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“Finnegan’s Wake: A radically experimental modernist novel (1939) by James Joyce (1882-1941). He began work on it in 1922, but was too superstitious to reveal the title; sections were published (1927-1930) in New York as ‘Work in Progress.’ Finnegan’s Wake is a record of a night, in which the mind of the sleeping H.C. Earwicker is interpreted with great virtuosity and invention of language, with meaning piled upon meaning. Joyce illustrated his literary method by saying that he was tunneling through a mountain from two sides. The structure largely follows the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744), who divided human history into three ages, divine, heroic, and human, to which Joyce added a fourth, return, emphasizing Vico’s theory of evolutionary cycles in civilizations. The circularity of Joyce’s work is emphasized by the fact that the last sentence merges into the first:

‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve to shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.’

The punning title derives from and Irish-American ballad about Tim Finnegan, a drunken hod-carrier who falls from his ladder and is killed. A splash of whiskey at his wake awakes him and he exclaims ‘Do ye think I’m dead then?’ The title also suggests the return (awakening) of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, mythical hero of the Ossianic cycle of stories.

Among the many coinages in Finnegan’s Wake, one in particular has come into wider usage. It was from Joyce’s phrase ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark” that the US physicist Murray Gell-man (1929-2019) took the word ‘quark,’ which he applied to what were then hypothetical elementary particles making up the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. Intriguingly, quarks have such properties as charm colour, and strangeness.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.