Room in the Kirkeyaard: Either/Or and the Heinousness of Choice in Finnegans Wake

According to Alasdair MacIntyre—whose book After Virtue was sufficiently influential in Kierkegaard studies to bring forth the riposte of Kierkegaard After MacIntyre—Either/Or represented the death of an old project in the history of morals. Briefly, his argument is that by presenting moral commitment as “a criterionless choice,” Kierkegaard produced a book that was “at once the outcome and the epitaph of the Enlightenment’s systematic attempt to discover a rational justification for morality.”¹ MacIntyre’s subsequent claim that Kierkegaard’s position “destroys the whole tradition of a rational moral culture” (41) recalls Eliot’s observation that “Joyce had killed the nineteenth century, exposed the futility of all styles.”² Joyce himself said that whenever he treated an area of artistic culture, he left “behind it a burnt up field” (JJ 461). As Bartholomew Ryan has observed, “The theme of death and the graveyard are central to both Joyce and Kierkegaard,”³ and Joyce took advantage of the fact that “‘Kierkegaard’ means literally ‘churchyard’” (Ryan 117) to change LeFanu’s gothic novel The House by the Churchyard⁴ into the Wake’s “oud huis bij de kerkegaard” (FW 245.36–246.1). Le Fanu’s novel, as if to emphasize these themes of literary and philosophical murder, begins with the digging of a grave and the unearthing of a skull of a murdered corpse (Le Fanu 4).

What MacIntyre deplores as a cultural disaster that left in its wake only “fragments of a conceptual scheme” was, in fact, valorized by Kierkegaard as a resistance to system building that can be traced back to the founders of philosophy (2). For example, his Concluding Unscientific Postscript—whose title attests to its belated status—begins with a complaint against Socrates that his thought only presents “scrapings and parings of systematic thought … divided into bits.”⁵ The implication is that the Postscript is similarly composed of scraps of thought—as the Wake suggests in the single word “postscrapt” (FW 124.32). Along the same lines, the anti-systematic title of another of Kierkegaard’s works—Philosophical Fragments—accords with the Wake’s description of itself as a “kiribis pouch filled with litterish fragments” (FW 66.25–6). Both writers warred against the totalitarian designs of system builders: Kierkegaard against Hegel and Joyce against the colonial collusion of England and the Catholic Church. Just as Kierkegaard feared being “brought into systematic relation with all the world,” the Wake looks askance at those grand narratives that aspire to “fill space and burst in systems” (Postscript 3, FW 429.12). Even Shem’s attempt to create a unified ontological system that would allow him to be “schystimatically auricular about his ens” is defeated by a tendency toward disunited schism (FW 157.22–3).

The determination of both writers “to defy and break up” master narratives of control was accompanied by a tendency toward split personality and psychological conflict (JJ 608). The Wake’s observation that ALP has had so many children that there isn’t “room in the kirkeyaard” to contain them, also suggests that Kierkegaard’s immense number of pseudonyms and pseudoselves had gotten beyond his command (FW 201.31). Likewise, the Wake asks that its characters be guided “through the labyrinth of their samilikes and the alteregoases of their pseudoselves” that threaten the sovereignty of authorial control (FW 576.32–3). Kierkegaard attempted to overcome the condition of being “interested in too many things without being able to decide on one” by learning to will one thing in his later Edifying Discourses.⁶ The Wake, on the other hand, adapts itself to the rhythm of a “swigswag, systomy dystomy”—a continual oscillation between systematic synthesis and anarchic breakage (FW 597.21).

Sorensplit and paddypatched

James Atherton’s observation that Joyce exhibits two tendencies—one to fuse “opposed characters” and the other to have individual characters “split up into two parts”⁷ appears in compressed form in the Wake: “Som’s wholed, all’s parted” (FW 563.31). In other words, while parts (somes) will be made whole, wholes (alls) will be divided...