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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2009
The first-time reader of Finnegans Wake needs to acquire some feeling both for Joyce's methods of word- and sentence-formation and for the book's larger structures. At all levels repetition is the key. It is the repeated elements, such as sound-patterns, images, catch-phrases, book- and song-titles and agent- or character-relationships which sustain the spiralling flights of Joyce's narrative. In any analysis of the Wake we are liable to find ourselves extracting words and phrases from their immediate contexts and juxtaposing them with widely separate textual items. The reason for this almost cavalier disregard for context is Joyce's systematic disruption of the integrity of paragraph, sentence, word, and phrase. Formal English syntax is maintained but the result, as often as not, disturbs our conventional and logical expectations as to meaning. Sentences may expand into enormous lists or wilt under a load of repeated parentheses. Sometimes the very statements which seem to be telling us things we need to know are those most tampered with, most subject to interference:
(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop) in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle. They lived und laughed ant loved end left. Forsin.
(FW 18:17–21)This is the first of several occasions on which the Wake's expository style pauses (stoops?) for what seems a direct address to the reader.
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