One of the most popular works of fiction by James Joyce is the Finnegans Wake. Like many of Joyce’s works, it is notable for its difficulty and experimental style. The work has a preeminent space in English Literature for being a spectacular comic vision. The book consisting of 17 chapters talk about the Irish myth of “black pig”, building scenes and motives around it. The characters are in the novel are in a constant state of flux- changing their names, occupation, and physical characteristics which is another notable attribute of the novel.
However, a senior English Major of Northeastern University, Tom Murphy, finds striking similarity between the book and the memes of the current online culture. He compares how Joyce’s novel succeeded in employing so many readers and scholars for 70 years, just how social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram engage millions of users in the ever-evolving memes. Murphy looks at the novel from a macro-level and draws parallels between the lives led by the characters in the novel and the memes going around in social media today.
Murphy, who developed an interest in this particular matter after he took a digital humanities course “Technologies of Text”, says, “I started tracking the characters in Finnegans Wake, and they reminded me more like memes than of the kind of characters you’d see in any other book.” The memes circulated on the internet represent a more complicated way people tell stories rather than being unique. Joyce’s characters in the novel are seeing evolving and changing themselves with the storytelling needs, just as the memes change with the latest news and happenings in the pop culture sphere.
He proceeded to present a research, “Memes, Distant Reading, and Finnegans Wake”, to pay a tribute to the digital humanities tool course. Indebted to the course for expanding his horizons to achieve success in this field, he says, “It opens up new ways of looking at the text that I never even thought was possible.”
Subarna Basu