Let's Get Reading: Newsletter 77

“When I'm not writing, it's as if I've never written a word or had any desire to write. I fall into bad habits. I stay up too late and sleep in too long. But it's okay. I've learned to be patient and to bide my time.” – Raymond Carver

Thunder Words Are Go

Writing, as much as I love it, is an inherently imperfect medium. We only have access to a certain number of words, even though the concepts we can think up are infinite. Now, to get around this, you can of course be a little creative, combining parts of speech into long strings (sentences) to convey more and more complex ideas. This is the strategy that most writers rely on, and, by and large, it’s a pretty good one. However, one of my favourite writers, an Irish man by the name of James Joyce, came up with a different solution in his famous novel Finnegan’s Wake – inventing new words.

The plot of the novel is a pretty complex one, following the lives of a Dublin publican, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, and their children as they transition into a dreamlike world where identities and events shift constantly. It’s circular and fragmented, beginning and ending with the same sentence fragment, and largely unfolds in a surreal, associative style, with characters and stories blending together to mimic the fluidity of dreams and the cyclical nature of history. Fun, right? Yeah, me too.

When you’re telling a story like that, our classic, day-to-day selection of nouns, verbs and adjectives aren’t necessarily going to cut the mustard. That’s where the Thunderwords come in. Joyce created 10 words for the novel, the first 9 of which are 100 letters long, and the last of which is 101 letters long, designed to help convey a kind of meaning that regular language didn’t have access to. They’re sonically intended to mimic a thunderclap (hence the name), however, each mark significant moments in the text, and do attempt to convey some external meaning. Each thunderword is a dense mixture of many languages, sounds, and meanings, which of course makes them almost impossible to translate literally.