“Then he died and had to begin again”

This chapter builds on and extends the argument by presenting readings of two texts – James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound – in which nonlinear temporality as a way of relating to time is explicitly articulated and appraised. Whereas in Ulysses and Omeros it is – for the most part, at least – the temporal experience of the characters that unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, in Finnegans Wake and Tiepolo's Hound, nonlinear temporality is in each case elevated to the status of a meta-textual principle. Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, was first published in 1939. Like "Finnegan's Wake" and "Michael Finnegan", and to some extent like Ulysses before it, the Wake is a work concerned with the moment of awakening as if from death, with what it might mean to awaken in this sense, and how such a return to life might be possible.