speck

As night follows day.
after the funeral the Wake. A speck of the Wake.
FW is the story of stories
a shot at writing down the Dreaming of Indo-European humankind. Very few of us read it like honest Roddy Doyle.
Is it a preposterous, impenetrable & immortal folly? An unscalable babel?
The ultimate pancollective unconscious kaka cake or oneiromastic encyclotron, if you will but you probably wont.
It is was & will be a Novel in the original sense of the word, a new thing
cobbled together over 16 years by a nearly blind man for an ideally insomniac readership, a readership required to speakeasy in tongues, panglossaliaquoiquoiquoiquoi!
A tale told of stem and stone… etc is told in the dubble en tongue. Speak it I pray you, drunkenly, as a Dublin lush and meaning unfolds like a family romance in the Freudian mode.
Hot Mama, ALP, Here Comes Everybody the fallen Dad, rival brothers, Shem & Sean, twin daughters & incestibilty between one & Dad . The tale is subject to archetypal shift in the Jungian mode. Joyce’s relationship with his daughter Lucia is part of the story since Ellman more so after Carol Loeb Schloss has the tongues wagging with her Dancing at the Wake.
The Greeks wrote tragedies about fuckedup families. Joyce wrote a comedy. EP called him Jim the joker. As the man so his works. Joyce words act up. In the beginning was the pun. A pun is word behaving badly, meaning both one thing and the other, an destabilised word doing a pirouette, performing, Peter is a rock. Anna is a river.
FW is wordplay on an epic scale. It begs wordplayers to fool about a text as non-linear as the Book of Kells and as sensicle as Jabberwocky
FW is a comedy and Joyce put himself in it. Scholars agree, the dodgy, artistic brother Shem is a satirical self portrait. FW p.169:

“Shem is as short for Seamus as Jem is joky for Jacob….