A character lying asleep across the length of Ireland is described in the following terms: “The meteorpulp of him, the seamless rainbowpeel. . . His bellyvoid of nebulose with his neverstop navel. . . And his veins shooting melanite phosphor, his creamtocustard cometshair and his asteroid knuckles, ribs and members. . His electrolatiginous twisted entrails belt” (Joyce, 475). James Joyce’s 1939 novel/poem, Finnegans Wake, is widely regarded as one of the strangest and most linguistically experimental books ever written. Yet for all the strangeness of Joyce’s diction, critics have since the 1960s noted that the Wake’s phrasing possesses “a fundamental syntactical clarity” (Hart, 31). What is more, phrases like those cited above cannot simply be passed off as nonsensical. For even as we are bamboozled by Joyce’s diction, we seem simultaneously—as with Lewis Carrol’s relatedly perplexing and illuminating poem “Jabberwocky”—to have an intuitive sense of how to say these seemingly meaningless words as if we mean them; and to gain a smattering sense of the sorts of things the writer is probably getting at in the process. In my paper, I suggest that both these readerly outcomes are functions of the “syntactical clarity” noted above, a phenomenon much more related to meaning and performativity than a common wisdom would have it. But if syntax has such a structural role in the Wake, what are we to make of claims like Philippe Sollers, that Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake “in such a way that the English language no longer exists” (Sollers, qtd in Lacan, 2). How can we attribute syntactical clarity to a language that no longer exists? I suggest that recent work by linguists in the field of Construction Grammar might offer some leads.
Bio
Paul Magee studied language and literature in Melbourne, Moscow, San Salvador and Sydney. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Canberra, where he directs the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. His most recent book is Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). A third book of verse, The Arranging of Skin,is forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann in 2024.
This presentation was accompanied by slides. View the slides HERE.