Joyce

Finnegans Wake by the Irish writer James Joyce is definitely a difficult read but I feel that the best way to get a good understanding of the text is through reading it out loud; listening to the changing patterns, rhymes, alliteration and polysemy not only help distinguish the theme of the text but also make the read a little bit more interesting.  The usage of polysemy is common throughout Finnegans Wake, and it is a technique that we have seen in other nonsense literature, such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.  However, I feel that it was probably easier to pick up on the polysemy and the multiple meanings of these words and phrases that were intended in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland than it was in Finnegans Wake. This was probably because of the structure and language of both of these texts. For example, Carroll employed polysemy in his text while still remaining in the confines of proper grammatical syntax. Joyce on the other hand, has a very unconventional structure in his work; he has a circular form, shifts in voices, fabricated words, and unusual sentence construction.

An instance that I remember from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is when Alice is at the mad tea part and the door mouse tells the story of sisters drawing treacle from a well. He plays with the meaning of the word “draw.” Carroll uses “draw” in terms of drawing something up out of a well and also in terms of actually artistically drawing a picture of something. Carroll plays with the multiple meanings of this single word.

Conversely, an example of polysemy that really stood out to me while reading Finnegans Wake was the following: “he sternely struxk his tete in a tub for to watsch the future of his fates but ere was eviparated…” (page 4). Here we see Joyce take polysemy to a whole new level. Previously we saw the employment of polysemy primarily with homophones but Joyce plays with the sound and spelling of the word. With the word “watsch” we see it like the word “watch” but we hear it sound like the word “wash.” Thus Joyce leaves the reader unsure of whether he is referring to watching the future of his fate, washing the future of his fate, or in fact both. We can also presume that he is showing how the substitution of either one letter or sound can change the entire meaning of the word.  Joyce reveals the relation between words that are similar but distant in sound.