Benji’s Reviews > Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals > Status Update

C.K.Ogden,a fairly good acquaintance of Joyce, wrote of Peirce in The Meaning of Meaning (London: Kegan Paul, 1923). This state-of-the-art 1923 survey of linguistic theory appears in the Wake as as the ‘Maymeaminning of maimoomeining’ (267.03).

Joyce was always alive to what his acquaintances were up to, indeed, in the lines of Finnegans Wake is concealed a diary, a form of critique of the cultural scene around him.

A clear Brunian ‘coincidence of contraries’ has surfaced again, for to be happy when miserable translates Bruno’s paradoxical motto which preceded his play Candelaio: ‘In tristitia hilaris: in hilaritate tristis’—in sad- ness, happiness and in happiness, sadness.

It brings us to a confrontation with that important perception of Finnegans Wake, that its apparent sense of affirmation, plurality, and multiplicity shades into or hides a stronger idea of nullity. From the infinitely meaningful, universally affirming, it is a short step to the opposite, to indifference, to voids of meaning and value.

the kind of curves you simply can’t stop feeling

‘Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world. . . . To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightening of your masses in travail.’

The ‘wrong thing’ happened, we are now told, during the ‘dark flush of night’ (527.07). A flush usually brings colour to cheeks, so a dark flush is a mild oxymoron, like a dark light, and is all the more suggestive, since the dark flush of night is probably an erotically charged flush.

Beckett wrote (now notoriously) of ‘Work in Progress’, that ‘it is not about something, it is that something itself ’; Tindall revised this idea, saying ‘Finnegans Wake is about Finnegans Wake’, and we can refine this further: ‘in part Finnegans Wake is about the writing of Finnegans Wake’.

His writing processes involve a psychological scorching, as self-reflection passes through the ‘slow fire of consciousness’: a hellish toasting of thoughts in the forge of the mind.

Chaosmos, however, is an aptly disunified concept, voicing the word ‘chiasmus’, or ‘arch’, that symbol of structural harmony, and in itself a bridge, like many of the Wake words themselves, between chaos and cosmos.