James Joyce's Liebestod : Fascism as Civil War

Abstract

Abstract: The ending of James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake rewrites the Liebestod , or love-death aria, at the end of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde . Joyce's parody of the Liebestod replaces the fascist myth of national redemption with endless cycles of love and suffering in history. The novel's circularity thereby forms a riposte to the redemption narrative in fascist politics. Joyce's composition and revision of Finnegans Wake from 1922, during the Irish Civil War, to 1939, when he left Paris ahead of the Nazi occupation, illustrate how he understood racial, sexual, and bourgeois desires in nationalism through an artistic trope like the Liebestod , and how he used it to narratively resist the seemingly teleological ascent of fascism in Europe. Further, civil war provides a model for parodying the ideology of racial supremacy by casting it as an attack on one's countrymen and kin.