Anarchy at the Wake

Abstract

In this work I examine the relation of Anarchy to Finnegans Wake. Drawing primarily on the writers Max Stirner, Peter Kropotkin, and Benjamin Tucker, I trace the many intertextual echoes between their works and the Wake. The problems of secession, solipsism, and violence are examined in turn. Stirner's philosophy of ‘own’ – a key element in Shem's make-up – is also criticised in the Wake for its tendency toward loveless isolation. Kropotkin's description of a decentralised Anarchist society without government became Joyce's model for an anarchic text in which nothing governs. Finally, I show how Tucker – according to Manganiello, Joyce's principal political authority – is both utilised and criticised. While Joyce learned a lot from Tucker's diagnosis of the ills of coercive government, the latter's endorsement of violence in certain situations was repudiated by Joyce who subscribed to an Anarchism without violence. On the other hand, Tucker's repudiation of force in certain passages became key elements in the Wake's depiction of a possible utopian future.

Keywords:

• Finnegans Wake
• anarchy
• heresy
• egoism
• violence

Notes

 1. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 79. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as P.

 2. Ellmann, James Joyce, 107. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

 3. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 188. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text by page and line number.

 4. Joyce, Ulysses, 275. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text by chapter and line number.

 5. Manganiello, Joyce's Politics, 232. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

 6. Norris, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake, 42.

 7. Tucker, Instead of a Book by a Man too Busy to Write One, 21. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. The title of Tucker's book suggests one of the many similarities between Anarchism and Deconstruction. The opposition of both toward totalising and totalitarian structures includes a critical attitude toward the very notion of the book. For example, Tucker's distrust of the book as ‘a literary structure, each part of which is subordinated to the whole’ leads him to insist that what he presents is merely ‘an assemblage within a cover of printed sheets consecutively numbered; but this alone does not constitute a book’ (Tucker, ix). Along the same lines, Derrida begins his Dissemination with the claim that ‘[t]his (therefore) will not have been a book’ – adding that that ‘[t]hese texts are assembled otherwise’ (Derrida, Disseminations, 3). Finally, when the Wake observes that ‘the book of the depth is. Closed. Come! Step out of your shell!’ (FW, 621.3–4) there is a movement from closed book to open text. The Wake is emphatically not a book with each part subordinated to a whole. It is an anarchic assortment of texts that are ‘assembled and asundered’ (FW, 136.6–7).

 8. Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, 220. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

 9. Stirner, The Ego and his Own, 235. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

10. Encyclopaedia Britannica , vol. XVIII, 956. Further references will be cited parenthetically as EB followed by volume and page number.

11. Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, 141.

12. McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, 534. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

13. Gifford and Seidman, Notes for Joyce, 274.

14. Crispi and Slote, How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake, 161.

15. Eltzbacher, Anarchism, 73. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

16. See Rabate, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, 66. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

17. Patterson, Nihilist Egoist, 50. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

18. Oxford English Dictionary , vol. II, 616.

19. Skeat, A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 478. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

20. This passage illustrates a family resemblance between Kierkegaard and Stirner. As Sartre observes, Kierkegaard champions ‘the cause of pure, unique subjectivity against the objective universality of essence’. Paradoxically, their insistence on uniqueness makes them similar to each other. Both writers were anti-Hegelians (Sartre, Search for a Method, 11).

21. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 8.

22. Shatz, The Essential Works of Anarchism, 42.

23. Kropotkin, Anarchism, 20.

24. Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics, 41.

25. Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics, 42.

26. Random House Dictionary of the English Language , l036. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

27. The phrase ‘all sorts’ (FW, 464.26) connects the variously interacting Anarchist society with the seceding ‘allsort serpents’ (FW, 540.1). This phrase was also important in Wittgenstein's well-known evasion of essentialist thought. Instead of defining what ‘the essence of a language-game’ is, he discusses ‘all sorts of language-games’ as a way of introducing his theory of family resemblance (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 31). This path is also followed by Joyce when he moves from Stephen's ‘dagger’ definition of the essence of a horse in Ulysses (‘[h]orseness is the whatness of allhorse’ (U, 9.84–5)) to the anarchic polyphony of Finnegans Wake (‘all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse’ (FW, 111.29–30)).

28. French, The Book as World, xx.

29. See my ‘Waking the King.’

30. Saint Jerome, Dogmatical and Polemical Works, 224.

31. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 218. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

32. Renan, Lectures on the Institutions, Thought and Culture of Rome, 131. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

33. Benjamin, ‘Intermisunderstanding Minds,’ 230.

34. Lloyd, Anomalous States, 3.

35. In Benjamin, ‘Waking the King,’ 317.

36. Shaw, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, 444. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

37. Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, 83.

38. Shatz, The Essential Works of Anarchism, xii.

39. Marx and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics & Philosophy, 320.