In Joyce's most recent work, Finnegans Wake, the destruction of language is completed. ¹

It should go without saying, at this centennial point, that James Joyce was both the master of the English language and, as an Irishman, the servant of it. Indeed, since language is usually the servant of thought, he was the server of a servant. "My soul frets in the shadow of his language" ( P189) thinks Stephen Dedalus, resisting the snares of the English dean of studies. Studying Joyce, we find our souls fretting, in the musical sense, in the shadow of his language.

Could anything new be said of Joyce's language, after Hugh Kenner and Anthony Burgess? Literary analysis by the means of modern linguistics finds its greatest challenge in Joyce, the greatest master of the English language since Milton, according to another practitioner.

Joyce was conscious of his control of English and other languages. He could do anything with language, he declared. He did more things with it than anyone who readily springs to mind. Yet his experiments are widespread; some are still undiscovered.

He is highly experimental in Dubliners in several places. Joyce gives us the clue to his linguistic heterodoxy on the very first page of "The Sisters," with the young boy hypnotized by the sounds of paralysis, gnomon, simony. At least two of these words are derived from Greek. Was Joyce even in 1903 searching for Odysseus? Homer himself is a famous experimenter in language, so much so that literary criticism, grammar, and linguistic criticism of verbal artifacts all trace their origin to the early scholiasts on Homer. Joyce's own drang nach Osten begins to drag him eastward very soon.

In addition, the hypnotic effect of the words themselves, apart from any meaning they might have, provides a focus on the verbal signifier, which eventually intensifies into a partial identification of the sign with the signified in Finnegans Wake, as we will see. In Dubliners, however, the usage is not really ever innocent. Joyce limits himself, by Kenner "Uncle Charles principle," to fiction and syntax appropriate to the characters. By this principle, the text reads sometimes as if the characters themselves were writing it, as if Joyce had lent them his pen. However, some parts of Dubliners possess a linguistic subtlety, a treachery, almost, of surface that shows a creator aiding his creatures to express themselves. (After all, the fatherfigure in the Willingdone Museyroom tenders his matchbox to his tumescent and furious son to light a bomb with { FW11}!) Consider for example the oddity of the following sentence from "An Encounter": "This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences" ( D20).

"One of my consciences"? How many consciences does a boy possess? Could Joyce (not the protagonist of "An Encounter") be using the word in one of its French senses of "consciousness"? If so, Joyce would be using the word in its root sense of "inward knowledge," or "inwit," as he later glosses it in Ulysses. "Conscience" would represent any awareness of inner mental reality, among which may be counted interior monologue, emotional upsurges, and public symbolic landscapes.

It is odd that conscience in the sense of inner knowledge, inwit, is a word with a treacherous surface, because Joyce also uses "remorse" in a "root" sense, in a "A Little Cloud": "Little Chandler felt his cheeks suffused with shame and he stood back out of the lamplight. He listened while the paroxysm of the child's sobbing grew less and less; and tears of remorse started to his eyes" ( D85).

"Remorse" seems oddly chosen. Little Chandler may feel sorry that he shouted at his baby, but the "remorse" is aroused more by his fright at his wife's vehemence than by any actual movement of conscience toward the amendment of bad action. His "remorse" is much more than a feeling that he has been a bad boy for shouting at his son; he is mourning for his lost youth. In fact, he is one of those Joycean fathers who has not yet accepted his role as father because of immaturity, like Farrington of "Counterparts." Farrington is treated roughly by his society, and in turn he beats his own son, as he has been "punished" by his society. Counterparts, indeed! Both Little Chandler and Farrington have become paralyzed between youth and maturity and cannot be fathers in spirit. This spiritual imbalance exacerbates their tempers, but whereas Farrington passes on the beating he has received, Little Chandler weeps like his own child. "Remorse" is not here the indispensable canonical requirement for absolution; it is sterile mental distress, the bite of the worm of "conscience," inner knowledge, in Hell. "Remorse" is, therefore, "agenbite," by what linguists call a "calque," a rendering syllable by syllable of a word in one language into another. "Inwit" is also a calque: con = in: scientia = knowledge = wit. Just so does re = agen; mordere, morsus = bite. Remorse of conscience is a biting of inward knowledge, whether leading to repentance or not. Stephen's "remorse" in Ulysses does not lead him to repent. His "remorse" is an inward biting of the mind, an almost physical gnawing away of his morale: "Agenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite. Misery! Misery!" ( U243). It is this internal "biting" that causes tears of pain to rise to the eyes of the paralyzed, doomed Little Chandler. "Remorse," taken in its usual meaning, seems to lack relevance, but in its root meaning it is all too pertinent.

Joyce is constantly aware of the "nest of evil in the bosom of a good word" ( FW 189.29-30); this extension of significance is his own contribution to the text, otherwise "written" by his characters. "Incest" is buried in "insect"; "biting" is hidden in "remorse." Another term, "vanity" as employed in "Araby," is also transparent: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger" ( D 35). Surely this is too extreme a reaction to disappointment. He may feel that his romantic dreams are immature, but what is more romantic than a darkened hall with flirtations taking place in the only lighted area? The mature Joyce would have felt this, but the shallow romanticism of the boy has been rudely rebuffed by the world. Yet why "vanity"? In its modern sense of "preening self-conceit" or "inordinate pride in one's own person or attainments" the word seems inappropriate. The boy is not proud of his body or of his attainments; at most he is possessed by a boyish chivalry, which is touching and appropriate rather than exaggerated and self-regarding. No: here "vanity" returns to its original meaning. It is derived from the Vulgate version of Ecclesiastes: Vanitas vanitatum, Jerome's rendering of the Hebrew hevel havalim. "Hevel" in Hebrew means "an exhalation, a breathing," or by extension mere breath rather than substance, emptiness rather than content. "Emptiness of emptiness" is how the preacher, Koheleth, or Ecclesiastes, judges all the facts of human life; "emptiness of emptiness" is the way Hebrew conveys "the most extreme emptiness"; Hebrew lacks a way to convey superlatives. ( "Shira haShirim"--"The Song of Songs"--means "The Greatest Song"). Vana in Latin means empty, and so Jerome's vanitas vanitatum literally translates the Hebrew.

The next stop in the journey to Joyce's "vanity" is in the seventeenth century. Bunyan "Vanity Fair" in Pilgrim's Progress means the fair where only emptiness is sold, but because Vanity Fair is a fair the term vanity has acquired a sense of a conscious clothing and adorning of the person. From that to the modern sense of "inordinate pride in one's personal attainments" is a short step. Joyce shows that he is aware of the history of the word, by the setting of the end of "Araby"--a fair in which nothing valuable is sold. The Araby bazaar is a Vanity Fair, in fact. The use of "vanity" is here part of a verbal mosaic which should coalesce with the phrase "Vanity Fair" in the mind of the reader, outside of awareness. "Empty Fair," the emptiness of the Dreams of Fair Women entertained by the boy, is the true significance of the last sections of the story.

The mature Joyce is not abashed by the "emptiness" of human life. Rather than encouraging in himself a spirit of contemptus mundi, which is the traditional attitude of the Church toward things of this world, Joyce dedicated himself and his powers to the portraying of the phenomenal world, poised and sustained upon the void. In the Wake his spokesman, St. Patrick, successfully defends the delusory rainbow of the visible-audible-gnosible world against the sage Koheleth or the Druid. The immaturity of the boy in "Araby" is shown by his "remorse" (if you will) upon contemplating the emptiness of his own Vanity Fair, an emptiness which will sustain the mature creation of Joyce. "Hell flies like a bubble before the breath of God," declares the Faust-Book. The whole universe is a bubble which Joyce portrays in his mere exhalations recorded on paper-hevel havalim--the acceptance of emptiness and the weaving together of its empty exhalations by a "weaver of the wind" ( U25). It might seem impossible to modulate Koheleth's mere breath into Joyce's sound-symbols of a world, but Joyce seems to have done it.

A Portrait contains many points of linguistic interest. One especially deserves comment. When Father Dolan erupts into Father Arnall's classroom, a linguistic ambiguity hastens disaster for Stephen. Father Dolan demands angrily why Stephen is not writing his lesson, and Father Arnall replies, "He broke his glasses . . . and I exempted him from work" ( P49). Father Dolan considers this "an old schoolboy trick" and pandies Stephen. Father Arnall does not intercede, perhaps obscurely influenced by the fear that the recent death of Parnell has brought on a spirit of rebellion that requires the repressing hand of temporary injustice to quell. Father Arnall's phrase is syntactically ambiguous, and Father Dolan can interpret it in the sense he wishes. "He broke his glasses" could bear what the linguists call an "ergative" interpretation. An ergative case for a noun or pronoun is appropriate whenever an actual action is performed (erg- being the Greek root for "work"). Therefore,

John kicked Bill.
Sam carved his name on a tree.
Stephen broke his glasses.

all represent action deliberately undertaken with a resultant alteration in the world. This is the interpretation that Father Dolan seizes, and which Father Arnall does not correct.

The intended meaning of the sentence is that the glasses became broken without ergative intention on the part of Stephen. Therefore, the sentence would resemble such apparently transitive but non-ergative sentences as John loves Mary (he is not performing a deliberate action upon her), or, The wind scattered the grain (this was the effect of the wind, not its deliberate action). In French the ergative interpretation would produce the sentence, Il cassait ses lunettes. The non-ergative intention might require some such phrase as Il se cassait ses lunettes! ² English does not allow the clarity of French. It uses the same phrase to mean two things: "Stephen deliberately broke his glasses to avoid work," an old schoolboy trick, and not, as Father Arnell intended, "Stephen's glasses became broken by an accident." It is characteristic of Joyce to ascribe drastic results to subtle ambiguities in English syntax.

Ulysses contains so many examples of linguistic subtlety that a book could be written on the subject. In Ulysses Joyce locates the source of linguistic creativity in the deepest instinctual centers of the human mind. In the Circe episode, Lipoti Virag represents both the Freudian Id, the center of aggressive and libidinal drives, and the source of language. He wears a pshent, the Egyptian crown found on the head of Thoth, god of language, and bears two quills behind his ears like a secretary-bird. He is also "basilicogrammate," the bearer of the sovereign word. ³ Words and syllables pop out of him alarmingly, and his phrases are clotted with unassociated articles, personal, relative and possessive pronouns and demonstratives: "That the cows with their those distended udders that they have been the known. . ." ( U516). It is at this point that Joyce acknowledges the self-impelling power of language as a phenomenon in itself and not only as a mirror of reality. Language has its own momentum and its own rules of cohesion.

In Ulysses and Finnegans Wake language has its free play conceded to it, frequently to the distress of readers, who often cry out, in the words of the Wake, that the text is nothing but a pure and simple jangle of words ( FW 112.4). Is anything in the Wake pure and simple? To answer my own rhetorical question, yes, the Wake is as simple as it can be, thus conforming to the principle of the economy of Nature's laws, as shaved by Occam's razor. Indeed, since the subject of the Wake is all of human life, one could almost argue that Joyce has oversimplified the subject matter; the Wake is much less confusing than life itself, any person's life. Joyce employs languages as a simplifying device, a filter through which passes only the essence of human life.

Any writer of the present age must wrestle with the chaotic nature of his subject matter. Matter was always seen as inchoate, but it is only in our age that the chaos was a matter of principle. Samuel Beckett declared that a new form in art will be necessary to deal with the chaos: "this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. . . . To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." ⁴ Joyce created a form with his "hyperpoems," long stretches of apparent prose, incorporating a great miscellany of material-scientific facts, business forms, tide-tables, hesitations, exclamations, but which is nevertheless poetry. It is as if the Liffey, along with the garbage it bears on its surface, were regarded as a concrete hyperpoem. The Ithaca chapter of Ulysses contains many such hyperpoems, the most impressive sequence of which occurs on the subject of water.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns. . . . ( U671-72)

Interspersed with the scientific prose we see poetry burning its way through, and the hyperpoem ends with a frankly acknowledged poeticism: "the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon" ( U672). It is as if Joyce had given himself permission to use any type of language in his search for exact expression, even the humblest.

Joyce could indeed do anything with language. It has been the experience of many Wake readers that the text seems to clear itself up; from the first chapters to the last the Wake becomes easier to read. Is it only that the reader becomes accustomed to Joyce's languages, "Djoytsch" or "Shemese," with experience? This may be part of the truth, but I think that Joyce may actually have succeeded in modulating his puns from obscure to clear from Book II to Book IV, as an iconic modelling of his diction on the principle of dark to light, as the Wake proceeds from dusk to midnight to dawn. It seems to me that Joyce deploys two grades of puns in the Wake, which rhetoricians would identify as paronomasia and antanaclasis. The difference between paronomasia and antanaclasis is that paronomasiac structures combine two words into a third which bears resemblances to both, but is itself a new creation; antanaclastic structures employ words that mean two different things without a wrenching awry of the word itself. Therefore, Joyce's "fairlygosmother-" ( FW 353.27) combines "fairly go smother" and "fairygodmother." The two opposed meanings are those of suicide and magical transformation, for a paronomasiac creation. The "abnihilisation of the etym" ( FW 353.22) destroys everything with annihilation of the atom, in Joyce's astonishing prediction of the atomic bomb, and the bringing about of creation from nothing (ab nihil) by the word creates everything anew.

As the Wake climbs out of midnight and moves towards dawn, the puns begin to clear, to move from paronomasia to antanaclasis. Even the paragraph which announces the first ante-lucan sifting of sunlight into the night of the Wake shows a movement from complexity to simplicity. Most of the paragraph is in perfectly clear English, with only an occasional paronomasia.

The phaynix rose a sun before Erebia sank his smother! Shoot up on that, bright Bennu Bird! Va faotre! Eftsoon so too will our own sphoenix spark spirt his spyre and sunward stride the rampante flambe. Ay, already the sombrer opacities of the gloom are sphanished! Brave footsore Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth wheron every past shall full fost sleep. Amain. ( FW 473.16-25)

This passage heralds the dawn, which at this point in the book (Book III.ii) is rising in eastern Spain ("sphoenix, sphanished") but sending signals ahead to Dublin five hundred miles to the west. The passage is for the most part in standard English, with a Dublin accent. There are a few paronomasias. "Erebia" equals Arabia, the habitat of the phoenix, "the Arabian bird" ( Shakespeare), with Erebus, the dark underworld of the Greeks (perhaps from Semitic/Hebrew yerev, darkness.) The compound Erebia would contain both light and darkness.

"Smother" equals mother and smotherer. There are references to Verdi Il Trovatore in the paragraph. "Stride the rampante flambe" contains a reference to the gypsy Azucena aria "Stride la Vampa", in which she sings of her horror at her mother's execution by fire by the father of the Count di Luna, and of her kidnapping of the Count's son, the brother of the present count. Azucena attempted to kill the Count's son by throwing the baby into a fire, but found that she had killed her own baby by mistake, since which time she has raised the Count's brother as her own son. When the child, now the troubadour Manrico, is executed by the Count, she reveals to him that Manrico was his brother. The reference in the Wake combines the fires of Azucena's mother's pyre and the fire in which Azucena destroyed her own baby, which made her a "smother" in Joyce's system, and the Phoenix fire of the rising sun. "Haun" combines Hahn, German for "rooster," and haunt, the shade that Shaun is becoming--from Shaun to Jaun to Haun to Yawn.

These are the main paronomasias in the passage, but the effect of the paragraph depends upon antanaclases. The most important antanaclasis is, of course, son/sun. Osiris, torn to pieces by his brother Set, rises up as his own son/sun Horus in the Egyptian version of the sun-cycle. The pun survives only in English. Also "lightbreakfastbringer" is antanaclastic--the bringer of a light breakfast, on Sunday morning, and the bringer of light breaking forth on the sunrise.

The antanaclases cluster thicker and thicker, leading eventually to two of Anna Livia's phrases. In "How glad you'll be I waked you!" ( FW 625.33), "wake" is, of course, the antanaclasis for the whole giant book, with two of its well-known meanings expressing opposites: "wake" as the watch over the dead, and "wake" as "arise." There is a third meaning, however, which is not so well known. The wake of a ship is important structurally in the Wake. Three of the books end with a river flowing outward--Book I ( Anna Livia), Book II (the ship with the Four Old Men), and Book IV ( Anna Livia's departure). The Prankquean Fable gives the clues to this wake; the family structure established at the end of the Fable combines the ship, the wave, and the wind: "The prankquean was to hold her dummyship and the jimminies was to keep the peacewave and van Hoother was to git the wind up" ( FW 23.12-14). The family ship sails out to sea into the sunrise, leaving a wake behind, which is the book we read. The title of Finnegans Wake is an antanaclasis.

The ending of Anna Livia's monologue and the ending of the book approach perfect clarity through antanaclasis. "I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes" ( FW 627.13-14). "Let" means both "allowed" and "hindered" (the archaic "let"). If the river is allowed to run it will do its best, but if it is hindered (as by hydroelectric schemes) it will also do its best. "If I go" means both "if I continue" and "if I die." Joyce even achieves an antanaclastic triumph with an omitted word: "My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can" ( FW 627.24-25). See/sea is omitted because she cannot see well--her sight is failing as she dies. Yet she is gazing out to sea, which provides a stronger rhythm for her dying efforts.

The ending of the book is a technical triumph of language unapproached in modern literature. All the devices of poetry appear in Anna Liebestod. The sounds of "bold," "bad," "bleary" ( FW 627.25-26) are repeated in "And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father . . ." ( FW 627.36-628.1-2). They are also echoed in the rhythm of "they'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me" ( FW 627.35-36; italics mine).

The actual ending of the book is a "bitter ending" in which the fresh water mingles with the bitter-salty water of the sea. Yet the rhythms are hypnotic, even traditional. Listen to the rhythm of the last sentence: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the" ( FW 628.15-16). Here we have a perfect iambic pentameter line, with a feminine endin: ˘ - ˘ - ˘ - ˘ - ˘. The rhythm actually continues over to the first page again. If the last sentence is connected to the first, an iambic rhythm persists until Howth Castle is sighted: "Ă wāy ă lōne ă lāst ă lōved ă lōng thĕ rīvĕrrūn, păst Ēve an+̆d Ādăms, frŏm swērve ŏf shōre tŏ bēnd ŏf bāy" ( FW 628.15-16, 3.1-2FS). The rhythm is broken only at "from," with its extra weak stress, another feminine ending. Then the businesslike male rhythms begin, with "brings us by a commodius of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

The syntax of the last/first sentence is extremely odd. The last sentence, with "riverrun," seems to bear the meaning, "Away, alone at last, and loved, along the river ran"; that is, Anna Livia is running "away" from the land, and is "alone at last," since "delth" has parted her from her husband and family; however, she is "loved" by the sea, which is mixed with her and bears her up and backwards, as the tide turns. So "along the river ran," to caverns measureless to man. However, the syntax of this sentence--an intransitive construction preceded by adjectival oppositives--will not fit the syntax of the rest of the sentence: "riverrun . . . brings us to Howth Castle and Environs." This sentence is transitive, with "us" the object. Joyce has fused an intransitive sentence with a transitive one: "along the river ran," with "the river-run brings us to Howth Castle and Environs." Perhaps Joyce is conveying the turn of the tide, the sandhi between death and life by his mixed form. Anna Livia feels the kiss which gives her the keys to life; then she flows away in language to the beginning of life again.