In 2022, a series of high-profile publications and events commemorated the centenary of James Joyce’s Ulysses. 2024 marks a less widely celebrated, but no less significant Joycean anniversary.
The first excerpt from what would become Finnegans Wake was published a century ago, in the April 1924 edition of the transatlantic review. The short piece’s four nostalgic but forgetful narrators are meant to evoke both the Four Masters, who wrote the early Irish annals, and the four provinces of Ireland.
From this strange vantage as both historians and representations of Ireland, they eavesdrop on Tristan and Isolde – the illicit lovers of Celtic legend – on a maritime voyage, while documenting their immediate environment, “listening in as hard as they could to [...] all the birds of the sea.” By paying careful attention to how narratives of human history are embedded in the world’s land, waterways and animal life, this peculiar sketch offers us insights into Joyce’s thinking as he embarked on his final 17-year project.
Following the 1922 publication of Ulysses, Joyce informed his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver of his intentions to “write a history of the world”. A year later, he described the process of composing this history in earthy, exploratory terms: “It is like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don’t know what I will find.”
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Around 1938–9, as Finnegans Wake neared completion, Joyce reportedly discussed how his opus merged historical, legendary and environmental themes. The book was to be “the dream of old Finn, lying in death beside the river Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world – past and future – flow through his mind like flotsam on the river of life”.
Eugene Jolas, whose Parisian journal transition published excerpts from Joyce’s work in progress during its long gestation, claimed that Joyce had explained to him the work’s broader aesthetic and conceptual framework: “Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book. Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death. There is nothing paradoxical about this. Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single aesthetic purpose.”
These comments show the author layering and merging human and nonhuman perspectives through the novel’s demanding new style. Indeed, while Joyce is often thought of as an urban writer with a focus on human history and culture, Finnegans Wake is particularly attentive to mountains, rivers, seas, animal life and the cosmos. The book is an exploration of the entangled histories of humans, the animal world and the environment.
This principle is visible in the strangely fluid figures of the novel’s central Chapelizod family: the father HCE morphs into an earwig, a fox, a radio, an atom and the city of Dublin; ALP is both his wife and the River Liffey, if not all the rivers of the world; their daughter Issy takes the form of a rain cloud, while their twin sons Shaun and Shem are transformed at various points into an ant and a grasshopper, a stone and a tree, and space and time.
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Beyond characterisation, the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman life is also given vibrant expression in the work’s experimental style. Joyce famously described the Wake’s most famous set piece, Anna Livia Plurabelle, as “an attempt to subordinate words to the rhythm of water”.
Our new book, Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories, is the first extended attempt to explore this tension between the human and planetary perspectives and time scales of Joyce’s “history of the world”. The project emerged from our shared belief that historicist or nonhuman-focused perspectives on their own will always fail to grasp some part of the Wake’s investment in the interconnectedness of the micro- and the macroscopic, the local and the universal, “the human” and that which the human calls “nonhuman”.
Our 12 contributors have unearthed new historical contexts for understanding Joyce’s representations of environment, animals and technologies in Finnegans Wake. Noting that Joyce’s text was among the first literary works to represent television, Katherine Ebury explores the Wake’s reflections on the enmeshment of human technologies and once-living nonhuman bodies through the Irish Free State’s commitment to peat as a source of energy for such new media technologies.
Picking up this theme of the relationship between nature and culture in Ireland’s history, Katherine O’Callaghan connects the Wake’s thunderous language to Oíche na Gaoithe Móire (the Night of the Big Wind), a particularly catastrophic historical storm which struck Ireland on the Feast of the Epiphany, 1839.
Other chapters explore the Wake’s representations of ecology in order to re-examine the work’s gender politics. Shinjini Chattopadhyay and Laura Gibbs consider the hybrid river-woman figure ALP through the theories of ecofeminism and hydrofeminism, which interrogate western cultural associations of women with water.
Elsewhere, the centrality of animals to the novel’s vision of history is given new urgency through Paul Fagan’s examination of Joyce’s depictions of the material exploitation of nonhuman skins in the technologies of writing and clothing, while Annalisa Volpone tackles the psychological figure of the wolf as key to reading the text’s representations of the hybrid and exiled artist figure Shem the Penman.
The collection’s organising focus also sheds new light on the Wake’s central theme of the interrelation of life and death, which Joyce foregrounds through the motif of Finnegan’s resurrection. While Christopher Devault contemplates animal and ecological imagery in the novel’s mourning rituals, Sam Slote compares the Wake’s cycles to the eternally reproductive life of genetic material.
Paying attention to the text’s nonhuman dimensions also enables contributors to refine our understanding of Joyce’s debts to and divergences from previous cultural movements and modes. By contrasting Yeats’ lake imagery with the watery scenes of Book IV of Finnegans Wake, Richard Barlow shows how Joyce combines ecology and Catholicism to offer an alternative vision of Irish history, landscape and time to that proposed by the Irish Revivalists. The place of rhythms, vibrations and atomic co-imbrications in human cultural production allow Ruben Borg to better position the Wake in relation to its modernist peers, and Michelle Witen to reflect on the role of musical harmony and disharmony in the Wake’s scheme.
Relocating from the longue durée of planetary life to the histoire événementielle of the writer in his milieu, Ronan Crowley closes the collection by reflecting on Joyce’s often inhumanely coercive, even predatory writing practice by spotlighting the too-often invisibilised labour of his pool of ad hoc researchers and amanuenses in the Wake’s composition.
With its fluid, experimental approach to character, language, setting and plot, we believe that Finnegans Wake is uniquely positioned as a text that compels us to think more imaginatively about the pressing 21st-century question of the relationship and interdependence of human and nonhuman life, and their shared histories and futures. For all its challenges, Joyce’s “cyclewheeling history” of “our funnaminal world” provides a unique textual experience of the intertwined realities of humans, animals, and environments. In a time when our relationship with the natural world is an increasingly pressing issue, Finnegans Wake is as relevant now as it was a century ago.
Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories is out now with Edinburgh University Press. From January, Richard Barlow will be an associate lecturer at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms (Oxford University Press, 2023). Paul Fagan is a research fellow at LMU Munich and the leader of the Irish Research Council project Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing, 1860s–1950s.
