Beyond the Rainbow: Spectroscopy in the Wake

Abstract

In Finnegans Wake II.1, the twilight games chapter, during a contest of riddles between Shem, Shaun and Issy, we suddenly find Shem holding a mysterious optical device, a ‘spectrescope’ (2002, p. 230.1). Joyce gives Shem, Shaun and Issy other names in this chapter, as Glugg, Chuff and Izod; however, this discussion will refer to them by their more common names since II.1 will be contrasted with other parts of the Wake. Shem’s device sets a puzzle for today’s Wake reader, to whom the word ‘spectroscope’ means little, but to Joyce’s contemporary readership it would have recalled key scientific debates on the complexity of light and of the universe that was still going on as the text was being written. This debate and this optical instrument, the spectroscope, shed new light on Joyce’s crucial and frequent use of the rainbow in the Wake. The twilight games chapter is intricately associated with colour and light, particularly as embodied in the spectrum, and is set against the increasing darkness of twilight: this makes the appearance of the spectroscope here seem appropriate. The Wake’s obscurity owes something to a notion of light’s spectral mystery and Joyce’s text functions as a kind of optical instrument that reveals a hidden strangeness within the everyday. This strangeness, of course, exhibits itself in the very words used in the Wake, which are split and reformed by Joyce to reveal new perspectives on reality; as discussed in the previous chapter, this is both a visual and an auditory effect, as an individual word, whether read on the page or aloud, often has several meanings.