So is it an indecipherable ruse or a harbinger of hypertext? Could it even be… therapeutic? As a self-taught enthusiast, how did I even get into this? PHD candidate Yuta Imazeki has calculated “numbers of portmanteaux and foreign words in the radio passage” that are higher in frequency than any others intentionally obscure. Joyce intentionally made passages more obscure to evoke radio. It sounds somewhat like the dial of a radio in Joyce’s time, static turning into myriad languages. He also wanted to shatter the conventions of language to form an almost eternal every-language. In the words of Joyce Scholar Sam Slote almost “any analysis will be incomplete.” After Ulysses, Joyce was interested in the subconscious interior monologue, our dreaming lives. But Wake scholarship is thriving more than ever. The Wake has been called “the most colossal leg pull in literature” and even Joyce’s patron fell out with him over it. The fantastic project Waywords and Meansigns films people around the world reading the Wake aloud. Joyce himself advised people if they were confused to simply read it aloud as it is often understood phonetically. That’s not to say you can’t just open any page and start reading to experience its unique music. Composed of dozens of languages smelted together, the Wake must first be deciphered, then the often overlapping references spotted and the whole thing basically decoded to then enjoy the audible ripple of true fun running throughout. But even 80 years on, it is “as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute.” In fact we may be just catching up to Finnegans Wake in many ways.įinnegans Wake has always stirred people up. It took James Joyce over 16 years to write, mired in the glow of his post- Ulysses fame and the gore of his personal life. It’s a book so mired in misunderstanding that it makes its older, more famous brother, Ulysses, appear mainstream. Finnegans Wake, published 80 years ago, is a difficult book.

Joyce reading finnegans wake