Joyce's tragicomic Genius in the perverse game of names

Abstract

From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through Ulysses to Finnegans Wake, Joyce's obsession with names, and more specifically with first names, in as much as they are ‘signatures of all things’, became one of the most operative features of his writings. This essay explores this function on three levels: 1. the gnoseological impact of animal naming of characters and/or descriptions of situations; 2. the oniric metamorphosing of ideational impressions from the beastly to the humanly and viceversa; 3. the linguistic, rhetorical, musical and mythical resources of names, embedded as they are in deep anthropological and cultural grounds.