Monism, Humpty Dumpty, and Finnegans Wake: In Defense of the Arcane, Pt. 2

by Derek Pyle

Finnegans Wake is concerned with the primordial. James Joyce’s book is an expository dramatization of the cosmic elements, as if depicting the sands that give rise to Ozymandias, only to collapse again later. As I suggested in the first section of the current essay, Finnegans Wake is about how ocean turns to desert, desert turns to Las Vegas, and Las Vegas eventually runs out of water and collapses back into desert–a land which in turn births the great T. S. Eliot epic, “The Wasteland.”