“Inbursts of maggyer”: Joyce, the fall, and the Magyar language
“Inbursts of maggyer”: Joyce, the fall, and the Magyar language

Summary/Abstract: The essay traces how, possibly in partial response to the national characterologies of Arthur Griffith and Otto Weininger, James Joyce made symbolic use of the Hungarian language in his mature fictional books Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Taking its clues from the Biblical narratives of the fall of man and the fall of the tower of Babel, the study argues that this Finno-Ugric language, radically different from most European idioms and possessing a seemingly impenetrable vocabulary, grammar and orthography, became a useful device in Joyce’s hands to reinforce his major themes of (postlapsarian) carnality and linguistic confusion in his later fiction.

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