Beyond the Rainbow: Spectroscopy in Finnegans Wake II.1

Joyce and the Science of the Spectrum

In Finnegans Wake II.1, the twilight games chapter, during a contest of riddles between Shem, Shaun, and Issy, we suddenly find Shem holding a mysterious optical device, a "spectrescope" (FW 230.1).¹ This sets a puzzle for today's Wake reader, to whom the word "spectroscope" means little, but to Joyce's contemporary readership it would have recalled a key scientific debate on the complexity of light that was still going on as the text was being written. This debate and this optical instrument, the spectroscope, shed a new light on Joyce's use of the rainbow in the Wake. The twilight games chapter is intricately associated with color and light, particularly as embodied in the spectrum, and is set against the increasing darkness of twilight: This makes the appearance of the spectroscope here seem appropriate. In this chapter, Joyce demonstrates the connection between specters and the spectrum, as he plays with the ambiguity of words such as "spectral," which can mean both ghostly and relating to the spectrum. In this essay, I will argue that the Wake's obscurity owes something to a notion of light's spectral mystery and that Joyce's text functions as a kind of optical instrument that reveals a hidden strangeness within the everyday.

Although other optical devices such as the kaleidoscope have been emphasized as models of Finnegans Wake's processes, the spectroscope is especially important as it is associated with problems of knowledge, particularly the knowledge of the universe and of light. Despite the fact that the device makes only a few direct appearances in the book (three more occur in II.3 and another in III.3), I would argue that it is potentially present in any occurrence of the image of the rainbow. The scientific spectroscope can be placed alongside other rainbow resonances, such as the theological (as in classic readings of the Wake or more recently in John P. Anderson's Finnegans Wake: The Curse of Kabbalah, which emphasizes the rainbow as divine covenant), or the alchemical (as discussed by Barbara DiBernard in her analysis of color in Alchemy and Finnegans Wake). One of the more useful analyses is J. Colm O'Sullivan's Joyce's Use of Colors in which he considers a range of possible meanings for the rainbow, including discussions of its sexual meaning, although there is little scientific depth to his idea of the spectrum.² In Joyce's Book of the Dark, Bishop discusses the rainbow more scientifically, in relation to Newtonian optics. All of these previous accounts of the rainbow ignore the fact that the period in which Joyce was writing was marked by a radical shift in the scientific and popular conceptions of the universe, on both a microcosmic and macrocosmic level, a shift in which the spectroscope, through its association with light, played an important part.

The spectroscope is an instrument that "analyses the light from a star, or indeed from any source whatever, into its various constituent colours,"³ producing a graduated strip of color, typically marked by dark bands or lines (called emission and absorption lines), which create a pattern. Depending upon the scale, the device was like a more complex telescope or microscope, with light entering a slit, being reflected off a lens or mirror, and finally being refracted through a prism or a diffraction grating (a metal or glass surface marked with fine grooves), which split the light into its different wavelengths, creating light spectra. These spectra could be directed by the observer onto strips of photographic film, thereby accurately recording them. The differing patterns of each spectrum thus made up of light and darkness could then be analyzed in order to produce data about the source of the light.⁴ Spectroscopes had been used since 1859 and they were first used in astronomy in 1863; however, it was only later, with the new physics, that the real importance of spectrum analysis was perceived.

In the early twentieth century, spectroscopy became a key method for investigating a suddenly unfamiliar universe, able to be...