Finnegans Wake is a book that cannot have an epigraph. To do so would set up a relation, even perhaps hint at a genealogy, between text and predecessor, within which an implicit readerly position would also be assumed. An epigraph typically functions as a form of address to the ‘competent’ reader. Instead, the Wake's citations – as above, to Baudelaire (‘– Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!’) and others – are gestures and echoes that hint without stating. If, as the previous chapter suggested, the Wake contains an ‘anarchive’ of Joyce's reception, it acts in this way towards all its sources: unable to quote or to represent, it instead transforms and enacts a reading of the myriad texts from which it is drawn.