Abstract
This paper proceeds from the concurrent interpretation of two distinct, apparently unrelated disciplinary contexts, at the crossroads of the positivism of archaeology and the imaginary world of literature. The character of the reciprocal relationship between megalithism in Neolithic Portugal and the writings of the twentieth-century author, James Joyce, is transfigured through the introduction of a third element of interpretation, a deeply paradoxical current of Jewish thought, with messianic dimensions, antithetical to the forces of mythic reconciliation present in Joyce’s fiction and in archaeological conceptions of ‘symbolic systems’ in antiquity, which tend to erase the innumerable singulars of experience. Applying a cryptotheologically-inflected exegesis immanent to the materials of text and archaeology in the light of their respective orientation to the same astral phenomenon, I seek to generate insights unanticipated within interpretations restricted to the disciplinary boundaries, theories and methodologies of archaeology and literary criticism as discrete entities. Within allegorised readings of archaeology and an archaeologicised reading of Joyce’s texts I bring into play non-synchronous elements which both disrupt the idealised harmonies of social and religious conformity and illuminate hitherto unseen connections between diverse, seemingly incommensurable contexts, beyond the discursive conventions of detached objectivity, without relinquishing irreduceible remnants to a totalising synthesis.
Highlights
In this paper I draw upon the ‘deeply paradoxical religious sensibility’ (Scholem 1971, p. 95) of the Marrano phenomenon to explore parallels between modalities of revelation at play in James Joyce’s novels, Ulysses (Joyce 1922) and Finnegans Wake (Joyce 1939), and that implicit in an archaeoastronomical interpretation of a group of Neolithic dolmens dating to around 4000 BC in the Mondego valley of central Portugal (Silva 2013, 2015)
The serendipitous conjunction of the latter two contexts manifests a dialectical encounter first staged between Finnegans Wake and Neolithic archaeology in north-west Europe (Crook 2004)
The merging of interiority and interment bolsters the connection to Finisterre, dominated by Mount Facho, an eminence once crowned by a dolmen, built by the enchantress Orcavella, beneath which she entombed herself with a shepherd (Lindström 2014, p. 61), aligning with the sexual archaeology of the mound where Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) and HCE are buried, ‘Humperfeldt and Anunska, wedded evermore in annastomoses by a ground plan of the placehunter’ (FW 585.23)
Summary
In this paper I draw upon the ‘deeply paradoxical religious sensibility’ (Scholem 1971, p. 95) of the Marrano phenomenon to explore parallels between modalities of revelation at play in James Joyce’s novels, Ulysses (Joyce 1922) and Finnegans Wake (Joyce 1939), and that implicit in an archaeoastronomical interpretation of a group of Neolithic dolmens dating to around 4000 BC in the Mondego valley of central Portugal (Silva 2013, 2015). This means converting the context of archaeological enquiry to a field of allegory, a plane where the corridors of the Carregal do Sal dolmens are coterminous with the corridors of the Holles Street Maternity Hospital in Ulysses, where Leopold Bloom experiences his epiphany By dislodging these megalithic structures from their exclusive association with either the discipline of archaeology or the harmonious cycles of antique and modern mythologies, I invoke the unquiet shekhinah-spirit—cognate with the character, ALP, in Finnegans Wake—who ‘tries to breathe life into the stony cosmos of indifference’ This is conducted against both the instrumental reason of positivist ‘deritualisation’ with its concomitant undialectical destruction of the aura (ibid.), and the atavistic submission to ‘mythical fatality’ characteristic of romantic neopaganism This strategy resonates with what Walter Benjamin in 1914 considered as the historical task to ‘give absolute form in a genuine way to the immanent condition of fulfillment’, redeeming ‘elements of the end condition . Joyce’s characters, active in an allegorised archaeological context, can carry the burden of messianic hope invested in them or are doomed to be recurrently submerged in the mythic flux
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