Finnegans Wake , Modernist Time Machines and Re-enchanted Time

In this chapter, Gregory Erickson focuses on the idea of time as a religious or magical idea and on current engagements with historical ideas of modernist time. The chapter enacts an idea of magical time into the structure of the essay itself, by using short passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as well as fading pages from his handwritten Notebooks; it moves back through Einstein’s theories and H.W. Wells’ Time Machine, the physical ruins of Dracula’s Whitby Abbey, and it also looks at a 1908 article on the fourth dimension. The chapter then uses Joyce’s phrase “four dim mansions” --a pun that appropriately connects Victorian occultism and modern physics with misty castles of the past—to connect to the same phrase in an 1846 short story in The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine that imagines a 15th century Spain. As the chapter weaves in the author’s own experiences of watching fantasy time travel dramas on television, it ponders how ideas travel through time, how “scripture” recreates and destroys, and how actual physical ruins enact, dramatize, and inspire these time traveling stories of ruin and decay. Writing against various theories of the “disenchanted time” of the modern era, Erickson propose that our engagements with these modernist texts instead reveal a form of “re-enchanted time” where the borders between magic, religion, and science are fluid and shifting.