Joyce, James - Marian Eide (essay date summer 1997)
Marian Eide (essay date summer 1997)
SOURCE: Eide, Marian. “The Language of Flows: Fluidity, Virology, and Finnegans Wake.” James Joyce Quarterly 34, no 4 (summer 1997): 473-88.
[In this essay, Eide explores Joyce's “fluidity of language” in Finnegans Wake and asserts that the book “performs an exploration of the interactive relationship between oppositional entities.”]
Walking along the edge of the Irish Sea on Sandymount Strand, Stephen Dedalus reflects on the relation between the water's movement and language: “These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here” (U [Ulysses] 3.288-89). In “Proteus,” Stephen envisions language as a heavy sediment whose surface is disturbed by the implacable and constantly changing influences of water and wind. While in this episode of Ulysses Joyce suggests that language is a solid though alterable element, in Finnegans Wake...
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