Letters

Deliberate coincidences?

On the trail of Finnegans Wake

Mon Aug 8 2022 - 01:45

Sir, – Thank you for publishing not one but two articles on Finnegans Wake in the past week. The first, by Bernadette Lowry (“Finding Percy French in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake”, Books, July 28th), describes the links between Joyce’s novel and the Irish balladeer Percy French.

The second doesn’t mention Finnegans Wake, but the Wake is hiding within it (“The Life of Oreille: Frank McNally on a famous French anthropologist with a very Irish name”, An Irishman’s Diary, August 3rd).

McNally’s diary concerns Patrick O’Reilly, a Parisian priest and ethnographer. McNally points out that Pere O’Reilly had difficulty sharing his Irish surname with his compatriots, and so he sometimes became Pere “Oreille” (the French word for ear).

The overlap with one of the Wake’s characters, Persse O’Reilly – and his alter ego, perce-oreille (the earwig) – is hard to miss.

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Also hard to miss are the shared identities of Fr O’Reilly and the subject of Percy French’s song Come Back Paddy Reilly (to Ballyjamesduff). One might dismiss Paddy Reilly as a most common Irish name but for the detective work of Lowry.

She finds references to Percy French throughout the Wake, concluding that French “dominates Joyce’s final novel”. Perce-oreille, after all, translates as Percy-French-Ear.

The Wake is a paradox of deliberate coincidences. It doesn’t matter if Joyce intended all of them. He understood what internet companies understand today, that if you pour enough information into a machine the meanings start to generate themselves and you can find anything you want, for good or ill.

In terms of Fr O’Reilly and Finnegans Wake, there may also be a real-life connection. Fr O’Reilly and Joyce lived in Paris at the same time. – Yours, etc,

DAVID HANDY,

Booterstown,

Co Dublin.

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