There is a type of thought that cannot be expressed linearly. It demands a detour through analogy and a form that speaks for itself before we even utter a word. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is precisely such a thought — a book that is simultaneously the object and the very interpretation of consciousness and time. It is written in a language that hovers on the border between speech and the pre-verbal murmur from which meaning emerges.

A word in this book does not signify something specific; instead, it activates multiple layers at once, and this multiplicity of meaning is its foundational principle. Quantum physics describes a similar phenomenon when discussing superposition: before a measurement is taken, a particle exists in all possible states at once, and only the act of observation forces it to collapse into a single, definite state. The reader of Finnegans Wake performs an analogous action — every attempt at understanding “collapses” one meaning, but this does not exhaust the text; it merely calms it temporarily while the other layers remain suspended. Joyce went a step further than quantum physics: he created a text that consciously resists this collapse and remains in a state of superposition even after being read.

Roger Penrose, embarking on an entirely different path — through mathematics and neurology — arrived at a related insight. His thesis rests upon Gödel’s incompleteness theorem of 1931: within any sufficiently rich formal system, there are true statements that the system cannot prove using its own foundations. A mathematician perceives that this statement is true by stepping outside the system and viewing it from the exterior. From this, Penrose concludes that the human mind is not an algorithm, that it is not a formal system, but that it performs something no computer can — and that this must be rooted in the quantum nature of reality, in processes beneath the threshold of classical physics.

Finnegans Wake is constructed on the exact same logic as Gödel’s theorem. The final sentence of the novel — incomplete and interrupted mid-stream — continues into the first sentence of the same book: the text closes into a loop where the end is also the beginning. This is a self-reference akin to Gödel’s statement: a system that speaks of itself and serves as its own prerequisite. And just as Gödel’s statement points to a truth that the system cannot prove, Joyce’s loop points to that which the novel cannot express — which is precisely the reason it was written.

Joyce built Finnegans Wake on Vico’s philosophy of history, where the cycle, after four ages, returns through transformation rather than repetition. This is a description of a fractal before the concept even existed. The Mandelbrot set possesses this property: at every level of magnification, a new version of the whole appears — recognisable but never identical, infinitely complex within a finite space. Joyce’s text functions in the same way: every passage is a microcosm of the novel, containing the whole in a different manner.

Category theory, a branch of mathematics originating in the mid-twentieth century, introduces a shift that is crucial here: instead of asking what things are in themselves, it asks how things relate to one another. Identity is relational, determined by connections. An object is that which behaves in a certain way within the network in which it resides. Joyce’s novel is a system of structures in this sense: the same character is simultaneously a man from Dublin, the biblical Adam, and Howth Head — because precise structural links exist between them, preserved through all transformations. What remains invariant is the shape of these relationships.

And Wittgenstein, in the late phase of his thought, introduced the concept of “family resemblances” which describes this exact situation: things are related because intertwined connections exist between them, like members of a family where each resembles some, but not all, of the others. Joyce’s characters and themes operate by this logic — the late Wittgenstein described the structural space of Finnegans Wake.

The early Wittgenstein, the one of the Tractatus, moved differently: he drew a boundary between what can be expressed and what can only be shown. Language can picture facts, but the mystical and the aesthetic cannot be said; they can only be glimpsed through what language does. Joyce responded to that boundary by turning it into the very subject of his writing — he wrote a book that attempts to say precisely that about which one must remain silent. He spoke in a language that lies on the other side of the border, rendering that border visible.

The holographic principle in modern physics states that all the information contained within a volume of space is entirely encoded on its boundary. The boundary is the informational equivalent of the whole. Joyce’s novel shares this structure. Its first and last sentences — the boundary of the book — form a holographic surface from which everything in between can be reconstructed. Every long portmanteau word contains echoes from a dozen languages and myths simultaneously: these are holographically compressed bundles of meaning whose unfolding can never be fully exhausted.

Ultimately, all these threads — quantum superposition, Gödelian incompleteness, Penrose’s thesis on consciousness, fractal self-similarity, structural relationships, the Wittgensteinian boundary, and the holographic principle — converge at a single point. Finnegans Wake is a system richer than any attempt to describe it. Every metalanguage is drawn into the text and becomes a part of it, rather than serving as its final interpretation. The text always remains one step ahead. Penrose would say it is the sign of a mind that is not an algorithm; Wittgenstein, that it is the mystical showing itself; the mathematician, a system that is semantically complete but formally unclosed; the physicist, a hologram whose boundary never ceases to evolve.

Through a writer’s intuition, Joyce entered the structure of reality that science and philosophy only later began to articulate. Just as Riemann developed the geometry of curved space decades before Einstein demonstrated that the universe is indeed so, Joyce wrote in parallel with these theories and anticipated them.

I have written all of this based on a few translated pages and the literature surrounding the novel, while we await Zoran Paunović to complete the translation into Serbian. Rarely has anyone in our country read the entire book, save for exceptional scholars of the language. This approach is, in fact, thoroughly Joycean: writing about a text that has yet to become accessible, and about a meaning that floats before the words have even arrived.

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For P.U.L.S.E: Boban Savković

Source: P.U.L.S.E Serbian

  Boban Savković, Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, quantum mechanic, Rogrt Penrose