“It was of a night,” begins the Prankquean paragraph. It’s an opening that suggests traditional beginnings of stories, but the odd phrasing reminds me of the opening lines of William Blake’s most famous and most anthologized poem, “The Tyger”:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night

The phrase “forests of the night” sounds strangely abstract, and Joyce’s clause “It was of a night” is even more so, using the indefinite article, rather than the definite: it is impossible to know where we are in time or space. It’s not even that it was night – it was of a night. Some indefinite night. Like Blake, Joyce evokes a hidden quality of the night, something that is universal and nonspecific. In Finnegans Wake, this aspect corresponds to the Unconscious, the dark parts of our mind.