…and the dumb speak.

Finnegans Wake is the closest I’ve ever seen to capturing on the page the very essence of what language is — in this book, arguably no one is speaking but language itself, to itself, unmasking the process by which language, the chattering river of the unconscious mind, produces selfhood.

The “quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoq” that ends Chapter 7 is, presumably, the speaking of the dumb. The “dumb” are all those who are unable to speak, but the word might also denote people who are not all that intelligent. Yet even people who lack intellectual accomplishments still, in terms of the Wake, embody the same Eternal story. And so the artist allows them to speak, through him.

I’m reminded of Joyce’s claim that Finnegans Wake was being written not really *by* him but by others around him, in the everyday conversation that he appropriates and weaves into perhaps the most impressive artistic achievement of the twentieth century.

The final word of I.7 is in part meant to evoke the croaking of frogs, a reference to Aristophanes’ “The Frogs,” and to the swamps from which life first came, the postdiluvian marshes in which the wars of history begin. But quo is Latin for “and” or “where” or “that,” all words of storytelling (and then that and then that and then that). Maybe the letter “I” is stuck between them to signify how artists obsessively work themselves into their works.

But it also recalls the word “quote.” Joyce is notorious for not using quotation marks, making it sometimes tricky to figure out who’s speaking in his works. And yet arguably everything in the Wake is a quotation of sorts: discourse recycled from everywhere, quote, quote, quote, quote, quote. Citing and reciting and transmuting the lead of our utterances into the pure gold of Art.