Crowds, Ghosts, and the Language of Fear: Reading Chapter 3 of Finnegans Wake
I have now finished the third month of reading Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, following Benjamin McEvoy’s suggestion to read one chapter per month. The pacing continues to matter. It gives each chapter time to settle, or perhaps more accurately, to unsettle.
Chapter 3 has stayed with me differently than the first two. If the opening chapter felt like entering a river and the second like moving through a distorted classroom of language, this third chapter felt like stepping into something closer to a public disturbance—something uneasy, unstable, and, at moments, genuinely frightening.
I am aware that part of this response may not belong to the text alone. It may also belong to where I am right now in the world. There is a sense, lately, of living inside overlapping crises—political, social, ecological—where information circulates rapidly but clarity does not. Reading Chapter 3 in that atmosphere, I found myself less interested in understanding what was “happening” in Joyce’s text and more attuned to how it felt. And it felt like rumor.
The chapter circles around accusation, scandal, and the public circulation of a story about HCE. But no single version holds. Voices overlap, contradict, distort. Language behaves like gossip moving through a crowd, picking up fragments, losing others, changing shape as it goes. There is no stable ground to stand on. Only a kind of collective murmur. That murmur began to feel familiar in an unsettling way.
As I read, I found myself thinking about The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, a text I had read in full again a couple years ago. What I remember most is not any single line but the atmosphere it created. The language was strangely lulling—rhythmic, almost hypnotic—but when I paused to consider what was being said, something darker surfaced. There was a quiet horror in it, an existential unease that did not announce itself loudly but lingered underneath the surface of the poem.
Reading Joyce’s Chapter 3, I felt something similar. The playfulness of language is still there, but it begins to carry a different weight. Beneath the puns and fragments is a sense of exposure—of being seen, judged, talked about by an unseen public. The instability of language becomes the instability of reputation, of truth, of identity itself.
Alongside this, I could not help but think of Human Acts by Han Kang, which I recently picked up to read to work on my Korean To Be Read List. What struck me most at the time was not only the depiction of historical violence but the way the city itself seemed to hold memory. I had expected to read a narration about streets I knew; kind of like a history tour. Instead, I felt as though I was suddenly psychic, hearing the voices that lingered in those streets—the ghost presence of those who had suffered, who had died, who had been erased and yet not entirely gone.
That sensation returned as I read Chapter 3 of Finnegans Wake. The text does not describe ghosts, but it feels haunted. Not by individuals exactly, but by the accumulation of voices—anonymous, overlapping, unresolved. The crowd in Joyce is not just social; it is almost spectral.
Last year I worked on a translation project involving survivors’ testimonies of May 18 events. What struck me then was the tonal quality of the narratives. Much of the material was, in a sense, ordinary. Daily routines, small details, mundane descriptions. And then, without warning, there would be a calm, almost flat report of abuse or terror. The horror was not dramatized. It was simply stated, embedded within the flow of the everyday.
Reading Chapter 3 now, I recognize a similar dissonance. The language moves, plays, shifts, but there are moments where something darker presses through—something about accusation, exposure, and the vulnerability of being spoken about by others. It is not always explicit, but it is there.
If the first two months of this reading project allowed me to approach Finnegans Wake as a kind of linguistic experiment—water, objects, play—this third chapter has made me more aware of its emotional and social force. The text is not only difficult; it is also, at times, disturbing.
What stays with me is not a clear understanding of the chapter, but a feeling: that language, when it circulates through a crowd, can become something unstable and even dangerous. Meaning shifts. Stories change. People are made and unmade in the process.
This month’s reading has made the project feel more serious. Not heavier exactly, but more charged. As I move into the next chapter, I carry with me not just curiosity about Joyce’s language, but a heightened awareness of what that language can hold.
