passages from james joyce's finnegans wake

Where, after a typical partmanteau combining the “House of Atreus” with the latin atrox (cruel, atrocious), a single word conflates a whole phrase, “is indeed in the dust.”

The boundaries between words, moreover, are not always respected by Joyce, something I do not remember seeing in Carroll: Which produces a cloud of meanings, only some of which are relavant to the narrative the others – funny as they may be – are purely ornamental. In which we can see two distinct meanings packed in one sententece: “to wash the features of his face,” and “to watch the future of his fate,” but for the most part Joyce aims at multipying meanings without keeping a strict syntactic and narrative control over all the threads started by the phrase given the context, in fact, the reader is invited to try all possible permutations: One yeastyday he sternely struxk his tete in a tub for to watsch the future of his fates but ere he swiftly stook it out again… (p. In all instances, however, Carroll’s invented words are discrete units, having a definite, univocal meaning, set in an English syntactic structure. I have not looked into my copy of Finnegans Wake for many years, but I distinctly remember that Joyce’s method sounded quite different from Carroll’s, which at least in Humpty Dumpty’s interpretation consists in using isolated words packing two, sometimes more, clear-cut meanings: so “mimsy” stands for “miserable and flimsy,” the “Snark” is a monster consisting of parts of a “shark,” “snake,” and perhaps “snail.”Ĭarroll’s only extended passage containing nonsense words is the first stanza of the “Jabberwocky,” also discussed by Wood it mixes portmanteu and pseudo-Anglosaxon words, which are then comically interpreted by Humpty Dumpty. Wood then notes that in 1927 Joyce wrote that he had never read Carroll until a friend “gave me a book, not Alice, a few weeks ago – though, of course, I heard bits and scraps.” A long list of Carrollian references in the Wake follows, showing that Joyce was well aware not only of Sylvie and Bruno (the book he presumably was given by the friend, according to Atherton) but of both Alice books and of Collingswood’s Life. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word.

Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. The opening paragraphs discuss Joyce’s debt to Lewis Carroll: 24, 16 December 2010), “ Quashed Quotatoes,” in which Michael Wood reviews a new edition of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. There is an interesting article in the the London Review of Books (vol.

Passages from james joyce's finnegans wake