Joyce’s Panarchy: Time, Ecological Resilience, and Finnegans Wake

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which time and temporality in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake are ecologically inflected. In a book that insistently anchors human civilization to the limits and contours of the physical landscape, Joyce articulates a form of temporality that anticipates contemporary ecological conceptions of temporal cycles of adaptation and resilience. The structure of his final work offers a model for understanding the relationship between micro and macro temporal systems: between the smaller, chaotic fluctuations of temporal transformation and the larger-world historical cycles of temporal change. Constructing his text as what contemporary resilience ecologists would call a “panarchy,” Joyce provides an epic framework for his vision of the inter-involvement of human rhythms with the cyclical processes of the nonhuman world while demonstrating literary modernism’s investment in questions that have since become urgent about the earth’s survival in the face of increasingly destructive human cycles.