“Night Lessons” in Wakese: The Furthest Extreme of Joyce’s Anarchic Pedagogy

Abstract

When James Joyce began to create the Work in Progress that would become Finnegans Wake, he no longer worked as a teacher, yet the Wake includes more explicit references to Berlitz, where he first taught English full-time, than any of his previous works do. It is also in the Wake that Joyce takes some of the ideas and issues that arose from his English-language-teaching experience to their furthest extreme. Whereas in Ulysses, Joyce draws into question distinctions between native and foreign speakers of a tongue by creating characters whose use of English cannot easily be classified as native or nonnative, in Finnegans Wake, he creates a lect (a term that refers to a language variety without specifying it as a dialect, an independent language, an idiolect, or otherwise) that does not, and cannot, have native speakers outside the pages of the book; it is also a lect that resists mastery even as it encourages a kind of exuberant fluency. The learning of this language demands a pedagogy that takes Joyce’s own antiauthoritarian approach to teaching to its furthest possible expression. Wakese, with its refusal of standardization, cannot be taught in an authoritarian way because no one can be an absolute expert on it,¹ and the depictions of pedagogy within the Wake, especially in its tenth chapter (here referred to by the fairly common name “Night Lessons”, in order to emphasize its pedagogical framework²), support an anarchic ideal of education.