James Joyce¡¯s Finnegans Wake is engaged in a new era of communication made possible by new-fangled mass media such as radio, film, and television. But he never jettisons old forms of communication like letters, newspapers, and magazines, thus rather encompassing a variety of forms of communication in order to attest the problematics of human communication. Joyce¡¯s interest in acoustic errors is deployed in his pervasive uses of stuttering. Joyce¡¯s extensive use of errors produces an effect of humor among the miseries of human life. There are three tactics frequently used throughout Finnegans Wake: montage, portmanteau word, and pun. The first tactic is derived from emergent film industry, in which Joyce must have been interested, since he visited Dublin in order to open a movie theater, Volta. Joyce¡¯s admiration for Sergei Eisenstein is sufficient for his use of the film technique. Second, Joyce refers to Lewis Carroll, whose biographical sources are woven into the Wake-such as his stuttering, relationship with Alice Liddell, and frequent use of portmanteau words. Lastly, Finnegans Wake is filled with a lot of puns. I argue that Joyce embraces not only new forms of communication and technologies, but also never jettisons old forms of communication like conventional periodicals. Joyce¡¯s interest in comic cartoons and their imaginative capability is shown when he deploys the music hall pairs and cartoon characters such as Mutt and Jeff. Above all, a Victorian popular magazine, Ally Sloper¡¯s Half-Holiday, witnesses the emergent discourse of entertainment and consumerism. So Finnegans Wake is not limited to acoustic qualities, but rather extended so as to encompass a variety of forms of communication. Joyce¡¯s inclusion of Victorian periodicals is derived from his aesthetic strategy, which makes possible the incessant production of new meanings. |