "low". The Wake (as it is often called) is very much formed by popular jingles, nursery rhymes, and other fragments from popular culture, exemplified, as mentioned above, in the title itself.

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One of the many sources Joyce drew from is the Ancient Egyptian story of Osiris, who was torn apart by his brother or son Set, and the pieces were gathered and reassembled by his sister or wife, Isis, with the help of their sister or daughter Nephthys; their other brother or son, Horus, emerges to slay Set and rise as the new day's sun, as Osiris himself. Reading Finnegans Wake might be seen as analogous to the process of Isis regathering the dismembered portions of Osiris – there are fragments and allusions and confusing messages that the reader must put together into a conscious form.

Related Topics:
Egypt - Story - Osiris - Set - Isis - Nephthys - Horus

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Osiris's night journey through the otherworld is described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of spells and invocations for the recently deceased to successfully join Osiris and rise with the sun. Such a journey, too, is analogous to the experience of reading the Wake – the reader enters its dark world and hopes to emerge in a sense reborn.

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