The "Cornish Tokens" of Finnegans Wake: A Journey Through the Celtic Archipelago

Despite the well-documented "spatial turn" in modernism, Joyce scholarship has only recently turned its attention to rural or regional spaces. Yet new work on the islands of the North Atlantic as an archipelagic network has demonstrated how fruitful such an examination can be. By focusing on the Tristan and Iseult myth as it appears in Finnegans Wake, this essay offers a further modest contribution, exploring how Joyce draws on Cornwall's status as a Celtic nation to disrupt simplistic, insular accounts of these isles. While the place of Cornwall in the novel may not seem immediately worthy of attention, the region is, in fact, significant as a key location in the Tristan and Iseult myth, which—recent genetic work reminds us—was an important source of inspiration during the Wake's conception. Outlining Joyce's curiosity about the region via reference to letters and drafts, this essay begins by tracing the repeated presence of the county in the author's "Tristan" sources. Turning to the novel itself, it then examines the presence of local vocabulary, place-names, and myths to map the Cornish facets of the Wake's "Tristan" cast and, by extension, their familial counterparts. As with so many things in Finnegans Wake, however, the presentation of Cornwall is not simple, and this essay will demonstrate how traces of "Cornishness" also seem to invite the presence of other Celtic identities and figures. It is suggested, therefore, that Joyce draws on Cornwall's "Celticity" to ramify its presentation in the novel, incorporating the Celtic identity of this regional location in the characters of Finnegans Wake.