Come Back 2RN: Irish Voices and European Radiospace in Finnegans Wake

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) is a work profoundly engaged with the new medium of broadcast radio. In an interview in the last year of his life Joyce remarked, ‘I am in Ireland every day for I listen constantly to the broadcasts from Radio Éireann’. This paper examines the specifically Irish dimension of Joyce’s radio listening, developing Jane Lewty’s concept of ‘radiospace’ to explore the difficulties of picking up the radio signal from Ireland amid the increasingly crowded airwaves of mainland Europe. It examines some of the Wake’s many references to Irish radio history and programming, and argues that the ‘effortful listening’ that Joyce’s experience of Irish radio required is also reflected in the language of the Wake, with its wandering signals, overlapping voices, multiple languages, and fluid mixture of interference, static and noise.