Language As Prayer In “Finnegans Wake,” by Colleen Jaurretche (review)

That prayer is both a guiding principle of, and key to unlocking, Finnegans Wake is the thesis underpinning Colleen Jaurretche’s deft book-by-book analysis of James Joyce’s final work. She traces the ubiquity of prayer from Isolde’s Paternoster in early notebook sketches¹ to Anna Livia’s returning of language to ordinary speech, suggesting that prayer is not only a mode of spiritual discourse but also a theory of language and a study of the human condition. Prayer, she insists, is what underpins and drives the Wakean world; it is what creates and orders it; but it is also what complicates and obscures it.

The book’s introduction discusses the prevalence of the prayer in Joyce’s oeuvre more broadly as well as in the Wake specifically, examining the significance of the Paternoster as it appears throughout the text where the prayer “comes to stand in for the process of gaining knowledge and for the ontological construction of characters (including letters) and words” (2). Jaurretche broadly defines prayer here as an exploration of the entirety of reality rather than of merely spiritual things, as non-discursive and conditional language that is rooted in unknowing. Jaurretche works methodically through Origen Adamantius’s treatise “On Prayer”²—both its discussion of prayer in general and its exposition of the Paternoster “as an exemplar for prayer as a whole” (15). She sets Origen’s exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer against both Giambattista Vico’s La Scienza Nuova³ and the Wake to provide a theory of language as inseparable from prayer that will inform the rest of her reading. Tracing Joyce’s indebtedness to the tradition of apophatic, or negative, theology (which attempts to describe God in terms of what he is not), she demonstrates that prayer, in its ability to bring into being that which is not perceptible, is a fitting framework for the etymological and connotative language of the Wake with its “multiply-rooted words” (29).

The body of Language as Prayer itself examines the Wake book-by-book, each chapter addressing an individual book in the Wake as a thematic exploration of the theory of language as prayer: image, magic, dreams, and speech (41, 68, 94, 117). Jaurretche convinces us that the Wake, structured as it is, takes “the evolution of writing backward, away from the primacy of the written word toward the oral nature of Anna Livia’s final soliloquy” (38).

In chapter 1, Jaurretche explores the concern in Finnegans Wake’s Book I with language as a nexus of image and word as she traces the development of alphabets and antiquarian interests in them. Paying particular attention to the Tunc page of the Book of Kells, she considers Joyce’s reworking of the sense of the past that comes from nineteenth-century design history and its teleological view of human creativity. Here, she highlights, with reference to the sigla of the Wake and the Doodles family, the co-existence of image, sound, and sense in the written word as a response to the antiquarian tension between reading words and seeing letterforms as images. Joyce’s Wakean world, she insists, resists stable notions of both “image” and “word”:

no one reads Kells to learn the story of the crucifixion, and no one reads Finnegans Wake to learn that HCE awakens in the morning. Each work exists in violation of our ontological and epistemological expectations of word and story, so much so that we are hard-pressed to call one merely a Gospel book or the other merely a novel.

(66)

Chapter 2 examines the magical function of language that pervades Book II of the Wake, which traces the influence of apophatic theology on occult theories of mind and matter. Of particular strength here is the analysis of “The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies” (FW 219.18–19) in which Jaurretche reads this section as exorcism and grimoire, as banishment...