“Es komme, was niemals noch wach!”Paul Celan, Spät und Tief1

Introduction

James Joyce’s works were produced in the first half of the twentieth century, a period critics define as modernity2, a term first coined by French poet Charles Baudelaire in 1863, who defined it as “transitory, fugitive and contingent” (1962: 467), foregrounding the world’s brokenness and loss of unity. Literary and musical modernity has been characterized by critics as the expression of a perpetual oscillation between the world and the hidden, elusive inner feelings of the poet, writer or composer. This phenomenon is expressed, in modern literature, by the gap that exists between the word, the sign and the object it is supposed to describe ― a flaw that is at the core of modernity and at the origin of the representational crisis highlighted by Wittgenstein’s approach. An approach that stripped language of denotation, transforming it into a game of abstract signifiers. Musicologist Julian Johnson, who considers music as central in the construction of modernity, argues that musical modernity locates the subject in the changing experience of space. The modern world, according to Johnson, is a world of ruins and fragments that the composer’s memory tries to “piece together” (Johnson 2015: 9). The composer’s writing process appears to be the artist’s only means at hand to give shape and stability to his very own existence, as “musical modernity is shaped by the idea of a musica scripta. Writing is the durable trace, the permanent mark of the contingent” (Johnson 2015: 242). During the nineteenth century, musical texts were grounded in an architectural structure that oscillated between multiple polarities that foregrounded the contrastive effect of music. At the century’s twilight and at the dawn of the new century this structure dissolved progressively to give shape to musical evocations which rested on a patchwork based on recognizable motifs but lacking tonality. Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) described it as “emancipated dissonance”, which enabled composers to express the world’s fragmentation3. This new musical approach freed composers from having to abide by the traditional narrative structures. According to Johnson, the music of modernity is “a broken music. It’s broken from the past, but also in itself” (Johnson 2015: 33). A musical mode that enabled the composers to portray the self-defining subject, a subject shaped by its own dissonance between its inner self and its public identity. In the early decade of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky’s music perpetually re-membered and refigured musical fragments into “kaleidoscopic patterns” (Johnson 2015: 33) that opened almost endless permutations. The “ceaseless” (Kermode 2000: 7) state of transition that characterizes modernity was also a critical concern in the literary field at the time. In modernism, things tend to coexist uncomfortably with their exact opposite. The writer’s task is therefore to find the means to interpret the ontological experience through language and words. The novelist, like his fellow musician, is compelled to resort to new means of expressing his thoughts, feelings, and emotions, as he resorts to a variety of strategies that produce impressions in the reader that are close to those produced by music, therefore placing high demands on the reader. As a result, modern composers, poets and writers attempted to stretch language to its limits to find new strategies to deal with the dialectics of human experience in a fragmented world, and music’s expressive potential offered them the opportunity “to go beyond the mere verticality of language” (Bucknell 2001: 3). While discussing the most salient musical echoes and structures encoded by Joyce in his last novel, showing how he recollects the fragments of the past as he translates into words the disruption and fragmentation of his consciousness, the present paper will also explore the circular motif that structures Joyce’s universe. A universe in which both the author’s consciousness and his cosmogonic conception of the novel coalesce.

1. Music and Memory

James Joyce’s Wake4 rested, like modern music, on the reader-listener’s memory. As Calvin S. Brown astutely points out, the reader and listener “must have a retentive memory” (Brown 1987: 11). A musical or literary work originates in the composer or writer’s mind in rather similar ways. Joyce draws from the long tradition of past literature and music, and reshapes already existing material, reproducing certain well-worn melodies and formulæ in new guises. Joyce envisions the writing process as an act of remembering the past. Consequently, musical, and literary tradition are a source of artistic inspiration while constituting a link between the past and the present, which implies a dynamic vision of the way in which both modes of temporality interact with one another. It therefore appears that the experiences treated in prose can only be understood in terms of memory and personal experience. Composer Paul Hindemith remarked that the reactions evoked by music are not feelings “but […] the images, memories of feelings” (1953: 38). In other words, to work efficiently, a piece of music or prose rests on repetition. Repetition5 is powerfully musical in effect, as repeated forms establish rhythms of speech. Wittgenstein insists on the importance of a repeat in a musical score as repetition contributes to the piece of music’s power and thrill. The process of repetition imprints in the reader or listener’s mind the subjective human experience he most likely associates to the first time he read or heard the text or the piece of music. As the operation reiterates itself the reader/listener recognizes the textual passage or musical phrase, and his perception and understanding of it becomes more and more precise each time. This change is best described by Marcel Proust in the second volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Within a Budding Grove (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1918), when the all-pervasive narrator recalls the first time he heard Odette Swann playing Vinteuil’s Sonata on the piano:

Ce fut un de ces jours-là qu’il lui arriva de me jouer la partie de la Sonate de Vinteuil où se trouve la phrase que Swann avait tant aimée. […] Probablement ce qui fait défaut, la première fois, ce n’est pas la compréhension, mais la mémoire. Car la nôtre, relativement à la complexité des impressions auxquelles elle a à faire face pendant que nous écoutons, est infime, aussi brève que la mémoire d’un homme qui en dormant pense à mille choses qu’il oublie aussitôt, ou d’un homme tombé à moitié en enfance qui ne se rappelle pas la minute d’après ce qu’on vient de lui dire. Ces impressions multiples, la mémoire n’est pas capable de nous en fournir immédiatement le souvenir. Mais celui-ci se forme peu à peu et à l’égard des œuvres qu’on a entendues deux ou trois fois, on est comme le collégien qui a relu à plusieurs reprises avant de s’endormir une leçon qu’il croyait ne pas savoir et qui la récite par cœur le lendemain matin (Proust 1988 : 100).

It was on one of those days that she happened to play me the part of Vinteuil's sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond. […] And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally "first hearings" and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth. Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall, a minute afterwards, what one has just been saying to him. Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning (Proust 1924 : 154-55).

Jean-Jacques Nattiez has convincingly shown that this passage highlights “two clearly distinct phases in the perception of sonorous phenomena” (Nattiez 1989 : 43). The Narrator moves from an emotional and impressionistic perception, when he hears the musical phrase “at the time of [its] ‘archetypal’ performance” (Nattiez 1989 : 56), to a more intellectual and analytical one as he hears the sonorous form played again. Music and literature are therefore understood in terms of memory and language, which are necessarily informed by the reader-listener’s other experiences.

2. Joyce and Music: A Brief Introduction

James Joyce’s first book was published in May 1907. It was a small volume of thirty-six poems entitled Chamber Music. Joyce came from a musical background and his love for music, especially vocal music, informs his literary works from his little book of verses, through Ulysses―in which Joyce shaped the Sirens’ episode into a structure of “sound, sequence, and motif that, if not music itself, is music’s parody” (Tindall 1969: 16) ―to Finnegans Wake. The latter is a perfect illustration of the way Joyce plays with word sounds and the effect they have on the reader’s ear. As Myra T. Russel rightly observes, “the sound of language is paramount” (Russel 2016: 64) in Joyce’s works especially in the Wake since it hinges on the perpetual blending of words and sound. While Ulysses takes place in daytime, Finnegans Wake unfolds at night. The oneiric realm of the Wake explores a man’s mind, whose dream is a succession of obsessive repetitions and absurdities. The complex verbal web conceals truths from the reader as he plunges into a maze of darkness and uncertainty (“Methought as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland”) (Joyce 1975: 403-04.18) in search for a key to unveil the symbolic meaning of this dream. A dream in the course of which sound and meaning emerge out of the darkness and abyss of the text in which the reader is “circumveiloped by obscuritads” (Joyce 1975: 244.15).

2.1. The Wake’s Musicality

Joyce began working on the Wake in 1922. The well-known old Irish pub song “Finnegan’s Wake” provides the book with its modified title. The novel, which is divided into three parts subdivided into 17 chapters, is a colossal puzzle depicting a highly intricate and complex dream6. As Joyce wrote to Ferdinand Prior, “[t]he devil knows whether you will be able to understand what the story means or what this entire wordspiderweb is about” (Joyce 1992: 393)7. Joyce made it almost impossible to read the Wake like any other text. Joyce was, as mentioned previously, a musician and, as such, music offers a path into the author’s kaleidoscopic text8.

The language in Joyce’s novel deliberately relinquishes the traditional way of writing, not unlike the way Arnold Schoenberg’s music broke away from the traditional system of tonality, which had been the basis of musical syntax for the previous two and a half centuries. In 1908, Schoenberg’s work, George Lieder Opus 159, initiated a profound change in the field of music. Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music (Simms 2000: 8)10 was touched by angst and spurred on by a need for liberation from the past, and it emerged from the same artistic movement that was developing in painting and literature in the years before World War I. The term ‘atonal’ points to the absence of key. Key is characterized by the persistence of a tonal centre and provides the composer with a unity of structure and a means to readily achieve differentiation, contrast and articulation. Modern music does not make use of tonal centres. Consequently, in atonal music the listener does not quite really know where he or she stands, creating what composer Paul Hindemith describes as a feeling of “spatial dizziness” (1953: 56)11, as the listener has “no tonal context in which to interpret it” (Hindemith 1953: 25). This impression is due to the fact that the musician uses all twelve different notes of the chromatic scale in such a way that not one note seems more important than another. Therefore, in the same way Schoenberg disrupts the traditional expectancy of the listener, with music that is characterized by the occurrence of pitches in novel combinations, the new language devised by James Joyce disrupts the rational intelligibility the reader’s “mind’s ear” (Joyce 1975: 254.18) may expect. Joyce’s “vowelthreaded syllabelles” (Joyce 1975: 61.06) prose assaults the reader by way of a whole new way of combining sounds and words that leaves the reader trying to grasp hold of the author’s verbal-musical imagination. The meaning conveyed by traditional literary texts is dislocated while it is “assembled and asundered” (Joyce 1975: 136.06) by the author. The music of Joyce’s prose is essential to Finnegans Wake and it proves more than helpful to read the text aloud12. To hear a recording of Joyce’s own reading of the book is, as Philip Kitcher put it, “to hear a musician making music” (2007: xviii). Although listening to Joyce reading the Wake does not necessarily shed light upon the cryptic nature of his text, it undoubtedly conveys a vivid impression of the text’s sound, and promotes, as Wittgenstein observes, the image of the speaking voice or “soundpicture” (Joyce 1975: 570.14): “[…] I might say that the written word intimates the sound to me—or again, that when one reads, letter and sound form a unity—as it were an alloy […]. Once I feel this unity, I might say that I see or hear the sound in the written word” (Wittgenstein 2009: 75)13.

2.2. Joyce’s “Atonal” Prose

There are many repetitions of words such as “mujikal chocolat box” (Joyce 1975: 13.09), “harps” (Joyce 1975: 103.10) “flute” “horn” “ciello” and “canto” (Joyce 1975: 43.32 and 44.05), “musickers” (Joyce 1975: 373.31) combined with a surprising number of famous operas, operatic arias or pieces of music, some only referred to by title such as the “Messiagh of roaratorios” (Joyce 1975: 41.28) by Hændel, “O’Mara, an exprivate secretary of no fixed abode (locally known as Mildew Lisa) in reference to the beginning of “Liebestod” from Tristan (Joyce 1975: 40.17)14, the “valkirry” (Joyce 1975: 68.15) by Wagner, “magic fluke” (Joyce 1975: 451.08) and “cosy fond tutties” (Joyce 1975: 417.19) by Mozart, “Piowtor the Grape” by “Rimseky Popparkork” (Joyce 1975: 497.28) not to mention the recurrent references to traditional religious and popular songs such as the “Litany of Saints”, “The Minstrel Boy” (Joyce 1975: 528.31)15“London Bridge is Falling Down”, “Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay” (Joyce 1975: 247.28)16 “Auld Lang Syne”, “Molly Mallone”, “The Rocky Road To Dublin” and the well-known ballad of “Finnegan’s Wake”17. All these references call attention to the web of musical allusions in Joyce’s novel. I will not be mentioning “The Ballad of Persee O’Reilly”18 which has been convincingly analysed and discussed by Bowen, Roughley and Schiff. I will simply remind the reader that the sheet music of the ballad is inserted in the Wake, emphasizing the novel’s multimedial nature.

The text is peppered with words packed with many syllables designed to trip up the tongue “(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawnt-oohoohoordenenthurnuk!)” (Joyce 1975: 3.15), “Ballyaughacleeaghbally” (Joyce 1975: 14.09)19, “muzzlenimiissilehims” (Joyce 1975: 5.16) and “Nuctumbulumbumus” (Joyce 1975: 598.05). The words seem to connect through mere adjacency like the portemanteaux words20 “wordwounder” (Joyce 1975: 75.19), or “voixehumanar” (Joyce 1975: 441.26) in which a single word is the junction of two or more different languages, a “fornicolopulation” (Joyce 1975: 557.17) of sorts. It is as if they randomly floated toward each other and merged before breaking away from one another to form other words and meanings in an almost infinite mathematical combination21. Because music is mathematical it imposes a numerical logic. Joyce’s clever use of assonance creates mellifluous sounds, through liquid consonants creating a euphonious effect “[…] Penelope Inglesante and lezba licking like Leytha liane […]” (Joyce 1975: 212.10)22. The almost voluptuous drowsy vowel sound enhances the erotic tone of the passage. The recurring use of onomatopœia pinpoints the importance of sounds in the text “Washywatchywataywatashy! Oiraresheorebukujibun! Watacooshy lot!” (Joyce 1975: 484.26-27) or “You told of a tryst too, two a tutu” (Joyce 1975: 491.13). The former onomatopœia is an example of what Derek Attridge describes as nonlexical onomatopœia23. The “repeated letters indicate prolonged sound” (Attridge 2009: 474), while also displaying a visual component in the text. Joyce indulges therefore not only in “exuberant aural games” (Attridge 2009: 483), but also in visual ones. The latter is evocative of someone humming a tune. In the following passage the rhythmic clacking of “camp”—“camp, camp, camp.” (Joyce 1975: 343.04)24—enhances the resounding effect of footsteps on a pavement by creating a cadential progression. Joyce also uses this technique with great expressivity to create a dissonant clatter in the text as he describes the world in sonic terms: “The clip, the clop! (All cla) Glass crash” (Joyce 1975: 44.19). Joyce’s experimental use of elements of visual language to represent musical sound is probably best illustrated in the following passage:

The rye is well for whose amind but the wheateny one is proper lovely. BENK! We sincerestly trust that Missus with the kiddies of sweet Gorteen has not BINK to their very least tittles deranged if in BUNK and we greesiously augur for your Meggers a BENK BANK BONK to sloop in with all sorts of adceterus and adsaturas. (Joyce 1975: 379.26-31)25

The apparent lack of syntactical constraints and the resulting ungoverned freedom produced by what we may describe here as atonal prose makes it extremely difficult for the reader to follow in either form or content. As the reader attempts to decode this passage, his eyes and attention are inevitably drawn to the words in capital letters which disrupt the text’s linearity. These dissonant sonorities integrated into the text’s fabric sound chaotic when read aloud, creating an unfamiliar percussion effect within the rhythm of this passage. While illustrating the abstruseness of Joyce’s prose, they disrupt the text’s tonal structure much in the same way Schoenberg’s twelve chromatic tones were constantly used with no particular tonal relationship to one another, creating an impression of dissonance and, as a result, conveying the impression that there was no central pitch around which the composition was organized. Moreover, the final words —“all sorts of adceterus and adsaturas”— provide no resolution to the present passage. Needless to say, that lack of resolution is a major feature of atonal music.

The following excerpt imitates the cockcrow “Echolo choree choroh choree chorico!” (Joyce 1975: 585.3-4)26, creating a jarring dissonance, while highlighting once more the vocal sonority of Joyce’s text. Consequently, the external world is reconstructed through the sonorous matter of the verbal text. Onomatopœia, or as Joyce puts it “onamatterpoetic” (Joyce 1975: 468.10) dislocates into mere sounds “Icecold. Brr na brr, ny prr!” (Joyce 1975: 502.09), which is evocative of the noise one makes when feeling cold, before morphing into mere consonantic abbreviations “Sft!” (Joyce 1975: 621.08) and “Lst!” (Joyce 1975: 621.17) expressing music’s non-lexicality. The reader moves from meaning through verbal sound to undifferentiated sound as Joyce expresses sounds without words. The repetitive effect of stammering gives the impression that the text is repeating itself, while it also marks time as the author’s hand stutters (“Bymaster Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand” (Joyce 1975: 4.13), conveying a sense of motionlessness to the text itself: “that he might, that he might never, that he might never that night?” (Joyce 1975: 90.30-31). Yet, Joyce also uses repetition to refer to the apparent motion in music when the speaker’s voice accelerates as it becomes more and more animated. “I am amp amp amplify” (Joyce 1975: 533.33). This short segment gives the reader an impression of volume as the word grows progressively in size as the voice steadily moves into a higher register. The apparently naive rhythmic scheme of this passage visually enacts the progressive growth of sound, while pinpointing the way in which Joyce’s novel works both visually and aurally, providing the reader with “an earsighted view” (Joyce 1975: 143.09-10) of the text. The louder it gets, the more emphasis is given to what is said. The higher the voice rises, the more the speaker asserts himself. These poetic devices evoke the way in which Alban Berg27 merges speech and song in a clangorous fashion in his opera Lulu (1935), or the way in which Schoenberg makes use of instrumental music in Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) (1899). Another important aspect of Joyce’s cleverness with words and their musical effects concerns the way he muses with words and how the text hinges on the variation of the words themselves. In the following passage for instance:

[…] playing copers fearsome, with Gus Walker, the cuddy, and his poor old dying boosy cough, esker, newcsle, saggard, crumlin, dell me, donk, the way to wumblin. Follow me beeline and you’re bumblin, esker, newcsle, saggard, crumlin […] (Joyce 1975: 555.11-15)28

Joyce plays on the repetitiveness of Crumlin, “esker, newcsle, saggard” as well as the suffix -lin. While the alliterations capture the reader’s sense of hearing, the repeated words have an almost hypnotic effect, the circular structure of the passage echoes the circular structure of the novel itself, a point I will be returning to later in further detail. Hence, strange rhythms and harmonies emerge from Joyce’s musico-literary text, whose complexity and layered meanings open up to a multiplicity of interpretations, while reminding the reader that music is everywhere in the Wake. By hitching together word and music Joyce’s work reflects a perpetual battle between meaning and sheer sound.

2.3. The Wake as Musical Score

Yet, despite the text’s apparent lack of a “tonal centre”, Joyce has disseminated throughout it keys to provide the reader with the necessary information to interpret his work. The reader may therefore read the text as a virtual score to be visualized in the form of a verbal-musical text. French critic Jean-Louis Backès underlines the importance of paratextual material in music. He compares the composer’s “music notations” (Backès 1994: 109)29 that one finds on sheet music to stage directions. This phenomenon developed from the eighteenth to the twentieth century inducing what Backès terms “a truly verbal invasion” (Backès 1994: 109)30 onto the music sheet, as the scores began expressing the authors’ intentions. In the early stages of the novel, the author warns the reader to look out for encrypted clues and not be rebuked by the task lying ahead of him:

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations. Tieckle (Joyce 1975: 18.17-20).

Joyce informs the reader that the Wake is a world in its own right: a world within the world. Leaving key centre and tonal hierarchy behind, Schoenberg’s fragmentation of musical continuity is mirrored through Joyce’s efforts to create an alternative prose structure that translates his stream of consciousness into the vocal sonority of his text.

Beyond the sexual innuendos deployed in the subsequent passage, Joyce underlines the fact that he views music as the expression of the body and desire, as he links artistic creation to sex31. Joyce’s insistence on the importance of sounds is clearly one of the many means of expression he uses:

It is told in sounds in utter thath, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con’s cubane, a pro’s tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall (Joyce 1975: 117.12-16).

While this passage confers a sense of sexuality to his creative process—“the word is my Wife” (Joyce 1975: 167.29)—, Joyce uses musical allusions as an ironical means to express secret desires that cannot be announced directly in speech as they arise directly from the flesh itself, conveying a sense of corporeality to Joyce’s musical prose. Meanwhile, the reader is plunged into uncertainty as he:

may have our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot, the interpretation of any phrase in the whole, the meaning of every word of a phrase so far deciphered out of it, however unfettered our Irish daily independence, we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness (Joyce 1975: 117.35-36 and 118.01-04).

As the narrative drifts onward, the author instructs the reader to pay attention to the margins of the text—“the marginal panels” (Joyce 1975: 122.25)—encouraging him to be a “conscientious scripturereader” (Joyce 1975: 67.12)32; in the same way one listens repeatedly to a record, the reader of the Wake spends his time re-reading the book. The opening lines of chapter ten depict the narrator awakening from the deepest of sleeps— “As we there are where are we are we there” (Joyce 1975: 260.01). His uncertainty about his whereabouts in the narrative mirrors that of the reader. A bewildering situation that is enhanced by the sentence’s absence of syntactical divisions33. What is more, the reader is puzzled by the form of the chapter itself—a text with marginal comments34 and footnotes, which inform it with a sense of polyphony and counterpoint as the voices of the three commentators contribute to the chapter’s contrapuntal structure. Shem’s professorial comments (left-hand margin), Shaun’s irreverent ones (right-hand margin) and Isabel’s footnotes35, which have been defined by William York Tindall as “the voice of silence” (1969: 172), interact with one another. The contrapuntal structure of this chapter is bewildering in its fragmentary division of the three different voice parts as the plural voices of the counterpoint tend to blur the expression of the individual voice.36 The twins will change sides in the middle of the chapter while Isabel, whose voice remains in the footnotes, personifies a form of constancy in this textual quagmire. Shem’s marginal comments, which consist among other things of a stave with a treble clef notating the higher pitch and the notes B, C, A and D on the text “Please stop if you’re a B.C. minding missy, please do. But should you prefer A.D. stepplease” (Joyce 1975: 272.12-14), indicate to the reader that the capital letters in the text may correspond to music notes. Toward the end of the Wake musical notation is used to express “discordance” when the narrator points to H.C.E.37 as an element of discord “It is so called for its discord the mesedo” (Joyce 1975: 564.04). In the fixed-do system of solmization, which singers use to sight-read music, the system designates musical notes by syllable names. C thus refers to do, E to mi and B (called H in German terminology) to si. Therefore, “mi-si-do” stands for E.H.C. A few pages later, Joyce will use the same strategy to refer to C.E.H. “Tableau final. Two me see” (Joyce 1975: 590.24-25) (do, mi, si). This musical combination of letters echoes Robert Schumann’s “Lettres dansantes” in Carnaval op. 9 (1835). Schumann, who had fallen in love with young piano student Ernestine von Fricken, was thrilled to find out that the letters of her birthplace―Asch―could be translated into musical notes: A (la), S (German for E flat / mi), C (do), H (German for B natural / si). The whole of Carnaval relies consequently on these four notes, as is made clear from the subtitle: Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes (Little Scenes on Four Notes). Schumann therefore equated music and letters as he joined them in a dance. The discovery sparked off a set of variations on these four letters just in the same way Joyce plays upon the combinatorial possibilities provided by the letters H.C.E.

3. Time and Space

In chapter eleven, a radio station broadcasts a musical programme that mixes composers, singers, songs, and instruments offering a microcosmic and fragmented history of music:

Let everie sound of a pitch keep still in resonance, jemcrow, jackdaw, prime and secund with their terce that betwides them, now full theorbe, now dulcifair, and when we press of pedal (sof!) pick out and vowelise your name [Debussy]. A mum. You pere Golazy [Pergolesi], you mere Bare [Bach] and you Bill Heeny [Bellini], and you Smirky Dainty [Mercadante] and, more beethoken [Beethoven], you wheckfoolthenairyans with all your badchthumpered peanas! We are gluckglucky [Gluck] in our being so far fortunate that, bark and bay duol with Man Goodfox [Fox Goodman] inchimings having ceased to the moment, so allow the clinkars of our nocturnefield, night’s sweetmoztheart [Mozart], their Carmen Sylvae, my quest, my queen. Lou must wail to cool me airly! Coil me curly, warbler dear! May song it flourish (in the underwood), in chorush, long make it flourish (in the Nut, in the Nutsky) till thorush! Secret Hookup (Joyce 1975: 360.03-16)38.

While making an agreeable composition in which rhythm and sound are in more than customary accord with sense, this passage nevertheless illustrates the discrepancy between what is read and what is heard, the discord between sound and meaning, text and sound.

Finally, Joyce dwells, through the voice of the professor who is digressing on “shamebred music” (Joyce 1975: 164.15-16)39, on his love for vocal music in an overtly erotic passage:

Of course, the unskilled singer continues to pervert our wiser ears by subordinating the space-element, that is to sing, the aria, to the time-factor, which ought to be killed, ill tempor. I should advise any unborn singer who may still be among my heeders to forget her temporal diaphragm at home (the best thing that could happen to it!) and attack the roulade with a swift colpo di glottide to the lug (though Maace I will insist was reclined from overdoing this, his recovery often being slow) and then, O! on the third dead beast, O! to cluse her eyes and aiopen her oath and see what spice I may send her. How? Cease thee, cantatrickee! I fain would be solo. Arouse thee, my valour! And save for e’er my Bdur! (Joyce 1975: 164.32-36 and 165.01-07)

This passage also foregrounds the notions of time and space—a recurrent motif in the Wake—in the writing process “in cycloannalysm, from space to space, time after time, in various phases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture” (Joyce 1975: 254.26-28). While music is viewed as a temporal form of art, the notion of circularity that developed in the twentieth century had an impact on the way in which one perceived music. Consequently, music overcame its specificity as a temporal art only unfolding in time, in favour of one unfolding in space. In Joyce’s “verbivocovisual” (Joyce 1975: 341.18) text, the paginal space of the book grows unobtrusively into an equivalent to time.

4. Circularity and Nostalgia

I would now like to draw attention to the Wake’s narrative circular structure. The novel opens in medias res of a sentence “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” (Joyce 1975: 3.01-03), a sentence that begins at the very end of Joyce’s novel “Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone last a loved a long the” (Joyce 1975: 628.13-16). The opening sentence gives the reader numerous clues as to what will be awaiting him or her during his or her textual perambulations. The “swerve” and “bend” announces narrative dislocation and digressions that highlight the rhapsodic nature of the novel. The motives of the river and recirculation evoke Italian historian Giambattista Vico’s theory of ricorso which describes history as a series of cycles, thus explaining the circular structure of Joyce’s narrative: “The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin” (Joyce 1975: 452.21-22). Hence, the closing/opening line may well be read ironically. The gullible reader, who has finally reached what he believes to be the book’s terminus ad quem, is brought to realize that, like Finn, he is invited to start off on his journey once again. The circular structure of Finnegans Wake rests also on the recurring references to circularity that pervade the novel40. The opening narrative device presents us therefore with an anfractuous text, a breached narrative symbolized by the split or breach in the circular shaped text. As a result, the reader literally falls into the Wake. Joyce’s book may also be viewed as an anatomical exploration into Tim Finnegan’s broken skull. A “microchasm” (Joyce 1975: 229.24) that opens up onto an oneiric realm in which the characters all spring from the dislocated mind of one person, the dreamer. The Wake unveils the disruption and fragmentation of the narrator’s consciousness. The fragmented aspect of the novel is pinpointed by the recurrent figure of Humpty Dumpty41, Tim Finnegan’s surrogate in the Wake. These ontological fractures are portrayed through musical metaphors “[…] when I’d like own company best, with the help of a norange and bear, to be reclined by the lasher on my logansome, my g.b.d. in my f.a.c.e., solfanelly in my shellyholders […]” (Joyce 1975: 450.08-10). The five-note chord FACE appears on the sol-fa scale following the ascending sequence from low to high. It is as if the narrator’s face itself were materializing in the interstices of the latticework of music notation. Joyce bolsters the impression of physical representation as the narrator projects his body into the interstitial space of the stave, while the voice “usurps the body and makes the modern writer reconsider the illusoriness of physical presence as a projection of genuine intimacy or authentic identity” (Hepburn 2016: 208). The author’s stratagem purposely entraps the reader within the threads of his fiction “[a]nd encircle[s] him circuly” (Joyce 1975: 505.13). Joyce’s disruptions of words and syntax offer an unstable perception of reality as they open up a gap between time and space.

Victoria Adamenko describes the remarkable way in which circular music forms expanded and developed in the twentieth century. Contemporary composer George Crumb has demonstrated that the myth of turning time into space can be conveyed through scores using a consortium of circular graphics with fragments of conventionally notated music that contribute to music’s mythological dimension. Allowing for the obvious anachronism here, we could draw a comparison between George Crumb’s carefully calligraphed scores that imply harmony between the ear and the eye—notably the scores of Makrokosmos I & II (1972-1973) that explore piano’s seemingly infinite sounding possibilities42—and Joyce’s Wake. The symbolic notation of Crumb’s work contributes to the mythological dimension of music. As is expected of cryptic symbols, “they puzzle the interpreter, who thus receives hints about a wide array of meanings” (Adamenko 2007: 205) while presenting technical problems for the musicians to read, just in the same way the Wake causes problems to the reader who wishes to interpret Joyce’s verbal-musical text.

Russian mythographer and scholar Eleazar Meletinsky observed that there was a rebirth of myth in early twentieth-century literature and claimed that “[m]ythification [was] certainly linked to Modernism” (Adamenko 2007: 4)43. It has been said that Joyce’s style of literary prose draws on Richard Wagner’s combination of myth and music, and there is no doubt that the Wake merges the consciousness of the dreamer and a cosmogonic conception of the world. Joyce’s cosmogony merges the Greek universe—the world as cosmos— with the Hebraic vision of the world namely the world as history. The incantatory verbal music of the Wake enables the reader-listener to undertake a unique voyage, from the creation of the world through the whole history of humanity. Joyce’s work proclaims the importance of the collective memory of mankind as he calls upon each reader’s memory to record and re-member the Creation (“the very dawn of protohistory” (Joyce 1975: 169.21) through the sounding matter of the verbal text in an age of disintegration, disruption, and fragmentation of consciousness. Joyce sought for a rationale through his mythological tale. He tried to create the means to renew and restructure our fragmented universe, whose dislocation is rooted in Man’s Fall, as Joyce attempts to make sense of temporality and its infiniteness within the limited space of his book.

The Wake refers recurrently to the Fall of Man― “The fall” (Joyce 1975: 3.18) as well as the Fall of Babel “(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhou- nawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)” (Joyce 1975: 3.15-17) ―both resulting in ontological and linguistic fragmentation.

A wake is also the occasion for looking back on life whether in mourning or celebration and, in the Wake, Joyce clearly links music to memory. Not unlike the phrases of Vinteuil’s sonata, “the evocation of events through sound in Joyce’s fiction suggests that the hearing body remembers, and recaptures, lost youth and lost time” (Hepburn 2016: 207).

As the narrative unfolds, the reader undergoes a memorial process in “Memoland” (Joyce 1975: 318.32-33) as he moves from the dark ages of the past to the present day “[i]t was ages behind that when nullahs were nowhere”. Time and space collide throughout the ages of history as he moves “from space to space, time after time, in various phases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture” (Joyce 1975: 254.26-28) in a neverending circle “Allow! allow! Gyre O, gyre O, gyrotundo!” (Joyce 1975: 295.23-24). The dream itself is retrospective—“[w]hen I’m dreaming back like that I begins to see we’re only all telescopes” (Joyce 1975: 295.12)—and it regains the continuity of human existence through retrospection. The complex layering of flashbacks is evocative of the jumbled, or mosaic nature of time. The reader is therefore summoned to remember—or to put it in Joycean terms “redismember” (Joyce 1975: 8.06); while reading he must “fress up the rinnerung and to ate by heart” (Joyce 1975: 300.15-16)44 to reconstruct, and re-member the fragments of his oneiric journey:

[n]ow, not to mix up, cast your eyes around Capel Court. I want you, witness of this epic struggle, as yours so mine, to reconstruct for us, as briefly as you can, inexactly the same as a mind’s eye view, how these funeral games, which have been poring over us through homer’s kerryer pidgeons, massacreedoed as the holiname rally round took place (Joyce 1975: 515.20-25).

Joyce’s Nostos rests first and foremost on the return itself as experienced by the reader and on the poetic and musical telling of that experience. Joyce’s nostalgia45 expresses a sentiment of loss and displacement, while also exhibiting the romance of his wildest fantasies.

Conclusion

The musical resonances and echoes, the snatches of lyrics and melodies, created within the structure of James Joyce’s last novel carries hidden or obscured meanings for readers, who are engaged in the temporal process of reading and hearing, and whose minds are submerged by a wildly accelerated flow of images and signifiers. Joyce wanted his prose to contain the non-lexical properties of music; this is especially true of the Wake in which Joyce seems to show an obvious preference for sound over sense. The musicality that emerges from his late prose disrupts the traditional order or unifying cantus firmus, as it attempts to escape from the constricting toils of tradition. Joyce’s works simply make audible the dissonance at the core of the old harmony. Yet, while his works hollow out new paths, his art is paradoxically deeply rooted in the arts, languages, and cultures of the past. Joyce followed in literature the path Schoenberg had followed in music. Schoenberg believed it was “of great importance that we conserve the knowledge and experience of the past. Precisely this former knowledge and experience will show, I hope, how correct is the path along which we are searching” (Simms 2000: 16)46. His works are not addressed to the ægrum vulgus to put it in Poundian terms (Pound 1918: 227), as Joyce resorts to memory, and relies on the reader’s memory and knowledge to grasp the subtle cultural, artistic, and linguistic references that are scattered throughout his work. The musical reminiscence and structure displayed in his works offer a fascinating reflection on the so-called Modern Times. Joyce’s “later” style expressed itself fully in the Wake, as he shapes sounds into words and words into sounds, creating a meaningful sequence of sounds that convey a metaphorical musicality to Joyce’s prosody. The Wake’s textual incarnation provides the reader with a literary text whose textures of sounds, by the rhythms they create when read aloud, morph almost into a musical composition. In terms of sound and music the attentive reader-listener of Joyce’s works moves from the classic poetic musicality of Chamber Music to the Wake’s chamber pot music of “turning breakfarts” and “farternoiser[s]”, as the Joycean text shifts from harmony to dissonance, from tradition to modernity, to “musics of the futures” (Joyce 1975: 407.32-33).