Literal Darkness: Finnegans Wake and the Limits of Print

This essay focuses on the role played by the medium of print in Finnegans Wake. Drawing on John Bishop’s influential reading of the Wake as Joyce’s “book of the dark,” I suggest that the work’s multi-lingual puns and portmanteaux—along with its sporadic typographical play—highlight the role of its “dark print” in the work’s mediation. My argument revolves around the discovery and exploration of the fragmented letter and also makes detours into the lengthy discussions of the kind of readerly acrobatics required by the work’s extreme linguistic performance. In doing so, it traces the Wake’s own awareness of its printed status and explores how the sensory attention, which it draws to its own physical materiality, opens up a series of reconciliations between the conflicting polarities—eye versus ear, space versus time, Shaun versus Shem—that drive so much of the work’s dynamics. As the “dark print” of the Wake works to break down these oppositions, it also comes to index their more fundamental continuity in terms of the physical limits with which embodiment as such is necessarily bound.