Joyce - connor chapman

Oh, lord. Finnegans Wake. Polysemy is ever-rampant in this work, and it's further proof that you don't need structure to create an excellent piece of literature. It reads like a druenk dysfunctional jawline, which may or may not have inspired lines 31-33 on the second page of book one: "ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed, like/Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicab-/les." Just before, Joyce was referring to a man who was caught for public masturbation, and this here appears to be a continuation of the description of that character. "ivoroiled" sounds like "involved," "overalls" sounds like "ovaries," "fondeed" sounds like "found seed," and "caligulate" sounds like "copulate," and it is as well a reference to the Roman emperor Caligula, whose legacy is that of an insane rule and sexual perversion. Here Joyce is describing the character's sexually deviant habits, and it appears that he would commit adultery and, well, for lack of better phrasing, continue the legacy of Caligula on a regular basis, as indicated by the phrase "habitacularly" which sounds like "habitually," "particularly," and "spectacularly." Joyce is taking Gertrude Stein's free association and polysemy and making it his own but not only using said free association, but he's mashing words together and making up his own, something Shakespeare used to do, but for he coined his own phrases, and Joyce is smashing together a whirlwind of that and portmanteaus; this is the portrait of a character as painted in the wake of the surrealist movement's dawning.