Richard Barlow and Paul Fagan, eds.

Edinburgh University Press, 2024. 256 pages.

ISBN: 9781399529433

This edited collection kindles anew a sense of awe at the extraordinary, totalising energies of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the multitude of worlds the novel evokes within, as well as keen admiration for the deft sophistication with which its contributors elucidate the multiplicitous dimensions of Joyce’s imagination of the “cyclewheeling history” of “our funanimal world” (1). The volume’s essays are as effervescent as the nonhuman lives and objects depicted in the Wake’s prose, which is multilingual in its playful punning, not only with human languages and names, but also with the songs of birds and utterances of nonhuman animals, the fizz of subatomic particles, beaming radio waves, and photons firing through vacuum tubes; the boom of thunderwords and clangor of storm-tossed bells; the liquid rollingriversense of fluvial bodies; the chitterings and chatter of nocturnal zoopoetics; or the vicociclometer’s mimetic machine clatter. Collectively, the contributors dynamically evoke the way in which the novel layers, merges, inverts, or subverts human and nonhuman perspectives, in a textual method that is not binary in its pairing of oppositions, but rather palimpsestic, accretive and multi-scalar.

The question of scale is both a question of content and a problem for form. As Ruben Borg notes in his essay on the Wake’s atomism, “the Wake’s reduction of the natural world to its smallest constituent parts” is bound up with the modernist desire to explore “the co-imbrication of organic matter and machine-life” and to interrogate sensory experience and constitution, while developing “new models of aesthetic composition” with the formal precision and aesthetic unity to register these (163). The volume convincingly demonstrates how the Wake is characterised by a remarkable movement and play between scales – the micro and macroscopic, local and universal – and represents the complex socio-ecological relations between human animals and the nonhuman world in ways that gestures to an open-ended totality in its attempt to capture planetary nature, but which refuses hierarchical or anthropocentric conceptions of human mastery in favour of an understanding of the profound interconnectedness of humanity-in-nature and the more-than-human world.

In their editors’ introduction, Richard Barlow and Paul Fagan compellingly position the collection in conversation with the recent efflorescence of twenty-first-century eco-Joycean approaches that draw on animal studies, ecocritical, and posthuman approaches, while emphasizing their desire for the book to act as a crucial forum to allow historicist and non-anthropocentric readings of the Wake to speak to each other more directly – eliciting both productive tensions and shared concerns – an aim which is definitely achieved. Barlow and Fagan convincingly argue that the Wake intervenes in questions of how we understand history, subverting “andrewpomurphyc narratives”, such as those promulgated by the character HCE, and asking us to consider not only which people should count in history’s movements, but also whether it is only people that make history (2). Accordingly, the volume explores the ways in which not only the individual and collective agencies of human-animals, but the activity, life, and energy of more-than-human nature are figured throughout the Wake as co-participants in environment-making and historical transformation.

In order to do this, contributors draw on the critical insights and methods of an array of cutting-edge developments in subfields including petrocultures, energy humanities, and a gesture to nuclear studies; blue humanities and hydro-feminism; new materialism, posthumanism, and animal studies; postcolonial ecocriticism and resource fictions; atmospheric studies and the aesthetics of weather; as well as eco-musicology and sound studies, as in Michelle Witen’s sparkling exploration of how the sonic ecologies and “soundsense” of the Mamalujo passages mediate the materiality of sound, music, and noise reverberating between and within human and nonhuman bodies (182).

Engagement with new critical discourses is a pronounced highlight of the volume, which enlivens new readings of the Wake and other works in the Joycean oeuvre by illuminating textual elements, narratives, and historical contexts that have been under-recognised, while also facilitating disciplinary enlargement by helping to expand and inform critical fields in their own turn, opening up new ground for the consideration of energy, water, climate, animals, and the nonhuman in Irish literature, culture and history more generally.  A major achievement of the book is to demonstrate that the Wake retains its vitality as a text that enables the interrogation of the limits, experience, and exploitation of both human and nonhuman life in the twenty-first century. This sense of powerful resonance for our current political moment, with all its intersecting crises of climate emergency, biodiversity loss, pollution, and human precaritization, radiates throughout many of the finest chapters.

For instance, Katherine Ebury’s electric opening chapter on the “energy unconscious” of the Wake invites us to both draw on petrocultures approaches but also to move beyond the typical conception of fossil fuels as mere inert matter to focus instead on turf and peat as the remains of formerly living plant and animal tissues (22). She suggests that these contain traces of folk knowledge about plants and animals which might lead us to conceive of fuels and extraction differently not only in relation to Joyce’s Wake but also to our current petro-dependent moment, as we wrestle with questions of energy transition away from oil and turf.

Similarly, Katherine O’Callaghan’s charged exploration of how storms wreak havoc, alter the landscape, and enter the language of Joyce’s novel, seems all the more timely in the aftermath of Storm Éowyn, the powerful and record-breaking extratropical cyclone that battered Ireland in January 2025, which climate scientists have heralded as more evidence of intensifying climate volatility. O’Callaghan details how the Wake evokes a particular historical storm – the “Night of the Big Wind”, which struck Ireland on 6 January 1839 – but also invites us to consider how the apocalyptic fears and “astraphobia” engendered by this historical natural disaster might speak to our present era of climactic instability, where it is not only past severe storms and winds that occupy a special place in public consciousness, but also the awareness of escalating new forms of extreme weather (38).

Meanwhile, the editors’ introduction reminds us of the gossiping washerwomen’s speculations that HCE’s rumoured crime has led him to be placed “under lough and neagh”, a watery internment that might make us think of the current protests against the pollution that is killing Lough Neagh in the North, where activists have staged symbolic “wakes” for the lake and descried the intersecting legacies of colonial land ownership and the slow violence of the state (3). Shinjini Chattopadhyay’s decolonial blue humanities reading of Anna Livia Plurabelle’s aqueous embodiment as the River Liffey further invites us to consider the hydropolitics of Joyce’s novel in relation to local histories of hydrocolonialism, nationalism, and patriarchy, while also contending that ALP’s watery existence embodies the transtemporal and planetary hydrocommons, evoking the possibility of resistance to pollution and enclosure through the power of riverine deluge (51).

The nonhuman element of “neverchanging everchanging water” flows on throughout other chapters. Richard Barlow’s exegesis of the bathtub, Lough Gill, and Glendalough, and the transformative acts of affusion and baptism in Book IV, reveals how these recursive figures evoke a state of continuous being and a conception of cyclical history that “subverts both the Catholic idea of resurrection and the cultural nationalist project of revival” (93). And in her reading of the “Bride-Ship and Gulls” episode, Laura Gibbs makes deft use of Astrida Neimanis’ hydrofeminism to read the phenomenology of the “leaky” Wakean body not as confined to an essentialist conception of feminised fluidity, but rather as a shared site of connection and continual flux between male and female figures, repositioning porosity as something that is inherent to all humanity, rather than gendered (67).

The chapters on nonhuman animals draw on animal studies to perform similar readings of the ways in which the text destabilizes hierarchical oppositions between the human and nonhuman and imagine human corporealities as also incorporating ecological surfaces and thresholds. Thus, Paul Fagan reads Shem the Penman’s transmogrifying assemblages as posing skin as an unstable, permeable threshold between human and nonhuman histories, a liminal surface that both cleaves and fuses, while imagining the environment itself as a kind of natural, living, changing, enveloping skin that bears the palimpsestic scars of its history under colonial and capitalist development (102). Annalisa Volpone continues the focus on Shem and the trope of “becoming-animal” by interpreting Shem as a hybrid figure who displays traits of both wolf and human, as well as other animals – squidself, larkseye, salmonskelt – yet does not truly belong to either category (123). Her discussion of the werewolf as a figure of the return of the repressed recalled for me the significance of the wolf in contexts of colonial plantation (119). Under Cromwell, bounties were paid for the slaying of wolves and human wolfheads, and such, the hybrid human/wolf might recall both the ecophobic spectre of the colonizer’s fears of both human and nonhuman indigenes, and the signifier of insurgent resistance to the campaigns of dispossession and deforestation carried out to rationalize Irish nature and submit it to colonial discipline.

Porosity and metamorphosis remain touchstones in Christopher DeVault’s elegant reading of the dehumanisation of mourning in the quiz show episode, wherein the transformation is not into animal, but into tree or stone or cloud, and where through portrayals of nonhuman mourning, the Wake not only recognises, but celebrates, the connections and continuities between human and nonhuman, living and dead, that the “falsemeaning” assertions of monadic human “onesomeness” attempt to deny (138). Yet DeVault concludes with an assertion about the novel’s form and narrative structure that is vital in respect to the whole collection:

Yet this does not mean that Finnegans Wake’s impossible mourning entirely dissolves the boundaries between human and nonhuman or moves us completely away from humanism. The novel’s characters frequently transcend the traditional limits of the human, but the text’s structure still establishes a central human consciousness manifesting each vignette within his mournful slumber, which grounds the Wake in a humanist subjectivity even as its narrative repetitively interrogates its limits. (144)

This important distinction, which resists a wholly posthumanist reading of the novel, has resonances with Sam Slote’s opening provocation in his own chapter on imperfect replication and evolution: “To talk about the nonhuman presumes that one knows what the human is. This is but one of the many double binds that confront us when we try to think through an idea of the nonhuman, something that is, by definition, radically foreign to and apart from us” (147). This is the paradox that whatever the polyvocality, multi-lingualism, hybridity, porosity, and dialectical flow between differentiation and connection evoked by the Wake’s textual effects, nonetheless, it is all focalised through human consciousnesses, interpreted by human critics, responded to by human readers, and produced by a human writer in concert with the labour of other writers, thinkers, and artists. The representation of the nonhuman, an order of representation emerging out of the background noise of the totality of existence, which Borg describes as “the miracle of an intelligible picture coming into view”, is nonetheless a “drama of appearance” inescapably filtered through human rationality and perception (166).

The concluding chapter by Ronan Crowley on crowdsourcing reiterates the tension driving the collection’s staging of an encounter between historicist and nonhuman approaches, suggesting that the nonhuman elements and forces that Joyce heralded as the so-called “real heroes” of the Wake – time’s course, the riverrun of water, the deep time of geological formations – exist in tension with the history writing produced by humans, which he necessarily drew on to tell their stories (197). Furthermore, Crowley’s analysis of the coercive and extractive relations of Joyce’s late writing practices and the invisibilised labour of his dispersed group of fieldworkers offers a salutary reminder that viewed through the material conditions of its own composition, Wakean intertextuality can have a “discomforting, exhortative edge” that exists in contradiction to the liberatory, pluralist, subversive, or radically open textual effects that critics celebratorily ascribe to his work (202).

Thus, even as we celebrate how the activity and energy of more-than-human nature and nonhuman things are figured with such vibrancy in the Wake, we must remain attentive to the material conditions in which humans as writers, critics, readers, translators, labourers, and political subjects remain embedded, and the necessity for an account of power that can both critique hierarchy and exploitation and imagine forms of organisation against it.