This post looks at the Enlightened Nonsense of Finnegans Wake, in sharp contrast to boring and childish citations and recitations of discourse.

In a paper called “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce” published in a 1929 book on Finnegans Wake (then called Work in Progress), Eugene Jolas argues that Joyce’s work is a response to the “inadequacy of worn-out verbal patterns.”

Beginning with the declaration that “The real metaphysical problem today is the word,” Jolas elaborates on the degradations language has suffered:

For in considering the vast panorama of the written word today, one is struck with the sensation of its endless and monotonous repetitiousness. Words in modern literature are still being set side by side in the same banal and journalistic fashion as in preceding decades, and the inadequacy of worn-out verbal patterns for our more sensitized nervous systems seems to have struck only a small minority. The discovery of the subconscious by medical pioneers as a new field for magical exploration and comprehensions should have made it apparent that the instrument of language in its archaic condition could not longer be used.

It is in this context that, he argues, Joyce’s new work “has given a body blow to the traditionalists.”

When I read Jolas’s words above, I can’t help but think they anticipate George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” which would be published in 1946. He too would diagnose the “worn-out verbal patterns” of English and its “endless and monotonous repetitiousness,” though he was less concerned with “banal” uses of language than with wordy pretentiousness, euphemism, and what we now call “thought-terminating cliches” that either say practically nothing of substance or conceal monstrous meanings. The real danger of these worn-out patterns is that they become substitutes for thinking.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say [“]In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that[“] than to say [“]I think[“]. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

You don’t have to hunt about for words because the words are already out there in set phrases and patterns. In a short time, the words come without you needing to think. In this way, people can unthinkingly support what Orwell called “orthodoxy,” touting the party line, whatever the party line is, instead of thinking critically about what is being said.

Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. […] When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

This is similar to the “endless and monotonous repetitiousness” to which Jolas refers. This lifeless language that enables an unconscious orthodoxy is exactly what “Newspeak” is in Orwell’s novel 1984. To drive the point home, he repeats some of this language in the novel when Winston speaks to Syme, one of the architects of Newspeak.

The passage is worth quoting at length here because it eerily forecasts the style of contemporary political “conversations” had among many people of all political persuasions:

At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught some such remark as “I think you’re so right, I do so agree with you,” uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking.

One person speaking, another person nodding along, neither of them listening or conversing in any real sense. And then Winston notices something unnerving about the man:

His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word […] And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature […] [The specific words] made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy

And then, he finishes, with more imagery from the essay:

As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but t was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

[Syme had just reminded Winston that “duckspeak” was one of the rare Newspeak words with a double meaning: “Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.”]

The picture is grim: political speech is ducks quacking. It’s people saying pre-generated phrases and arguments without thinking about them at all, and other people nodding along, not listening. Political speech becomes a vague signaling of being on a “side” or a “team,” rather than thinking through ideas with anything resembling intellectual honesty. It is endless repetitiousness, endless chatter, endless duckspeak. Noise without meaning. Modern discourse is nonsense in the truest sense: if we can speak without thinking, then we are making no sense.

It is against this nonsense that the Enlightened Nonsense of Finnegans Wake is pitched. The prose of Finnegans Wake is a rebellion against the perversion of language into a tool of orthodoxy and unconsciousness. Ironically, it is this novel about the unconscious mind that strives to break its readers out of their thoughtlessness, to make them more fully conscious. In a world where people are encouraged to amble about like robots quacking and regurgitating slogans and hashtags and lines and arguments without a single thought, a novel that violates not just the conventions of the genre but the very fundamental rules of the language itself is an attack on the ossified, worn-out husks of repeated phrases that pass for political “conversation.”

*

Something I personally struggle to understand is the popularity of figures like Donald Trump. But it struck me the other day that his violation of norms might be appealing to many people because it may seem like a reprieve from the “same old, same old” of political discourse. In a world where “politics” is an endless cycle of repeated cliches, typically in the service of maintaining (or ever-so-slightly modifying) the existing system, the presence of something new and unexpected, the violation of the usual rules, might very well create excitement.

It might seem like I’m suggesting a parallel between Donald Trump and Finnegans Wake. But there’s a reason that the former is broadly popular in America while the latter is virtually unknown outside of small groups of eggheads like me: while both are arguably kinds of nonsense, the former speaks in nonsense that is crass and largely meaningless (little more than an novel spin on duckspeak) and only the latter involves a nonsense that is truly transgressive. Rather than entrenching the power of the wealthiest, Finnegans Wake causes us to think and reflect, to band together into reading communities to collaborate, to become conscious of the reading process — and hopefully more conscious of our own thoughts and arguments — in ways that most of us, most of the time, are not.

*

The new “Department of Government Efficiency” was given that name so it can be abbreviated DOGE, which is a reference to a twenty-year-old meme involving a misspelling of the pet.

Some might be tempted to think that this is a new and exciting use of discourse: lifting a meme out of popular culture and applying it to christen a department of government, which is normally labeled with terms that are formal and official. But this childish joke, if we can call it a joke, isn’t transgressive. It’s a stale regurgitation of a worn-out reference, invoked in the service of entrenching the power of the already powerful.

Finnegans Wake, meanwhile, remains as fresh, complex, and subversive as ever. Almost seeming to see into the future, Joyce included the word “doge” in his novel. It describes the slumber of HCE at the end of I.3. Humphrey (Chimpden Earwicker) has been locked into his home (Stonehenge) and has withstood an assault from a form of the Cad. And now he sleeps:

Humph is in his doge.

“Doge” was for centuries a title for Venetian rulers. It also makes me think of “dojo,” as if it also designates a sensei ruling over martial arts students. So the word represents strength and leadership.

But it also represents weakness. “Doge” could be rendered “doze,” especially since the passage it comes from describes a sleeping body. It can also be “dotage,” describing the fallen/sleeping HCE in terms of a descent into age: a doddering, weak-minded old man.

[“Well, old Humber was as glommen as grampus,” gossip the washerwomen of I.8]

If we read it with a hard g, as I used to pronounce the meme decades ago, it makes me think HCE is in the dog house: another depiction of his fall entails him getting in trouble with the missus for his extra-marital dalliances. [locked in his home, HCE “mourned the flight of his wild guineese” in I.3, mixing his wife (compared to a goose in I.8) with Guinness beer and the “wild geese,” a term for Irish who left home to live on the Continent]

Altogether, HCE is a strong ruler who now slumbers, and the people wait for his return. All of those ideas are compressed into a single word. That’s genius writing; this one word is worth ten grade-school-level attempts at acronym humor.

And “Humph” both casually abbreviates one of HCE’s given names, calls him a “hump” (suggesting simultaneously virility [and oomph?] and jerkishness), and makes a sound that could be either thoughtful or dismissive, depending on the context.

The fallen HCE — like our language itself — is tired and waits to be redeemed. He will not be revitalized by new spins on worn-out cliches. It takes intelligence, imagination, critical thinking, and the bravery of intellectual honesty — the bravery of being able to admit that you’re wrong, to follow arguments and evidence where they lead, even if you aren’t happy with the conclusion — to revive the fallen human spirit.

*

Shaun is HCE’s son who is the extrovert, the politician, the bully, the braggart, the sexist. He is the priest and nationalist. He wraps himself in the flag and waves the cross. He is a holier-than-thou moralist and a hypocrite.

He is an interesting figure to consider in the modern world.

Most of his appearances in Finnegans Wake reveal his flaws, his inadequacy as a person, the utter folly of his belief in self-sufficiency. As only one half of what it means to be Human, he is missing a vital part of the experience, signified by his brother, Shem (the introvert, poet, mystic).

I’ve been thinking recently not only of his bullying, hypocritical attack on Shem at the end of I.7 but of part of II.2 in which Shaun attempts to learn his lessons — trying to learn about his imperial control over the world — but fails and has to be schooled (in every sense of the word) by Shem, who makes fun of him through a math lesson.

Just before his brother takes over, it reads,

by long last, as it would shuffle out, must he to trump adieu atout atous to those cardinhands he a big deal missed, radmachrees and rossecullinans and blagpikes in suitclover. Dear hearts of my counting, would he revoke them, forewheel to packnumbers, and, the time being no help fort, plates to lick one and turn over.

I will leave the interpretation of this passage for another post to come about Shaun the Postman.