ABSTRACT
What exactly does Joyce carry over from a source, or from one of his earlier texts, when he reuses a plot, a character, or an abstract configuration in Finnegans Wake! Critics have long questioned the use of terms like “parallel” or “parody” to describe Joyce's use of Homer and other sources, and I will generalize their point: the meanings we can assign to Joyce's borrowings always remain radically local and ad hoc. They remain what can be called, with an anti-essentialist pun, “nonce symbols,” that is, significant structures whose meaning is tied to a particular usage by Joyce and a particular reading by us. The meanings of a putative symbol or motif vary from one use to the next according to new opportunities opened by new contexts; Joyce jettisons previous details or connections when they grow confining for him. Readers, attempting to assemble and reapply these very details elsewhere in a text, are starkly confronted with a dialectic of sense and nonsense that all reading inhabits, but which Joyce's writing specifically exploits. Joyce did not base late texts on what preceded them, so much as he rereads his early texts in light of later ones, crediting what came first with containing seeds of what was to follow. My calculated example of this procedure, a demonstration of the literary potential of the equation 3 + 1 + 1=5, begins with Finnegans Wake Chapter I.4 and works backwards through a derivation based on theDubliners story “Grace.”
