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James Joyce

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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Ulysses

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Editor Eric

The great joke

"Science split the atom and Joyce split the word." This summary of progress in the first half of the twentieth century has often been stated in reference to Finnegans Wake. Joyce chops up words and fuses the syllables together again in new ways that supposedly uncover the links made by the subconscious mind. 

Even the title is a complicated pun: Finn as in the French fin meaning "end" and egan sounding like "again", together forming the paradoxical "end again". Wake refers to a party for the recently dead but also a joke because the dream content of Finnegans Wake takes place during Finnegan's sleep. If you find all that a real kneeslapper, you'll die laughing over the rest of Finnegans Wake. 

It starts famously:

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth, Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war; nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's giorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time....

And then it starts getting really strange.

I loved this book when I was young. I thought it was a great joke on all the pretentious literary folk, like John Lennon's books were in the 1960s (a lot like John Lennon's books, except his were funnier). But then I realized no one got the joke. Maybe not even Joyce. Everyone took it so seriously, as if it were a great piece of literature that had something important to say about the modern human condition. 

Not that they could say what it was, mind you.

— Eric

© Copyright 2002-2003 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.

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