피네간의 경야의 제자 읽기

Abstract

The title of James Joyce’s last work Finnegans Wake has multi-faceted symbolic significances and allusions. The time when Joyce decided on the title is not known and unclear. When he started the work, he revealed it to his wife Nora Barnacle only, but to no one else. In May 1927, through his friend Harriet Weaver he got his siglum for the title of book: □. It, however, remained to be only suggestion and ambiguity. In 1938, to Joyce’s astonishment, his another friend Eugene Jolas correctly guessed the title: Finnegans Wake. Joyce decided on Finnegans Wake and intended a pun on the name of the Irish ballad “Finnegan’s Wake,” the spellings of which appear later directly in the page 607 of the text. This paper aims to analyse the title of Finnegans Wake both thematically and linguistically and to search for the various connotations it incorporates: a high number of intertextual allusions and references to other texts. The title is populated by a number of major themes and concerns of the book, and it enumerates such as Finnegans fall, the promise of his resurrection, the cyclical structure of time and history, the motif of warring brothers, Vicoian historicism and Brunoian theory of the polarity of opposites, etc. Furthermore, the title is also evocative of another Irish folklore hero Finn MacCool. Joyce continued to exploit the title’s play on words in many ways, like the voice of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the murmuring river-heroine of the text. All in all, Joyce weaves many allusions to the title in and out the pages of the text, taking on different forms on the historical, philosophical, mythological, legendary, linguistic, cultural bases. Such exegetically analytic methodology of the title of the text might be the desirable and ideal way of reading a story in the whole text, which takes the form of a discontinuous dream-narrative, with abrupt changes to characters, character names, locations and plot details, etc.