ABSTRACT

This chapter begins to map out some remarkable points of contact and overlap as well as some instructive differences of Hugh MacDiarmid and James Joyce. MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is a long, multi-layered, stylistically diverse poem, set at night, using much interior monologue, bringing in historical as well as contemporary figures, climaxing in a vision of the Great Wheel of history. It would not be surprising if James Joyce's Finnegans Wake showed a measure of influence from A Drunk Man, but in any case there has been some parallel development going on in the two authors which encourages to look at them together. MacDiarmid's enthusiastic response to the fragments of Work in Progress, as they appeared during the late 1920s, elicited one direct tribute in his own poetry. MacDiarmid's argument, throughout In Memoriam James Joyce, is that he and Joyce were both working towards world-consciousness, and that this was in fact the next general evolutionary step.