Objects, Lessons, and Language Play: Reading Chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake with Tender Buttons

 Objects, Lessons, and Language Play: Reading Chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake with Tender Buttons

For the second month of my slow reading of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, I followed the one-chapter-per-month rhythm recommended by Benjamin McEvoy. The pace continues to feel right. Rather than trying to master the book, I am letting it accumulate slowly, the way sediment gathers in a river.

Alongside each chapter I am also noticing what other texts are already present in my reading life and allowing them to become companion pieces. These pairings are not planned; they emerge from coincidence and curiosity. For Chapter 2, the companion text is Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein.

If Chapter 1 of Finnegans Wake felt like entering a river of language, Chapter 2 shifts the scene into a schoolroom. The chapter centers on the children of HCE and ALP—particularly the twins Shem and Shaun—along with their lessons, scribblings, and rivalries. Schoolbooks, alphabets, classroom recitations, and juvenile mischief circulate through the text. Yet even here Joyce refuses stability. The language behaves like a pile of exercise books that have been soaked in the river and scattered across the floor. Words blur into each other, lessons become jokes, and authority—especially educational authority—constantly dissolves into play.

Reading this chapter alongside Tender Buttons turns out to be unexpectedly clarifying. Stein’s short prose pieces, organized under the headings “Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms,” dismantle the ordinary relationship between words and things. Instead of describing an object clearly, Stein circles it, repeats it, fractures it, and reassembles it in unexpected ways. A familiar household item becomes linguistically strange. Meaning does not disappear so much as it becomes unstable, forcing the reader to pay attention to rhythm, sound, and pattern rather than straightforward description.

Both Joyce and Stein are working against the assumption that language transparently represents the world. In Tender Buttons, the object becomes an occasion for linguistic experiment. A chair, a plate, or a room is not simply named but re-experienced through repetition and rearrangement. In Chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake, something similar happens with the structures of schooling. The alphabet, the lesson, the exercise—these forms that are supposed to produce clarity and discipline—are scrambled into puns, echoes, and playful distortions.

What makes the pairing especially interesting is that both writers take materials associated with childhood or domestic life and use them to challenge literary authority. Stein writes about objects from the everyday interior world—rooms, food, small household things—and transforms them into sites of linguistic exploration. Joyce places the reader in a classroom filled with children’s lessons and scribbles, only to let language overflow those orderly educational forms. In both cases, spaces that might be dismissed as trivial become laboratories for experimentation.

There is also a sonic dimension shared by both texts. Stein’s sentences rely heavily on rhythm and repetition, creating patterns that resemble spoken language or incantation. Joyce’s prose in Finnegans Wake likewise depends on sound—internal rhyme, alliteration, multilingual puns. Reading Stein beside Joyce makes it easier to hear how much of Finnegans Wake operates at the level of the ear rather than the eye.

For me personally, reading Stein alongside Joyce carries another layer of resonance. Years ago, when I was a university student in New Orleans, someone once described my own writing as “Gertrude Stein-esque.” At the time the label was meant as dismissal, but it had the curious effect of sending me directly to Stein’s work. I began reading her partly out of defiance and partly out of curiosity about what that comparison might mean. Returning to Tender Buttons now, decades later, I can see more clearly how Stein’s willingness to disrupt ordinary language created space for other kinds of writing—writing that values repetition, rhythm, and small observations rather than narrative authority.

Placed beside Chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake, Tender Buttons becomes less an eccentric modernist artifact and more a companion experiment. Both texts remind the reader that language is not a fixed tool but a field of possibilities. Objects, lessons, rooms, alphabets—these ordinary structures can all be taken apart and rebuilt.

If Chapter 1 of my year with Finnegans Wake began with water—the sea of The Waves by Virginia Woolf and Joyce’s river—then Chapter 2 moves indoors, into classrooms and rooms filled with objects. Yet the underlying impulse remains the same. Both Joyce and Stein treat language not as a stable system but as something alive, something that can be turned, rearranged, and listened to in new ways.

Reading them together makes that playfulness easier to see—and easier to enjoy—as this slow journey through Finnegans Wake continues.