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Benstock, Bernard / Joyce-again's wake : an analysis of Finnegans wake
(1965)
Chapter three: comic seriousness and poetic prose, pp. 108-163
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Page 108
I ~ CHAPTER THREE~ ~j Comic Seriousness and Poetic Prose As Shem and Shaun, the dual aspects of man's nature, constantly merge and "reamalgamerge" into each other; as Isobel, the Alicegirl, sees her image in her looking glass; so the twin muses of Comedy and Poetry are constantly fusing in the language of Finnegans Wake. Essentially they are dual characteristics of Joyce's "Revolution of the Word," which like most revolutionary aspects of the novel (the antithesis challenging the thesis) is actually a romance of the word—a synthesis of the comic with the poetic into a single entity of language. As it is often impossible to separate the meaning from the language in Finnegans Wake—its form being derived intrinsically from its content—it is equally impossible to segregate the humorous from the poetic. In an attempt to analyze the nature of the comedy and the qualities of the poetry in the Wake, it is important to do so primarily in terms of reuniting the dissected parts into its original unity—the synthesis which is the basis of Joyce's harmonic as well as intellectual balance. Its humor is basically verbal since Joyce's universal dream is poetically conceived in terms of "echoes" rather than "images"; it is a purblindman's dream transliterated immediately upon perception into speech patterns capturing the many-leveled irrelevancies which dance about the central core of significance in each event. This is not to imply that Finnegans Wake as a comic novel lacks its comedy of situations, but to impress that even its "slapstick" situations are delivered in terms of lingual gymnastics, words falling over each other in comic processions. The strong element of pantomime which, as Atherton indicated,' dominated much of Joyce's thinking in his conception of the Wake, is equally linguistic. His Harlequins and Columbines wear their splashed profusion of colors in a tumble of linguistic patterns of "rudd yellan grue
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