Impossible Mourning in Finnegans Wake

This chapter examines James Joyce’s ethical critique of mourning throughout Finnegans Wake. Using Jacques Derrida’s writings, it argues that Joyce reveals the limitations of traditional performances of mourning through a cyclical narrative that perpetually resurrects his deceased characters, resists the closure of complete mourning, and challenges the boundaries that separate the human mourners from the deceased other. Joyce also expands the possibilities of mourning by constructing mournful identities that combine human and nonhuman elements and which further destabilise the boundaries between self and other that mourning ostensibly enforces. The chapter thus reads Finnegans Wake as the culmination of Joyce’s career-long exploration of the ethics of mourning by using the juxtaposition of human and nonhuman characteristics to construct a perpetual affirmation of the living and dead that provides a more viable ethics of commemoration.