Letter: Waking up to the Finnegans

Sir: Dominic Cavendish (Outside Edge, 18 March) consistently refers to Finnegan's Wake. There is no such book. As the late Anthony Burgess put it, in his fine introduction to Joyce's wonderful masterpiece:

The technique of Finnegans Wake represents a sort of glorification of the pun, the ambiguity which makes us see a fundamental, but normally disregarded, identification in a burst of laughter or a nod of awe. The very title is a complex pun, one missed by printers and editors who restore the apostrophe which Joyce deliberately left out. The primary meaning is one with an apostrophe - 'the wake of Finnegan' - but, as we read the book, we find secondary meaning assuming a greater and greater part in the semantic complex: 'The Finnegans wake up, the cycle is renewed'. The very name contains the opposed notions of completion and renewal: 'fin' or 'fine' (French, Italian) and 'again'. Once we understand the title, we are already beginning to understand the book.

Yours sincerely,

ROGER HAMILTON

London, SE14

18 March