Ruth M. McAdams

Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Fellow in the Humanities

20042005 Forum on Sleep and Dreams

Ruth M. McAdams


College '06

Ulysses and Finnegans Wake: The Syntax of Sleep

In his two great novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, James Joyce represents a spectrum of states of consciousness—from the wakefulness of Leopold Bloom’s morning routine, to the daydreaming of the “Circe” episode, to HCE’s sleeping dreams. Ulysses chronicles the lives of three characters over a single ordinary day in Dublin, while Joyce’s “book of the night,” Finnegans Wake, describes one man’s dreams over the course of a single 628-page night. Joyce’s novels have often been criticized as being incomprehensible and overly obscure, and to me, one of the most interesting aspects of this incomprehensibility stems from non-standard syntactical and formal structures that create Joyce’s distinctive voice. I am researching Joyce’s use of syntax to determine how and why he bends and breaks the rules of the English language, and how these deviations create a grammar and syntax that attempts to mimic the various levels of wakefulness represented by the two novels. I will attempt to determine how distinct these syntaxes are from each other and to what extent they follow predictable rules, in an effort to better understand the relationship between language and consciousness.