Buckley in a general Russia

Finnegans wake and political space

pp. 128-155

in: Richard Robinson, Narratives of the European border, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

The book now turns to another text composed throughout the interwar period of border change, and also completed in the shadow of the Second World War, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.¹ Joyce had moved across Europe (Dublin, Pola, Trieste, Zürich, Trieste and Paris), while Europe had redrawn itself, replacing its Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman dynasties with the narrowed borders of the new USSR, the successor states of Central Europe, a reduced Weimar Germany and a newly secular Turkey. For Joyce, modernist exile did not take place on a European map of steady states — rather, the unhoused "extraterritorial" writer travelled over newly fractured political spaces.²