Musical reminiscence and structure in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939)

Abstract

James Joyce’s enthusiasm for music is proverbial, not to mention the long-acknowledged importance of music that is at the core of his creative process. His works are replete with references to Opera, classical music and song. The way Joyce deploys language denotes the temporal dissonance of modernity while evoking a disjunction with the past. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) could well be viewed as a musical composition in its own right. In Finnegans Wake, nostalgia expresses the impossibility of a mythical return to the prelapsarian unity of time and space. The dissonant clatter in Joyce’s Wake signals the break with that previous state of harmony. Joyce’s last novel oozes with an awareness in every word and phrase, in every rhythm and pause. The aural dimension of the words questions the status of language itself as the written text makes audible the dissonance that is at the core of a once harmonious cultural landscape. Furthermore, Joyce was deeply concerned with the musicality of the word that enabled him to play on the non-lexical properties of music. Following Ezra Pound—who believed that the poet’s duty was to learn music—and Ludwig Wittgenstein for whom reading was like listening to music, the present paper will first attempt to tease out some of the musical fragments, allusions, references and structures in Joyce’s novel, before pointing to music as both a modality of self-reflexivity and a mirror of the historical moment in which he produced his work of art.