4 - Minds of the anti-collaborators
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2009
Summary
[T]he bodily eye sees all objects outside itself but needs a mirror to see itself.
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, paragraph 331Such double fables or characters must have been necessary in the heroic state in which the plebeians, having no names of their own, bore those of their heroes; to say nothing of the extreme poverty of speech that must have prevailed in the first times, since, copious as our present languages are, even in them the same word often signifies different and sometimes contrary things.
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, paragraph 581If Joyce and Ulysses are the hidden doubles in The Apes of God, the figure of Wyndham Lewis is abundantly evident in the patterns of Finnegans Wake. As Adaline Glasheen has noted, the problem with references to Lewis in Finnegans Wake is “there is just too bloody much of them.” This abundance is programmatic, for Joyce was the first to wish that his counterblast to Lewis's criticisms in Time and Western Man be obvious and recognizable. Lewis serves as implicit and explicit subject in no fewer than four of the twelve essays on Work in Progress published in 1929 as Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress by friends and supporters under Joyce's supervision.
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- Information
- The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham LewisMonsters of Nature and Design, pp. 153 - 197Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994