James Joyce "writing"
Obviously he wrote in English, i.e., basically... There is the Dubliners and then there is A Portrait where it is very English. In Ulysses it is still English but concealing so many meanings that a dictionary will not do, and you need a special encyclopedia such as Don Gifford's Annotated Ulysses. And then there is Finnegan's Wake, which is written in wakese...
Let's forget everything else and concentrate in Finnegans.
You can, if you can..., read it and figure out what Prof. James S.Atherton did and can be seen in standard English at his the Books at the Wake or you can loose yourself and wander in an open loop, anyway at some point you have to come down and face details and, though to my understanding it is a totally blind vision, what you will have in front of you is something like that (take a look on the "Night Lessons Episode" of Finnegans Wake).
Let's loose ourselves and wander in a closed loop...In James Joyce A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work it says about the example above the following, and I quote (pg 132 Lessons Chapter)
Lessons Chapter - A variation
of an informal designation of Book II, chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake (FW 260-308).
Others have identified the chapter as the Study period - Triv and Quad (Joseph
Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson - A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake)> and
Night Lessons (Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake) When Joyce
published three fragments from works in Progress in the pamphlet Tales Told
of Shem and Shaum (1929), he included a portion of this chapter (FW 282-304)
under the title ""The Muddest Thick" That Ws Ever Heard Dump""
(see FW 296:20-21). In a July 1939 letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce explained the
format of the chapter: "[T]he technique here is a reproduction of a schoolboy's
(and schoolgirl's) old classbook complete with marginalia by the twins, who
change sides at half the time, footnotes by the girl (who doesn't), a Euclid
diagram, fummy drawings etc" (Letters I,406).
The narrative recounts the efforts of Dolph Shem) Kev (Shaum) and their sister
Issy to master their lessons, and presents an impressionistic survey of the
liberal arts, including grammar, history, letter writing, politics and mathematics.
Sexual matters too are included. In the geometry lesson, for example, Dolph
uses geometrical configuration of triangles and circles (FW 293) to elucidate
for Kev the geometry of their mother's (A L P's) vagina. For further details
of this chapter, see FW II.2 in the Finnegans Wake Entry)
Let's accelerate the closed loop like a dog chasing his tail (I have a suspicion that the motivation among scholars are the same that of the dogs...) take a look at Editors, Scholars, and the Social Text, which you can read there and I won't quote, but will boil down to some more sensible explanation such as Prof.Elizabeth Kate Switaj offers, and I will write it here, in case it disappears:
Night Lessons in Wakese
teacher-extraction:
In the “Night Lessons” episode of Finnegans Wake, there doesn’t appear to be a teacher, except to the extent that the children act as “pupilteachers” educating themselves and each other, sometimes through confrontation. They even take part in the construction of the primer (which is the text of the chapter itself), with the twins contributing marginal glosses and Issy adding the footnotes.
The lessons are exuberant, funny, and weird. The children make a mess of history and mathematics, but at the end of the lesson, they are able to write a nightletter to their parents in the very best Wakese. They have learned how to use Wakese by using it, which is in line both with the way James Joyce taught the English language (starting as an employee of Berlitz) and with the way Stephen Downes describes Edupunk.
Wakese, as a language, is based on creative error and idiosyncrasy. When Joyce taught English, even if he appreciated novel usages by his students, he had to teach them a more standard way to express themselves. This was what they wanted.
To eliminate the teacher entirely from the classroom only works for certain learning goals and disciplines. Teacherless classrooms demand revisions of knowledge and our notions of what is correct.
She obviously surrendered... but in a nice and elegant way...
What, the hell, are we talking about? A second grade subject turned into rocket ballistics?Are we all going crazy? It is about time we come to our senses and realize that Joyce simply did a mixing combination of carefully introducing "noise" (disguised as profound knowledge) in a very simple matter using a process similar to what is described at noise in communications and print technology and Lexycon