routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

428 The twentieth century: 1900–45
the city. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom becomes a modern Ulysses, an
Everyman in a Dublin which becomes a microcosm of the world.
Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake (1939), took fourteen years to write.
In the novel, Joyce attempted to present the whole of human history as a
dream in the mind of a Dublin innkeeper, H.C. Earwicker. Any attempt to
depict life realistically is abandoned. Devices of literary realism are replaced
by a kind of dream language in which as many associations as possible
are forced into words and combinations of words. In many ways, the
novel is about language itself: Joyce uses puns and plays on words within
and across both English and other languages. He pushes language to the
absolute limits of experiment and for most readers the result is a very
demanding, sometimes incomprehensible experience.
Sobs they sighdid at Fillagain’s chrissormiss wake, all the hoolivans
of the nation, prostrated in their consternation and their
duodisimally profusive plethora of ululation. There was plumbs
and grumes and cheriffs and citherers and raiders and cinemen
too. And the all gianed in with the shoutmost shoviality. Agog and
magog and the round of them agrog. To the continuation of that
celebration until Hanandhunigan’s extermination!
The use of language suggests the merging of images in a dream. It
enables Joyce to present history and myth as a single image with all the
characters of history becoming a few eternal types, finally identified as
Earwicker, his wife, and three children. This corresponds with a cyclical
view of history which Joyce developed and in which the events of human
life are like a river that flows into the sea from which rain clouds form to
feed once again the source of the river. Thus, life is always renewed.
In his cyclical view of history, Joyce, like the poet W.B. Yeats, was
influenced by the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista
Vico, who proposed a four-stage circular process of human time. As
did Yeats, Joyce saw his own generation as in the final stage awaiting
the anarchy and collapse that would eventually return them to the
first stage. Joyce even builds this cyclical view into the structure of his
novels. The final word of Ulysses is ‘yes’, which reverses the letters ‘s’
and ‘y’ of the first word ‘stately’ and signifies a triumphant new
beginning; the end of Finnegans Wake is a half-complete sentence
and, to complete it, the reader has to return to the very first sentence