A Wilder Joyce: Influence, Borrowing, Appropriation, Theft

Abstract

This article re-examines the unintended consequences of American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder’s lifelong passion for the work of James Joyce, as Wilder was writing what would become his second Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth, while in the midst of ‘unriddling’ Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake. Subsequently, accusations of plagiarism arose from two major Joyce scholars, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, who not only questioned the borrowings of a particular playwright in creating a new artwork for the stage but also challenged the practices of commercial theater and contemporary theories of originality and textuality. Exploring The Skin of Our Teeth as an intertext, on the other hand, simultaneously validates Campbell and Robinson’s initial assessment and encourages a rethinking of Wilder’s commitment to Joyce as both a scholar and something of a collaborator. Such a shift would allow the critical community to ask theoretical questions about how this ‘collaboration’ works to afford accessibility and so opens Finnegans Wake to a wider audience. Wilder might thus be seen as offering something like a thematic catalogue to the novel in parallel to the ‘theme keys’ he outlined in his Joyce journals. Such recalibration would reposition Wilder’s contributions, not only as an American playwright but as a pioneering critic and crusading intellectual: a European-focused writer wholly in the American grain, an avant-garde champion like his compatriot Edmund Wilson, one who could recognize, invoke, and engage simultaneously with the European avant-garde and the American theatrical and critical traditions.