The Subaltern Finnegans Wake
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Most readers will know this phrase from James Joyce’s Ulysses, but few will remember why Stephen says it. Recall that the bigoted schoolmaster Mr. Deasy, talking about the Jews, proclaims, “They sinned against the light …” and Stephen replies, “Who has not?” Evidently confused, Deasy asks, “What do you mean?” So Stephen clarifies with, “History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” I propose that Joyce’s “book of the dark,” Finnegans Wake is a text that “sins against the light” exceptionally well, and is as much a nightmare as anything written. If colonial modernity had a nightmare, Finnegans Wake would be it, and it is one from which it will never awake, at least on the text’s terms; that can be assured by its enduring challenge to modern certainties. Just as the colonies figured as the dark underside of the clean well lit metropolis, Finnegans Wake figures surely as its textual equivalent, dark, obscure, everywhere and nowhere, shady, full of voices that echo from center to the peripheries then back to the center again, an imperial language distorted, portmanteaued, punned against and punning; it is a text that offers itself as an answer from the postcolonial darkness, a vertiginous rejoinder to the certainty of modern colonialism’s systems of meaning making. It is, in other words, what it looks like when the subaltern speaks.