ABSTRACT
Finnegans Wake is a text that only ironically elicits decipherment. As Roland Barthes writes, “Once the Author is gone, the claim to decipher a text becomes useless.” And there is no author in Finnegans Wake; there is only the semi-autobiographical character of Shem the Penman, a “tragic jester,” who is “a Sham.” The conjunctive personage (both Joyce and not Joyce) so memorably described at the beginning of Book 1, section 7 of Joyce’s master-piece-de-resistance thus locates the problem of the author-function within the aliminal text of the world, represented through Finnegans Wake and the many (un)coded texts within that text. Whereas Joyce seems to take pride in claiming that Ulysses will keep scholars busy with deciphering its code for years, in Finnegans Wake there is no code; there is no interpretation; there is only infinite.
