Induction, Deduction, and Visual-Spatial Perception: The Finnegans Wake Intelligence Test

Abstract:

Finnegans Wake makes intense demands on its readers’ intellectual energies, and I propose that the text brings our cognitive reasoning capacities to the foreground by putting them to work. In this, the Wake resembles an intelligence test, calling upon abilities of deduction, induction, and visual-spatial perception. Using deduction, readers draw upon existing linguistic paradigms in order to make sense of Joyce’s neologisms, while induction involves identifying patterns created by the text itself. Moreover, “characters” such as HCE are often denoted only by the appearance of these letters, activating pattern-recognition skills. Nevertheless, identifying these references is not the end-point of studying the Wake, since dissecting Joyce’s text into an inventory of allusions would dissolve its artistry. Instead, discerning familiar elements in Joycean innovations is a fluid and ongoing process, where the manifestation of one’s own cognitive processes constitutes an aesthetic effect.