Book II

Abstract

This chapter examines the relation of ideas about magic to the conceptualization of language as prayer in the Wake. Ranging in reference from Claude Levi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Tzvetan Todorov, Giambattista Vico, and Eliphas Levi, the chapter shows that Joyce not only saw words and letters as magical and coterminous with prayer, but also as visual entities. It focuses on the role of exorcism, and draws correlations between the cartoon drawings in Finnegans Wake II.2 and images from the tradition of the grimoire. It also examines how the Wake touches on the work of Ernst Cassirer, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning.