This article deals with Joyce´s use of the portmanteau words and multilingual punning in the Wakean language in how it destabilizes identity - of language, history, nation, and, last but not least, of itself as text. The paper proposes to read these concerns in one the key tropes with which the Wake describes this reader destabilization: "hesitency," which is taken as emblematic of the unity of the specifically historical, the generally textual, and the artistically aesthetic throughout Joyce´s radical literary experiment.