This is not a concluding chapter, but, rather, a drawing together of strands that have been explored in what has been a ‘vertical’ approach to the Wake, organised primarily around ‘themes’ as opposed to reading horizontally from I.i to IV.i. The synthesising develops here around the issues of ‘filth’, or the vulgar, and the Wake's construction of ‘family’. More precisely, the aim is to find a way of presenting ideas about the Wake in terms of its relationship to fascism, an ideology which belonged to nineteenth-century traditions in many ways but which also formulated itself as something profoundly energised and new, this being just one of many contradictions within fascism. It was traditional, yet modern; forward-looking, but deeply retrospective; decisively ‘volkish’, but crucially dependent on capitalism, and so on. Indeed, for some historians this is the essential quality of fascism – the heavily circumscribed indeterminacy that made its appeal across conventional social divisions and stratifications.

Why is it necessary to formulate the Wake in these terms, particularly when there is so much material in the work to suggest its general antagonism to fascism? In the first place, for the obvious reason that race was fundamental to fascism. All fascisms are powered by race consciousness, though most historians would want to distinguish German fascism on the grounds of its determination to ‘eliminate’ both the racially ‘inferior’ and the racially ‘damaged’.