Financing Fitzginnegan: Joycean Influences and Similarities in the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Abstract

Abstract:This article is fully titled "Financing Fitzginnegan: An Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of Joycean Influences and Similarities in the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Based on an Exagmination of Fifteen Hundred (or so) Textual Factifications and Critical Opinionations, Diagnosed in the Terminology of Different Contemporary Schools—Together with a Chronology of Such Subdivision of Opinionations as Have Arisen Independently." Owing to the evolution of F. Scott Fitzgerald's artistic aims during the nine years it took him to write Tender Is the Night, the novel is pathbreaking in ways scholars continue to discover. The profound influence of James Joyce both in this work and over Fitzgerald's entire career is an example of this. Building on scholarship tracing Joyce's influence on Fitzgerald's writings, this article shows that Fitzgerald had both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in mind as he fashioned and refashioned his last complete novel and that Joyce's influence also resonates in one of his last stories, "Financing Finnegan." Published in Esquire in 1938, this tale serves simultaneously as an homage to Finnegans Wake and a retelling of Fitzgerald's own financial, creative, and psychological struggles in the writing of Tender Is the Night.