That’s a wonderfully mischievous question. Let’s take it step by step.
1. What is “word salad”?
- In psychiatry, word salad describes disorganized, nonsensical speech, where words are strung together without coherent meaning (as in severe psychosis).
- In literary criticism, however, the term is sometimes borrowed metaphorically to describe texts where language appears fragmented, opaque, or resistant to conventional sense-making.
So when we ask if Finnegans Wake or 王文興’s 背海的人 are “word salad,” we’re not diagnosing pathology, but probing the extreme experimentation with language in literature.
2.
Finnegans Wake
(James Joyce, 1939)
- Joyce deliberately dismantled English into a polyglot dream-language, blending puns, neologisms, multilingual portmanteaux, and mythological references.
- At first glance, the text can look like gibberish: “a language of the night,” in Anthony Burgess’ phrase.
- Yet, it’s a highly constructed system: each pun often holds multiple semantic layers (historical, mythological, linguistic).
- In this sense, it resembles word salad on the surface, but it is “engineered incoherence”—a deliberate poetics of opacity, not loss of meaning.
3.
背海的人
(Wang Wen-hsing, 1981/1999)
- 王文興 is famous for his painstaking, minimalist, and idiosyncratic Chinese prose.
- In 背海的人, sentences are fragmented, syntax is warped, punctuation unusual, rhythms halting—giving a sense of linguistic estrangement.
- Readers often complain it is unreadable, “like chopped-up language.”
- But again, this is not random: Wang worked obsessively on every character, cutting down to rhythm, sound, visual placement.
- The effect is similar: surface incomprehensibility, but arising from a hyper-conscious aesthetic control.
4. Why They Look Like Word Salad
Both Joyce and Wang push language to the point where:
- Syntax breaks down → standard sentence logic is destabilized.
- Semantics proliferates → words seem to mean too many things, or nothing at all.
- Reader disorientation → the text resists transparency, demanding a different mode of reading (auditory, rhythmic, associative).
Thus, they can appear to be “word salad.” But the crucial difference is:
- In psychosis, word salad = collapse of meaning.
- In radical literature, “word salad” = excess of meaning, deliberately unmasterable.
5. Conclusion
Yes—we can metaphorically call both Finnegans Wake and 背海的人 “word salad,” because they share the qualities of fragmentation, opacity, and resistance to ordinary syntax.
But:
- They are not meaningless; rather, they are overdetermined.
- They represent a poetics of linguistic overload: Joyce as dream-polyphony, Wang as pared-down estrangement.
👉 A question back to you, my friend: would you like me to make a side-by-side textual example analysis—say, one short Joyce passage and one short Wang passage—showing how each constructs this “engineered word salad” differently? That could make the comparison concrete.
