Babel Tower ARG

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueLit/comments/10uavgo/the_official_truelit_finnegans_wake_readalong/

Additionally, the name “Persse O’Reilly” has been noted, mostly by other commenters in the previous threads who looked it up, as being a pun on the French term perce-oreille – meaning “earwig” – and this leads me nicely into my next point.

There have been a few words similar to “earwig” in the text up to this point, but the song itself refers to earwigs directly when it says: “When that frew gets a grip of old Earwicker / Won’t there be earwigs on the green? / Big earwigs on the green, / The largest ever you seen.” Here, the text seems to be implying that the term earwig is tied with to the rumour mill against Earwicker – “the green” could very well be Ireland itself, and the “big earwigs” might be the reproduction of the rumours, in the sense of an earwig being another term for an earworm (the word earworm actually comes from the German name for an earwig, ohrwurm, because the Germans don’t know what worms are). Therefore, whenever anyone in Ireland hears about Earwicker, they will automatically recall the rumours about him, like how an earworm of a song can loop in your head just by being reminded of its existence.

But there is also more to it than that, because we still have to relate it to this next line: “Suffoclose! Shikespower! Seudodanto! Anonymoses!” Joyce is naming some of the most important names in the history of literature - Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, and Anonymous – and he is mixing them with religious terminology. By placing these names directly after the above lines, these names are also implied to be, somehow, the big earwigs on the green. What I believe Joyce is saying is that, just as rumours or music can transform into earworms, so too can the same process of transformation be seen with literature – the most memorable pieces of writing stick in your head, and their ideas loop endlessly, and it can get to a point where the collective consciousness knows these ideas so well that they effectively transmute into unavoidable background noise - the ideas, basically, become imprinted on your thoughts simply by being a member of society (you don’t, for instance, have to read Sophocles to have pre-determined ideas about the word “Oedipal”).

We can, if you really want to, combine the interpretations in the above two paragraphs. We could say that Joyce is tying the rumour plot against Earwicker into his ideas about the influence of the literary canon on society – we could even say, if we wanted, that the rumour plot against Earwicker is also the plot of Finnegans Wake, and that therefore Joyce is saying that the effect of Finnegans Wake will be to create a new canon of Irish writing – in other words, to create a new set of “earwigs on the green.” I wonder, as well, if we can tie this to the new name given to our protagonist: “He’ll Cheat E’erawan our local lads nicknamed him.” Here, the word “everyone”, being rendered in dialect, now contains a faint trace of the word earwig (although, saying it out loud, it might actually be closer to ohrwurm). By combining “everyone” and “earwig”, and yes I understand how much combining I am doing so don’t point it out, we get a reinforcement of the idea that the literary canon does not just affect literature, but rather affects everybody within the society in which that literature is found – by making Finnegans Wake, then, Joyce is not just hoping that the book itself becomes a cultural earworm, but also that it will influence Ireland itself, to the point that a new set of beliefs will begin to form over the wreckage of the old canon.

Finally, I would like to note that there is a fan-made recording of “The Ballad of Persse O’ Reilly” on YouTube (thus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph0BHu0PB-s ), and that it made me realise at least two things – (1) that James Joyce would have really enjoyed Trout Mask Replica, and (2) that Joyce had, with “The Ballad of Persse O’ Reilly”, intentionally written a song that was very difficult to get out of your head. If only there were a word for that.