Focusing on the author’s first encounters with Finnegans Wake, this chapter reexamines the distinction between what is supposedly “intrinsic” and what is “extrinsic” to the experience of reading. The context in this case was not simply apartheid South Africa in the mid-1980s. More directly relevant, at least for one initiate into the mysteries and global effects of the Wake, was the looming presence of the 1820s Settler Monument in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, a center for the arts inaugurated in 1974 and designed to commemorate British settler traditions and celebrate the English language. Joyce’s last and most eccentric foray into literary writing, it turns out, constitutes a powerful refutation of the monument’s founding assumptions and of the act of monumentalization itself.

Joyce subjected race to comic treatment without lessening its seriousness. He does this by broadening his perspective and deferring judgment about differences (“prejudice” literally means prejudgment). Human racial competition takes the form of a car race (in “After the Race”) and a horse race (in Ulysses). This play on different meanings of “race” allows Joyce to make fun of racism while simultaneously belittling it. People “pre-judge” the results of racial competition by betting. Racial hatred is no longer comic in Finnegans Wake, where Shem the Penman is excoriated as black, Jewish, and oriental. Joyce exposes the superficiality of race prejudice by suggesting that darkness is internal to everyone, and it can be transformed into a form of communication that is communal instead of being driven by self-interest and greed.

Baron’s chapter uses the lenses of periodical culture and reception studies to situate Joyce’s writing after Ulysses in the context of his involvement with the internationalist avant-garde editorially spearheaded by Eugene Jolas and Elliott Paul in transition. As Edmund Wilson stated in 1948, “without transition, it’s an open question whether Finnegans Wake would be comprehensible at all.” This chapter first reads letters around the serializations of Ulysses and Work in Progress to argue that Joyce learnt from his dealings with The Little Review how to use transition to orchestrate the exegesis and apologia of his rule-flouting project. The chapter examines the strategies that established the Wake’s reputation as an avant-garde triumph rather than a fraudulent con; for example, Joyce’s instigation of the publication of numerous essays devoted exclusively to the praise, explanation, and defense of his work as well as his incorporation of negative views. Most importantly, the chapterwill go on to uncover the ways in which transition brought Joyce into collaborations with a cohort of admiring idealists – involving him in relationships which in turn nourished and inflected the text as he wrote it.

This chapter focuses on James Joyce’s investments in life at the microscopic level in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a way of linking literature and science methodology with Grusin’s (2015) concept of a “nonhuman turn.” Ebury’s intervention is to turn an established critical conversation about Joyce’s knowledge of the nature of matter towards his aesthetic and ethical emphasis on nonhuman life, and consider how his interests in science facilitate an awareness of connectedness across different categories of being. Previous ecocritical scholarship on Joyce has mostly concerned itself with whole entities, from Joyce’s representation of rivers or trees to Joyce’s attitudes to specific species and biological principles. Ebury builds on Tim Clark’s (2015) “scale framing” approach to argue that Joyce’s use of the nonhuman microscopic scale, informed by the complexities of quantum physics, might help us to cope with the difficult equation of our responsibility to the nonhuman.

This chapter addresses the advent of Nothing within the history of religions as an advent necessarily within literature, and within the ritual enactments of literature as sacred. If the Commedia of Dante is our most profoundly heterodox work while at the same time our most purely orthodox, then Joyce is the late modern counterpart of Dante, and Finnegans Wake is not only the final epic of late modernity, but also at once deeply primordial and apocalyptic, so that its pure heterodoxy is nonetheless a profoundly liturgical work. Only the advent of a uniquely modern Nothing makes possible this universal liturgical celebration. This Nothing is more primal in the Wake than the liturgical movement of anamnesis, but this is an anamnesis of the fall, condemnation, and crucifixion of H.C.E. or Here Comes Everybody, repeated again and again, even as the host is ever broken in the mass. Thus the epic becomes our only purely liturgical epic, embodying a pure action that is a purely ritual action, one truly irresistible to all who actually encounter it as a liturgical mode of being, which is our most sacred mode.

“Paris Compounded” argues that the text of Finnegans Wake prompts readers to engage in sentient thinking. Joyce’s last work stages a heterogeneous and potentially limitless profusion that resists any preconceived order and disallows the passive reception associated with the commodity and with authoritarian discourse. The chapter situates the Wake’s textual assemblages within the literary practices of Paris of 1910 and 1920, showing that Joyce’s problematization of value and meaning are indebted to Apollinaire’s verbal montages but also, and more particularly, to Alfred Jarry, whose pataphysics deploys scatology, Lucretian materialism, and coincidentia oppositorum in an avant-garde mode. The chapter draws on the aesthetic theories of Benjamin, John Dewey, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas to argue that, as the Wake compounds the city under capitalism, it calls for ideal communities that respond to its material features with imagination, spontaneity, and joy.