Writing in the Wake of Empire

When Joyce began writing Finnegans Wake in 1922, the British Empire was already beginning to disintegrate. In India, Gandhi had begun the first of several satyagraha campaigns against British rule. In East Africa, more than 200 men and women were killed by police in Nairobi during a March, 1922 demonstration against the colonial government, sowing the seeds of a violent resistance movement. In Ireland, the establishment of the Irish Free State (1921) prepared for the independence of the 26 counties of the South. These cracks in the imperial edifice were to deepen during the 17 years in which Joyce wrote the Wake in self-imposed exile from the first colony to break away from the modern British empire.

Long considered either a purely formalist tour de force or a curiosity for linguists, myth critics and source-hunters, Joyce’s last work has recently begun to be read as being deeply involved in the political currents of the period between the wars, and of early twentieth century European history in general.¹ In particular, the historical reality of decolonization became one of the conditions for Joyce’s last work, which makes decolonization into a discursive as well as an historical event. To read Joyce as a decolonized writer is to recognize that his historical perspective on the final stages of the imperial era coincides with his creation of a text which calls into question, formally and thematically, the structures of power from which writing is inherited. It is also to begin the process of rethinking Joyce’s place in the context of European modernism, especially insofar as modernism has been held to represent a privileged aesthetic domain of an imperialist European society. For if one aspect of modernism was to resolve the contradictions existing between the individual subject and the imperialist state, another aspect—and here one thinks of Beckett, Kafka, and the later Joyce—was to make manifest those contradictions in the subjective and objective conditions of modernity that persisted as latent and unresolved. Written in the spirit of this latter project, the Wake declares its independence from imperial structures of discourse in order to create a text that one may call, in terms that sometimes prove useful, both postmodern and postcolonial.

Following a recent formulation by the historian Arif Dirlik, the term postcolonial may be used to describe a) the actual conditions in formerly colonial societies, b) a global condition coming after the period of modern European colonialism, and c) a discourse concerning these two kinds of conditions that is informed by the “epistemological and psychic orientations” which these conditions have produced (332). My treatment of Finnegans Wake as a postcolonial text makes reference to the first two of these meanings—a newly decolonized Ireland, and a world in which colonial institutions are already seen to be outmoded—as background for reading the Wake in the context of the third, i.e. as the production of an artistic discourse made possible by these newly emergent national and global realities. Where Dirlik argues that such a formulation makes postcolonial discourse indistinguishable from that of postmodernism, I find the category of the postcolonial useful in speaking of that aspect of postmodernism (including the Wake) which specifically addresses questions of colonial authority as an historical and epistemological reality.

Joyce’s parodies of colonialism and of imperialism in general are matched in their satirical force only by his parodies of Irish nationalism, a double refusal characteristic of more recent postcolonial writers such as G. V. Desani and Salman Rushdie. There is by now a tradition of twentieth century writers descended from Joyce who recognize that even in its oppositional stance, nationalism repeats imperialism’s master narratives of universal development, paternal property, and racial purity (Lloyd 46). This ironic refusal of both nationalism and imperialism, however, is accompanied in Joyce by the affirmation of a language designed not simply to subvert the prevailing discourses of colonization, but rather to open a space beyond the simple opposition of colonizer and colonized. This is especially true of Finnegans Wake, where the play of language breaks free from the formations of authority which, in the empire...