Falling Asleep in the Wake: Reading as Hypnagogic Experience

Abstract

One feature of Finnegans Wake seems compellingly if paradoxically clear — its ‘stupefying obscurity’ (Bishop 1986, 3) as self-confessedly a ‘book of the dark’ (FW 251), of nightlanguage and nightletters, of sleeping and dreaming.¹ That it was intended as such is clear from Joyce’s own comments during its long elaboration, made in his letters or otherwise recorded, comments rueful, defensive, or triumphant. ‘In writing of the night,’ he said to Max Eastman, ‘I really could not, I felt I could not, use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages — conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious’ (JJII 546). The celebrated negative justification given to Harriet Shaw Weaver bears considering once more: ‘One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot’ (Letters III 146).