Joyce, Race and 'Finnegans Wake'

The structuring principle behind this account has been to take vertical slices through Finnegans Wake. In part this approach was suggested by the nature of the material, which seemed suited to thematising, but it also responded to concerns about the implications of attempting a horizontal reading. With the latter the temptation is to account for the Wake not necessarily in its entirety, but as an entirety, a whole that is constructed according to structural principles in the way that Ulysses is. If such principles exist, however, they would not just link the Wake back to Ulysses. Inevitably the discovery of a coherent structure and a reading that rendered the Wake ‘whole’ would establish a position for the Wake in the widest contexts of literary and aesthetic tradition. In particular, the horizontalist reading, with its focus on a centralised, unfolding and ‘developing’ narratology, would imply a predisposition for formalist positions – if the Wake ‘makes sense’ as a linear text, then its essential, or perhaps primary, signification would derive from its own internal dynamics, as opposed to any engagement with wider society and culture.

None of these positions, however, is established for the Wake. It is not simply that there are no agreed readings for this text, a position easily accommodated and, indeed, positively encouraged by literary criticism. The Wake throws the very idea of a ‘whole’ reading into utter confusion, with the result that the most basic principles behind ‘reading’ literature become entirely destabilised.