Customer Reviews

Joyce-again's Wake: Analysis of "Finnegans Wake"

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The most interesting part of this text is Joyce's "handling of alliteration and assonance in varying his language to fit the dual purpose of his comic-poetic variations. A principal example can be found in the S sounds that pervade throughout the Wake, recording the slithering of snakes in the grass and the swish of temptresses' skirts. Serpents and seductresses offer at least two parallels for Joyce - Eve in the garden, Cleopatra and her asp, the latter heard hissing in a marginal comment to a reference to "sire Jellyllous Seizer" (271.3) "Cliopatria, thy hosies history" (271.L) and the former genesis of the Wake: "past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of Shore" (3.1). they form the duo of druidesses" (271.4), the "sosie sesthers" (3.12).

Elsewhere L sounds couple with S sounds as the gossip crosses and recrosses the river where the dirty linen is being washed, and the seduction of young Anna Liva provides conjecture for the washerwomen: "Letty Lerk's Lafing light throw those laurals now on her daphdaph teasong petrock" (203.29-31), and "she was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by silamoonlake (202. 26-28)."
In contrast to the musical pairing of the S's and L', Joyce also offers a nonmusical pattern of sounds involving P's and Q's, also indicating the girls in the park. The choice of these sounds probably has a lot less to do with their significance in Gaelic sound changes than with a dictum of propriety ("mind your P's and Q's") against which all the characters in the Wake sin, and the urinary meaning of "pee," as well as the form of the two letters, both being yonic in shape with a small tail attached. The Prankquean as such is a combined P-Q female, most often seen in the Wake as a pair, the girls in the park: "a queen of pranks"(68.22), "the parkside pranks of quality queens" (394.27-28)."

Bernstock stands with the original Wake critics such as Atherton, Glasheen, Hart, Tindall, and Campbell. Though old, this is still one of the most well-ordered and systematic books ever written on the Wake." A necessity to all Wake Junkies.