ABSTRACT
How does Finnegans Wake translate into a fictional context the equivocations basic to the knowledge-gathering enterprise of the encyclopaedia? We can use the well-known formal difficulties of the Wake as a starting point. One of these eccentricities is the central use of wordplay in the form of puns, portmanteau words and combinations of these two. The other difficulty is the text’s building of lines by an association of words that is tightly controlled by ready-made encyclopaedic categories of knowledge. 1 These two operations of wordplay and “automatic” lexical chaining have implications for our discussion of fictional encyclopaedism. Wordplay has been linked by Freud to an evasion of psychic expenditure. 2 In the Wake, wordplay and word association are linked to an indiscriminate multiplication and manipulation of the categories of knowledge, woiking through all the categories in such a way as to avoid or defer the prescriptions of a literary Reality Principle which would restrain semantic exuberance and restrict any multiplication of connections among ideas.
