A being again in becomings again
Finnegans Wake“A being again in becomings again” is a compact expression of the book’s logic of recurrence: being returns, but it does so through repeated becoming rather than as an unchanged state. The phrase turns return into a process, joining the persistence of identity to the continual alteration that makes renewal possible.
Wording and Paradox
The sentence places “being” beside “becomings,” then makes both recur through “again.” Its grammar resists a clean division between stable existence and change: being is not simply recovered after becoming, because becoming itself is plural and already in motion. The doubled return therefore holds continuity and transformation together without resolving their tension.
Placement and Sound
The phrase appears within a quick sequence of questions, calls, and compressed wordplay. It is followed by the clipped exclamations “Pirce! Perce! Quick! Queck!” and then by a passage crowded with allusive, shifting language. Against that acceleration, the sentence briefly states a broad principle; its formal balance makes recurrence audible even as the surrounding prose keeps changing direction.
Significance
As an expression, it offers a miniature of cyclical time: what comes again is not a perfect copy of what came before, but another becoming. The wording makes repetition generative rather than static, joining return to alteration in a phrase whose own repeated “again” performs the motion it describes.
