Lucia Boldrini, Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in `Finnegans Wake'

Medium Aevum, Spring, 2002 by Steve Ellis

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). xi 233 pp. ISBN 0-521-79276-2. 37.50 [pounds sterling]. This study argues that of all the modernists it was Joyce who had the keenest engagement with the linguistic issues raised in Dante's work, and that in distinction from Eliot's talk of Dante's `easy' imitability Joyce responded to the more complex issues of polysemy, fragmentation, and the problematics of signification raised not only by the Commedia but also in the Convivio and the De vulgari eloquentia.

Lucia Boldrini superbly demonstrates how Finnegans Wake is saturated in these matters and their Dantesque provenance, seeing the text as indebted to yet `playfully' subverting Dante; thus Beckett's hints, in his seminal essay `Dante ... Bruno ... Vico ... Joyce', of the Wake's pursuit of the fourfold allegory expounded in the Convivio is exposed as an inadequate response to the potential infinitude of Joycean meaning. Likewise, Dante's vulgare illustre is both a model for Joyce's eclecticism and an ideal ironized by his own vulgarism, while Joyce's adoption of geometrical signs in the Wake takes off from but goes well beyond Dante's attempts by similar means to signify the ineffable in the Paradiso. This is a persuasive and stimulating study that lives up to the demands of the subject, and that also bubbles over with a host of parenthetical insights.