SOURCE: Eide, Marian. “The Language of Flows: Fluidity, Virology, and Finnegans Wake.” James Joyce Quarterly 34, no 4 (summer 1997): 473-88.

In this essay, Eide explores Joyce's “fluidity of language” in Finnegans Wake and asserts that the book “performs an exploration of the interactive relationship between oppositional entities.”

Walking along the edge of the Irish Sea on Sandymount Strand, Stephen Dedalus reflects on the relation between the water's movement and language: “These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here” (U [Ulysses] 3.288-89). In “Proteus,” Stephen envisions language as a heavy sediment whose surface is disturbed by the implacable and constantly changing influences of water and wind. While in this episode of Ulysses Joyce suggests that language is a solid though alterable element, in Finnegans Wake language appears on the page in a constant, liquid state of flux. Joyce's last book records the tracings of water on land, the...