James Joyce and the Philosophers at "Finnegans Wake" by Donald Phillip Verene

Abstract

Reviewed by: James Joyce and the Philosophers at "Finnegans Wake" by Donald Phillip Verene Dieter Fuchs (bio) JAMES JOYCE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS AT "FINNEGANS WAKE," by Donald Phillip Verene. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016. xxi + 124 pp. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paper. Donald Phillip Verene's James Joyce and the Philosophers at "Finnegans Wake" is an excellent book of many turns. There are too many turns, in fact, to give due credit to all the important insights presented in this study within the limited scope of a book review. The text reflects an incredible density of thought, and the reader can only try to summarize the most central aspects of a myriad of carefully interwoven insights presented in this, quantitatively speaking, rather slim booklet. The study is held together by a central cluster of thought. Although it has become commonplace schoolbook knowledge that Finnegans [End Page 185] Wake is informed by the philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Giordano Bruno, and Nicholas of Cusa, Verene rather provocatively claims that—apart from John Bishop's Joyce's Book of the Dark: "Finnegans Wake"—there is no study with an in-depth focus on the role of Vico in the Wake (xx).1 As pointed out by Verene, the Joycean schoolbook knowledge about Vico is limited to the notion that history follows a repetitive or cyclical pattern known as corso and ricorso and that this pattern is informed by the duplicity of the Brunonian concept of the coincidence of opposites. Or, as Verene puts it, "Vico's philosophy of history is a wake in which the nations in their corso and ricorso seem to be dead, and rise again—all at the direction of providence that rules the great city in which they cycle" (15). It is mainly because of this cyclicality beyond life and death that Viconian philosophy has been considered a source of inspiration for Finnegans Wake. James Joyce and the Philosophers at "Finnegans Wake," however, proves that this aspect is only a very early clue to a carefully interwoven network of multiple undiscovered philosophical allusions. This is the research gap to be filled by Verene's book. Reading Vico, Bruno, Nicholas of Cusa, and the Wake side-by-side, Verene convinces the reader that Vico's Pricipj di Scienza Nuova D'Intorno Alla Comune Delle Nazioni and his autobiographical Vita di Giambattista Vico do not only function as sources of manifold intertextual reference.2 Rather than that, the system of thought presented in these works functions as, borrowing from Anthony Burgess, a structural "scaffolding, a backbone" or skeleton of Finnegans Wake—very much like Homer's Odyssey does for Joyce's Ulysses (xi).3 This insight constitutes nothing less than the (unmentioned) claim that Joyce's "mythical method"—as defined by T. S. Eliot with regard to Ulysses—constitutes an important and undiscovered dimension of Finnegans Wake as well.4 Although one may at first be hesitant to approach the Wake in structuralist terms of plot- and character-centered analogy and correspondence, Verene's careful close reading offers convincing insights to prove his research hypothesis. In this way, the reader learns that, no matter how radically different the Wake may be compared to Joyce's earlier works, this text can be also approached as a documentation of Joyce's lifelong artistic continuity—as an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, way of "making it new." Seen from this vantage point, Finnegans Wake holds an organic place within Joyce's oeuvre as an organon-like Gesamtkunstwerk. Just as Vico's Scienza Nuova claims that knowledge can be best achieved if one blends philosophical and philological approaches,5 Verene fuses his study of Joyce's philosophical encounter with Vico with the philological analysis of Joyce's intertextual dialogue with Dante's Divina Commedia.6 Taking Samuel Beckett's landmark essay "Dante… Bruno. Vico . . Joyce" as a starting point, this intertextual analysis shows that the Divina Commedia reinforces the structural scaffold [End Page 186] provided by the Scienza Nova.7 It is well known that Ulysses derives structure from an intertextual dialogue with Homer's Odyssey, and similarly Finnegans Wake profits from the structural design of the Divina Commedia written by Dante Alighieri, whom...