The Nonhuman Skin of Finnegans Wake

The essay interrogates the specific attention that James Joyce pays to skin as a permeable threshold between the human and the non-human in Finnegans Wake. This approach relocates from symbolic, archetypal, and aesthetic considerations of nonhuman animals and environments in the Wake to focus on both the physical materiality and diverse discursive constructions of “skin” as a liminal surface that cleaves and fuses the human and the nonhuman on biological, cultural, technological, phenomenological grounds. Drawing together distinct debates in Joyce studies about the significance of skin and animality to his poetics, the essay’s argument proceeds in four interrelated movements. First, it establishes an arc in Joyce’s aesthetic project from an early association of the skin with human sensation in his 1912 essay “L’influenza letteraria universale del rinascimento” to the Wake’s deanthropomorphized engagement with the material histories of nonhuman skins in human cultural production. Second, it examines how the “Shem the Penman” episode stages these histories through Shem’s transformed and transforming skin, which figures the forger-artist as a non/human assemblage. Third, it shows how Joyce foregrounds the exploitation of nonhuman bodies in the technologies and semiotics of clothing through scenes of sartorial ostranenie in Biblical, colonial, and ecofeminist contexts. In closing, it is argued that the recurrence of nonhuman skins in spectral, funerary, and ecological scenes demonstrates a Wakean principle of becoming that is “limitrophic” in the sense later employed by Jacques Derrida. Along the way, intertextual allusions to literary scenes of nonhuman skin are identified (from Jacob and Esau, medieval religious poetry, and “Bryan O’Lynn” to Jonathan Swift, Honoré de Balzac, and Oscar Wilde) to situate the Wake in a lineage of texts that foregrounds and thematizes an awareness of the commodification of the nonhuman in human cultural production. In sum, the essay develops the claim that as an unstable threshold of the human and the nonhuman, skin is neither rigidly fixed nor wholly effaced in Joyce’s work. The Wake is thus reframed as a prominent instance of “ecological modernism” in which the material and conceptual epidermal limits of the non/human are continuously transgressed, multiplied, redrawn.