Conclusion In the Wake of ‘Work in Progress'

In the previous chapters, I have suggested a reading of ‘Work in Progress’ as a simulation of the human mind at work, an evocation not so much of a dream or of ‘the unconscious’ but of human consciousness, including its default mode network. From a cognitive perspective, the relationship between ‘Work in Progress’ (the production process) and Finnegans Wake (the final product) can be regarded as paradigmatic of the workings of the human mind in terms of Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts model’ and what Mark Rowlands calls ‘4e cognition’ (the embedded, embodied, extended, enactive mind). The way in which the workings of Joyce’s extended mind served as a model of the mind as evoked in ‘Work in Progress’ explicitly includes the interaction with notebooks and drafts, with the cultural and material circumstances of the production process, the publication history and the immediate reception – or what Jerome McGann has called ‘the double helix of a work’s reception history and its production history’ (16).