ABSTRACT
As early as the titlepage we're in mild perplexity. “Finnegans Wake”—what does that tell us? Perhaps just that the typesetter has been careless, for should the word not be “Finnegan's”? But the author's name, “James Joyce,” suggests otherwise, for from that author we've learned to expect odd things. The very first sentence of his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man arrays words of one or two syllables in a syntax of utter naivete, and three of those “words” we will never have seen before: “moocow” and “nicens” and “Tuckoo.” (A “word,” by the way, is something we've learned to perceive between spaces fore and aft. Thus “moocow” is one word, not two.)
