‘Austrasia or Anywhere’: Place, Space and the Antipodes in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Abstract

James Joyce included imagery of the Antipodes in Finnegans Wake to contribute to the book’s contrary themes and innovative depictions of space and place. Through close readings of the book’s references to the region known historically as the Antipodes (including but not limited to Australia and New Zealand), Joyce’s technique of doubling Ireland with other places as part of the book’s style shows his universal idea of the desirable yet complex merging of opposites. The trope of the Antipodes is of great value in studying the figuration of place and space in Finnegans Wake, as the region was considered to be opposed to Europe in more than geographical terms. The Antipodes are merged with Ireland in Finnegans Wake by collapsing distance through amalgamations of language and formations of place. The Antipodes are considered in their historical, geographic and literary context as contrary to European life. The Antipodes’ spatial figuration in Finnegans Wake is discussed in the context of literary criticism on Joyce’s writing of space and place in his earlier prose. It is argued that critical research on the stylization of place and space in Finnegans Wake is at a nascent stage. Theoretical approaches to the authoring of space are found in recent writings that draw on Geocriticism, and Finnegans Wake is considered a prototypical geocritical work as it uses multiple and conflicting textual perspectives to create a sense of place. Ireland is presented as the primary narrative site in Finnegans Wake with a focus on how Joyce expanded Irish space on a global scale. Ireland is shown to be superimposed over the Antipodes through the metaphor of verticality and the motif of felix culpa, the fortuitous Fall. The spatial role of the character HCE is discussed through his north-south alignments with the land, while the character Shem is the focus for a discussion of the Antipodes and perversity. It is argued that the textual references to the Antipodes represent a portal for Irish exile and travel, reflecting Joyce’s innovation in destabilizing spatial referents. The thesis concludes that Finnegans Wake is a global text in its distortion of geographical boundaries.