Finnegans Wake's Radio Montage: Man-Made Static, the Avant-Garde, and Collective Reading

This essay situates the semantic excess of the Wake within the tradition of avant-garde literary montage, in particular that of Guillaume Apollinaire. It argues that Joyce constructs the radio passage in 1936 to respond to Adolf Hitler's contemporary appropriation of the new technology of radio. Written at a specific moment, the radio passage is, however, exemplary of the demands that the Wake makes on readers. Subverting monologic authoritarian discourse by activating readers to read collectively, the montage form of the Wake is of continued importance in the face of contemporary aggressive discourse, instrumental rationality, and mass consumption. The ideal sociality of Finnegans Wake reading groups offers a new possibility for avant-garde collective agency.