Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
The famously difficult-to-read Finnegans Wake is a mathematical outlier, according to a new study.
The Polish team of researchers found that James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness writing breaks punctuation rules that are generally rigid in European-language literature.
But they also found that Finnegans Wake has a punctuation pattern all of its own.
The study is published in Chaos.
Finnegans Wake, a 1939 book by Irish writer James Joyce, took 17 years to write and is filled with portmanteaus, odd phrases, and words borrowed from about 70 different languages. The book begins and ends mid-sentence – in fact, two halves of the same sentence, with the end of the book connecting back to the start.
Despite frequently being derided as gibberish or unreadable, the book has also found fans, with many book clubs taking more than a decade to read it together – the record is 28 years.
“Finnegans Wake exhibits the type of narrative that makes it possible to continue longer strings of words without the need for punctuation breaks,” says study co-author Stanisław Drożdż, a researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
“This may indicate that this type of narrative is less taxing on the human perceptual and respiratory systems or, equivalently, that it resonates better with them.”
Punctuation marks in literature generally follow a pattern called the Weibull distribution, according to the researchers. This distribution dictates that the longer a sentence runs on, the more likely it is that a punctuation mark will appear after the next word.
Joyce’s late work is some of the only known literature that doesn’t adhere to the Weibull distribution, say the researchers. Even Jerzy Andrzejewski’s The Gates of Paradise, a 40,000-word novel where all but 4 of the words are in a single sentence, follows the Weibull pattern.
But not Finnegans Wake. The researchers analysed it alongside 9 other experimental novels, looking for word counts between punctuation marks.
“Finnegans Wake appears to have the unique property that the probability of interrupting a sequence of words with a punctuation character decreases with the length of the sequence,” says Drożdż.
When mapping word sequences into a function called a “singularity spectrum”, the researchers found that Finnegans Wake’s sentences followed a symmetrical distribution. This meant that variations in sentence length followed a neat internal order.
The distribution matches with a mathematical phenomenon called “multifractality”, where patterns repeat within each other.
“This makes the narrative more flexible to create perfect, long-range correlated cascading patterns that better reflect the functioning of nature,” says Drożdż.
The researchers say that their work could help to inform the development of large language models.
