…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.