Regular or prolonged exposure to Finnegans Wake has significant social consequences. These effects— unlike, say, the bleary-eyed hipness achieved by binge viewing of entire television seasons, which thereafter fuels knowledgeable exchanges and valuable cultural fluency— seem to alienate their subjects from the world. Reading everyday functional texts such as street signs, telephone directories, and restaurant menus becomes unexpectedly strange and difficult, and— let's be honest— the chances of finding someone with whom to puzzle over the riddles of the Wake and giggle through the protracted bouts of puns that it offers (and inspires) are more than slightly slimmer than those of finding someone to discuss the latest surprise disembowelment in Game of Thrones. But the difference I want to underscore isn't a matter of faddishness: the repeat viewer of such shows, the online gamer who gives up whole weekends to the quest, grow more authoritative, more certain in these imaginary worlds, and thus able to disregard the tedium or injustices of mere meatspace. The Finnegans Wake reader, it seems to me, instead becomes more doubtful and bewildered in both worlds in proportion to one another.

There might be perceptible stages of acclimatization— if that is the right word— to the Wake. Among the later stages, or at any rate not among the first, is a suspicion of words and phrases in the text that seem immediately sensible, that is, to all appearances syntactically sensible arrangements of readily identifiable words. In turn a reader may grow— as I, for one, have grown— suspicious of the Wake passages of which I seem (or seemed) to have some comprehension. We might think of this as one of those reversals of the unfamiliar, a sort of squaring of the uncanny, not unlike the moment in a foreboding narrative or dream when the recognizable friend who greets us in the terra incognita is revealed, precisely when it dawns on us how very out of place he is, as not our friend at all.