The Hundredlettered Name: Thunder in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Abstract

In “Literal/Littoral/Littorananima: The Figure on the Shore in the Works of James Joyce,”² introducing a “poetics of the seashore,” I considered Joyce (or his characters) walking and imagining along the seashore. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce made use of two natural-water cycles. These water cycles include, by natural inference, rainbows and thunder. The two water-cycles retain their natural base and are associated humanly and mythologically in Finnegans Wake with the oceanfather,the cloud-daughter, and the river-wife. The first water cycle is the spring of water that turns into a stream or lake and river to flow to the sea. This cycle was a commonplace in nineteenth-century English poetry, where the stream was associated with daily individualized experiences and the ocean offered painless impersonality and oblivion.³ The ocean was also the reservoir of images of a metaphysical collectivity.⁴ In this tradition, Joyce wrote to his brother that “Anyway my opinion is that if I put down a bucket into my own soul’s well, sexual department, I draw up Griffith’s and Ibsen’s and Skeffington’s and Bernard Vaughan’s and St. Aloysius’ and Shelley’s and Renan’s water along with my own. And I am going to do that in my novel (inter alia) and plank the bucket down before the shades and substances above mentioned to see how they like it [. . .].”⁵

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Viking Press, New York, 1958; references are given in text in parenthesis.

For Alice Fredman.