Charting Wakean Territory

Abstract

This chapter explores how geometry is presented as a language for describing both visual and nonvisual spaces in Finnegans Wake. It demonstrates how the Wake’s Protean visual landscape is shaped by its polyphonic narrative, and how the Wakean landscape’s boundaries expand and contract in accordance with the movement and breathing of human bodies. With reference to Bruno’s notion that “the infinite straight line […] becomes the infinite circle,” it illustrates how straight lines and rectilinear thought processes veer off course as they are projected onto the uneven bodily, textual, and terrestrial surfaces which record the Wake’s ouroboric narrative. This chapter also investigates how James Joyce incorporates the notion of a “4d universe” in Finnegans Wake, in which time constitutes the fourth dimension of space, and how the “fourdimmansions” of Wakean space-time are framed by the quadrilateral gaze of its four historians as they chart the Wake’s territories using crisscrossing lines of sight. By examining the four old men’s attempts to describe Mr. and Mrs. Porter’s “sleepingchambers” in cycles around the four bedposts in III.4, this chapter considers how the penultimate chapter of Finnegans Wake reflects Joyce’s own concerns with the quadrature of the circle in his writing of the Wake.