“Paradox lust”: the fortunate fall according to Joyce in finnegans wake

Newer archaeologies of the soul: avatars of religious consciousness in modern European fiction

“…Hence we can more readily see analogies between Mann's vulnerable Hans in Zauberberg and Joyce's nervous Stephen in Ulysses as hypothetical experiencing subjects coping in their circumstances, but we must admit that in Finnegans Wake Joyce passes into a different realm where his virtual abstract play as author with almost infinite variations on patterns outweighs any interest in fictive supposed ''individuals.'' Though Joyce continued to abhor everything in the anti-individual ethos of modern totalitarianism, he does verge on a modern mysticism in the Wake to the extent that he humorously subsumes individual phenomena in a theater of archetypes (Gillespie 2011). In contrast, Mann expresses deep anguish in Doktor Faustus over the real historical fact of attraction to the cult of mass power which entails the crushing of the liberal democratic heritage, the radical subordination of individual fulfillment and rights.…”

“…Over and over again, when we look at categories of knowledge in Joyce's encyclopedic Ulysses and Wake, we are amazed at the profusion and playfulness that hint at a level where we finally accede to amazement at the human story as a wonderful drama of love. Elsewhere I have noted how in the Wake Joyce roguishly revises Milton's fortunate fall (Gillespie 2011), and Lucia Boldrini has demonstrated the nec plus ultra of Joyce's Wakian quasi-pornographic celebration of motherhood as paradigmatic for the deepest divine mysteries (Boldrini 2014). As (Schork 2000) has shown, Joyce's enormous legions of saints from many places, and especially from Ireland, begin to overwhelm us and fuse into an ekphrastic super-reality alongside the innumerable gods and goddesses who turn up referenced in the pages of Ulysses and the Wake.…”