Abstract
The book now turns to another text composed throughout the interwar period of border change, and also completed in the shadow of the Second World War, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.1 Joyce had moved across Europe (Dublin, Pola, Trieste, Zürich, Trieste and Paris), while Europe had redrawn itself, replacing its Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman dynasties with the narrowed borders of the new USSR, the successor states of Central Europe, a reduced Weimar Germany and a newly secular Turkey. For Joyce, modernist exile did not take place on a European map of steady states — rather, the unhoused ‘extraterritorial’ writer travelled over newly fractured political spaces.2
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Notes
All following references will be made within the text to the following edition: James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Seamus Deane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).
See George Steiner, ‘Extraterritorial’, in Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), for the eponymous term, and for the distinction between the nationalist mystique of the writer enraciné and modern ‘unhoused’ multilinguists like Beckett and Nabokov. Joyce’s European movements fit the paradigm: ‘A great writer driven from language to language by social upheaval and war is an apt symbol for the age of the refugee’, p. 21.
John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (Dublin: Lilliput, 2000), p. 208.
See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 384–5, 471–2.
James Joyce, Letters, 3 vols, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1966). II, p. 467.
See Kelly Anspaugh, ‘How Butt Shot the Chamber Pot: Finnegans Wake II.3’, James Joyce Quarterly, 31:1, 1994, 71–81, makes clear that the Buckley story is ‘not a “true” story, in that the incident described, a soldier named Buckley shooting a defecating Russian general, never happened’, p. 71.
Margot Norris, The Decentred Universe of ‘Finnegans Wake’: A Structuralist Analysis (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 63.
R.D. Beckman, ‘An Idea as to why Buckley Shoots the Russian General’, unpublished notes on a paper given at the XVIII International James Joyce Symposium (16–22 June 2002), p. 1.
Marquess of Anglesey, A History of the British Cavalry 1851–1871 (London: Leo Cooper, 1975), p. 92.
Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988): ‘Buckley is a common Irish soldier in the Crimean War who comes upon a Russian general with his pants down, in the act of defecating, and either does or does not shoot at him’, p. 204.
There are transitional moments of violence between the brothers in the Wake, notably when Kev knocks down Dolph in the ‘Nightlessons’ chapter. See Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), on this section of the Wake, a period when ‘the father ceases to be a full presence’ but is also preserved by Kev (the Shaun figure) against the mockings of the Shem-figure, Dolph, pp. 144–5. Be it after the sexual initiation of II.2 (seeing ALP’s delta) or the parricide of II.3 (the shooting of the Russian general), the brothers tend to war or merge with each other, in order to become the next father.
Clive Hart and Fritz Senn, A Wake Digest (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968), p. 8.
James Joyce, ‘Fragment from Work in Progress: Part II, Section 3’, transition, ed. Eugene Jolas, 27 (April–May 1938) pp. 59–78.
Petr Skrabánek, A Wake Newslitter, IX, 4 (Aug 1972) p. 51. See also the posthumous revised collection of Skrabánek’s Slavonic lists: Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers: Studies in Finnegans Wake, eds. Louis Armand and Ondrej Pilny, Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2000.
The metaphor of the magnet and the iron filings is M.J.C. Hodgart’s: quoted in J.S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 69.
Petr Skrabánek, A Wake Newslitter, VIII, 1 (Feb 1971) p. 13. Also noted by Bernard Benstock in Joyce-Again’s Wake, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1965. I acknowledge that this and following close exegeses have made use of the well-known available secondary sources. For many of the cultural, historical and foreign-language allusions, I have consulted Roland McHugh, Annotations of Finnegans Wake (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). The book is a concordance of the work of many specialists. For more detailed Slavic references, I have consulted A Wake Newslitter, together with the Slavonic lists in Petr Skrabánek, Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers: Studies in Finnegans Wake, ed. Louis Armand and Ondrej Pilny (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2000).
David Hayman, A First Draft Version of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1963).
Ivan Klíma, The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays (London: Granta, 1998), p. 41.
See Saul B. Cohen, ed., The Columbia Gazetteer of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
Phrase taken from title of Alan Palmer, The Lands Between: A History of East-Central Europe since the Congress of Vienna (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970).
R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 550.
Kevin M. McCarthy, ‘Turkish References in Finnegans Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly, 9 (1972) 250–58, p. 257.
David Hayman, ‘Dramatic Motion in Finnegans Wake’, Texas Studies in English, 37 (1958) 155–76, p. 171.
Thomas Hofheinz, Joyce and the Invention of Irish History: ‘Finnegans Wake’ in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 183.
Nathan Halper, ‘Notes on Late Historical Events’, A Wake Newslitter, II, 5 (1965) pp. 15–16.
Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 150–1.
Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 199–200.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, London: Faber and Faber, 1944, p. 7.
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© 2007 Richard Robinson
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Robinson, R. (2007). Buckley in a General Russia: Finnegans Wake and Political Space. In: Narratives of the European Border. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287860_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287860_6
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