James Joyce and the Writing of the Tomb

Abstract:James Joyce's well-known remark that the puzzles and enigmas of Ulysses could ensure his "immortality" points to a central but largely unrecognized aspect of his two big books and, to a lesser extent, of all literature. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are examples par excellence of how literary works are inherently a defiant response to mortality in its most capacious sense, as the transitory condition of all people and things. The two works defy mortality by performing with extraordinary effectiveness the memorializing and symbolic functions performed by "tombs" of all types. Seeing Ulysses and the Wake in this way challenges some widely held beliefs about Joyce's art. It also allows us to understand the works anthropologically, as essentially funerary artifacts that, in conjunction with "ritual" activities, both preserve traditional civilized order, values, and thought and selectively reforge them for the modern world.