Joyce--Amy

     In his book, Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce plays with the spelling of words to create polysemy. The way that Joyce twists words to create multiple meanings is similar to the way Lewis Carroll creates polysemy in his novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, however the two authors employ this technique for different reasons.
     In Alice in Wonderland, Carroll employs polysemy that is preexisting in the English language. For instance, the mouse tells a tale about his tail. The poem of the tail's tale is shaped like a tail. This nonsensical poem is lighthearted and pokes fun at homophones and misunderstandings in the English language. On the other hand, Joyce often creates made up words to create polysemy. For instance, Joyce spells "Finnegan" as "Finnagain," creating a word play in the line, "Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain." "Finnegan" and "Finnagain" sound the same, however the slight variation spelling adds a completely new meaning to the name. "Finnagain" can be separated into the words "Finn" and "again," thus implying that Mr. Finnegan will be "Finn" "again." In other words, Finnegan will be himself again. Joyce pushes the idea of wordplay by creating words by putting together words that sound like a unrelated, longer word. The word "again" is completely unrelated to the word "Finnegan" in meaning, but the sound matches that of the "egan" in Finnegan. Joyce implicates the two words through this connection, in the process giving "Finnegan" a new meaning. Whereas Carroll points out preexisting polysemy, Joyce creates his own polysemy.
     Joyce is interesting in not only polysemy, but sound as well. Finnegan's Wake contains many onomatopoeias. For instance, he writes "Hahahahaha," creating the sound of laughter. However, some of Joyce's onomatopoeias are more nonsensical. For instance, the parenthetical: "(bababababababalghrghtk...!) is nonsensical and almost impossible to read aloud. When reading Finnegan's Wake, I read the prose aloud, and though I did not mean to, I found myself falling into an accent similar to an Irish accent.This is because Joyce spells words based on sound, not spelling. For instance he writes "fr'over" rather than "from over." Thus, Joyce is not so much interested in the meaning of his prose, but rather the ways he can manipulate words to create new meanings and new sounds. He also pulls words from other languages, such as "tete" and "d'amores" from French, as well as various German words. Finnegan's Wake is a book that contains a myriad of specific references to very specific fields of knowledge, and because of this it is fitting that the language would be written in a specific accent as well as contain words from other languages. Joyce's Finnegan's Wake is not nonsense as much as a connecting of unrelated ideas through sound and language.