- Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Well, the Gentleman’s game for a change, is exploited with a shade of boldness and impudence in ‘’Finnegans Wake’’ (1939). It took a master craftsman like Joyce seventeen years to cultivate the contents of the book. The most efficient practitioner of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique,Joyce wrote the entire book in a kind of idiosyncratic language. Joyce presents us with the names of 31 cricketers in this intriguing book and looks to astonish the readers by incorporating an erotic sex scene; drawn purely from the names of First Class cricketers. Joyce must have sifted through quite a few editions of Wisden Cricketer’s Almanac while hatching the plot but it was perhaps the expertise of his research assistant on ‘’Finnegan’s Wake’’ which benefitted him the most. And what was the name of that gentleman? We have never had such a ‘famous’ cricketer really. Samuel Barclay Butler quietly stood at the non-striker’s end and forged a recondite but precious partnership with Joyce, the striker.
