The matter of (with) Finnegans Wake

Thus begins James Joyce's last work, figuratively and thematically in midstream. The sinuous sentence, the swerving phrase, continues a journey: by water, by bodily fluid, by verbal fluency. If we, the readers, are encompassed in the ambiguous 'brings us', then we can begin to understand why the voice of that opening sounds so like the narration of a tour guide. For we have no way of knowing where we, as readers, are situated in this opening. Are we on a boat in the river Liffey in Dublin, or are we inside a human body; are we at the beginning of time, or in the eternal present of every human utterance? The opening of Finnegans Wake drops us, without map, clock, compass, glossary, or footnotes, into an unknown verbal country, and the voice of the tour guide, alas, speaks their language rather than ours, although we catch enough cognates to keep from drowning altogether in that verbal stream. The role of that tour guide is, in a sense, duplicated by the enterprise of this essay. Surely, no other existing literary work needs a 'guide' more sorely than James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, with its strange language, its neologisms, its generic ambiguity, the obscurity of its allusions, the mysterious status of its speech.