The first thing a reader notices while reading Finnegan’s Wake is the language. Instead of fashioning his allusions, puns, and references around the English language, Joyce did the exact opposite by altering the language itself to suit his purposes. By changing words as he did, Joyce packed his language with double meanings; “Funeral” became “Funferall”, “Mighty” turned into “Mitey,” and the “Cosmos” were now known as the “Chaosmos.” Sometimes Joyce would slam multiple terms together to create new ones that baffle the casual reader; Pentateuch (Greek for the five books of the Old Testament) and Punch & Judy (a British puppet show dating back to the 1600’s) combine to form “pentshanjeuchy.” How Joyce expected anyone to understand this is… anyone’s guess, really. Joyce often jumps between several languages to emphasize particular passages. He uses Norwegian words, for example, when the Norwegian Captain is the subject, and employs various “secret” languages of travelers in the underworld, priests, and scholars to multiply the layers of meaning in certain sections. Words will be altered to fit a particular meter of speech, accent, dialect, mishearing, or sometimes just to play with alliteration/music/familiar phrases. Passages can be scrambled, stuttered, or simply rendered unreadable by the sheet number of devices Joyce employs simultaneously. One prominent example of these intertwining layers is the name Perce O’Reilly, the name used to mock Wake’s protaganist, Earwicker, during a ballad. The name comes from perce-oreille, the French word for an earwig, but also combines the name of two Irish leaders who led the 1916 Easter uprising. Joyce then goes on to take the name he’s just created and make jokes out of it. Much later on in the novel, Joyce writes “beers o’ryely” to mock Earwicker’s penchant for alcohol by evoking a scene from the old vaudeville song “Finnegans Wake” (which the book is obviously named after) that goes: “A gallon of whiskey at his feet / And a barrel of porter at his head.” Just try to count up how many esoteric jokes and references those two words alone (“beers o’ryely”) rely upon. Now imagine over 600 pages such writing, and you’re starting to get an idea of just how difficult Finnegans Wake is to get through with even a modicum of understanding.
		Linguistic Complexity Character Continuity Esoteric Allusions