Book IV

This chapter contextualizes the lyrical and poignant ending of the Wake as both dramatic monologue and speech act. Expanding upon the tradition of the aubade set forth in Chapter 3 by considering Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on the god Thoth and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s mysticism, it looks at the intimate, domestic, and elegiac tone of the ending of the Wake as the logical conclusion to the book’s larger framing of prayer and theory of language.

Introduction

The introduction shows Joyce’s preoccupation with prayer across all of his works in demonstration of his ongoing use of it as a mode of language. Focusing on the writings of Origen, Giambattista Vico, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin, the introduction lays out how prayer is a theory of language through exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer as it appears in Finnegans Wake (as Isolde’s night prayer). The introduction concludes by making the case that the four parts of the Wake are progressive and cohere around concepts of language as prayer.

Book III

This chapter envisions the Wake as part of the tradition of dream vision literature. Beginning with the first critical writing on the Wake that sought to contextualize the book as such, and reassessing more contemporary views that the Wake is not part of the genre, the chapter lays out the tradition from the origins of English poetry and demonstrates Joyce’s adaptation and conformity with it. Part of the chapter engages Giordano Bruno’s extensive writings on dreaming and sight. The chapter takes into consideration the end result of dreaming—awakening—and situates the Wake as an aubade as well as an example of dream vision. In so doing it connects Joyce’s work to possible sources of inspiration, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Bishop, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Dream of the Rood, and Richard Rolle, and looks into the criticism of Derek Attridge, Edmund Wilson, and John Bishop.

Book I

Focusing on how we perceive images and their relationship to cognition, perception, and representation, this chapter examines the relationship of Joyce’s long fascination with the history of inscription and alphabet, letters and sigla, primitive art, Giordano Bruno, The Book of Kells, and the image-making powers of the mind.

Book II

This chapter examines the relation of ideas about magic to the conceptualization of language as prayer in the Wake. Ranging in reference from Claude Levi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Tzvetan Todorov, Giambattista Vico, and Eliphas Levi, the chapter shows that Joyce not only saw words and letters as magical and coterminous with prayer, but also as visual entities. It focuses on the role of exorcism, and draws correlations between the cartoon drawings in Finnegans Wake II.2 and images from the tradition of the grimoire. It also examines how the Wake touches on the work of Ernst Cassirer, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning.