He was unorthodox in his beliefs but he used the terms soul and spirit in passionate and meaningful ways and he did not accept the premises of a vacuous form of relativism. Joyces methods are demonstrably modern having more to do with philology and psychoanalysis than with symbolism and magic but they are none the less informed by a sacral relation to language as a kind of broken heaventalk in which truth subsists in a dismembered way. Yet this intention could not have sustained him over the seventeen years of Work in Progress without a corresponding belief in the revelatory power of the syncretic methods that he applied to all languages and cultures in all their phenomenal variety. After Ulysses, Joyce believed that he had come to the end of English, and there is some room for the idea that he intended to challenge or dismantle the psychic authority of the language in whose shadow Stephen Dedaluss soul frets in A Portrait of the Artist (∞nglish punned to petery pence, in Wake-parlance).
The most conspicuous innovation of Finnegans Wake is its use of dream-language, in fact a constant layering of multi-lingual puns in successive drafts which produces a fabric rich in semantic possibilities but generally impenetrable to the ordinary reader. James Joyce: Work in Progress / Finnegans Wake Back to Index James Joyce: “Work in Progress” / Finnegans Wake
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