"commodious vicus of recirculation": Finnegans Wake Under the Influence of Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

In composing Finnegans Wake, Joyce owed a great deal to Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. Having in common the fragmented condition of humans under grinding modernity, Joyce and Dickens imagined the world to be based on literal and metaphoric garbage. Both works suggest that the act of scavenging and recycling constitutes a power to reconstruct the world. If Dickens presented a morally resurrected world with such an act, however, Joyce captures the moment of perpetual recreation of world/words through his linguistic experiments. The Wake simultaneously produces multiple and even conflicting sets of meanings, undermining inherent, and possibly biased, values in the English language. A demand is placed on the Wakean reader to scavenge a text scattered with linguistic debris in order to make sense of it. The reader, in other words, is required to perform a new type of reading that I term imaginative speculation, an act modeled on the illiterate Noddy Boffin's phonetic understanding of texts in Our Mutual Friend. His capacity for imaginative speculation redeems society in Dickens's text; in the Wake, Joyce attempts to create an aesthetic space in which his readers can also take pleasure in their own ingenious reading without being hindered by the limits of English. Joyce's challenge is to expand the capacity of human imagination beyond the linguistic level.