Ecological-Artistic Interpenetrations on a Damaged Planet: Invoking James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Bartholomew Ryan IFILNOVA / Universidade de Nova de Lisboa Abstract Due to the increasing acceptance that we are now living in an age of radical environmental catastrophe, various innovative ecological-philosophical-artistic texts are being published, dispersed and discussed in attempting to transform our consciousness into ecological selves immersed in the ecological thought. In this essay, I present James Joyce’s final exasperating work Finnegans Wake as a supreme text of experimentation and dissidence and how it both links and articulates in dazzling new ways the contemporary ecological thought. Joyce’s art offers us ways and visions to constantly realign and transform our relationship to each other and all animate and inanimate things, and incorporates and interpenetrates all human and natural history and experience in this “timecoloured place” propelling us into the reality of the present which is the ecological thought. It is without a doubt one of the most difficult and impenetrable ‘novels’ ever written, but I propose that is only now that we are ready to enter this ‘book of the dark’ and understand it within a present-orientated Chthulucene (Donna Haraway’s neologism) rather than an Anthropocene epoch. I argue that Joyce’s ‘explosition’ demands the reader’s participation as an endlessly experimental, dissident, problematic, destabilizing and subversively joyous work of art, and as a philosophical vision for multispecies storytelling and entangling encounters. The final part of this essay demonstrates briefly that there is a profound ecological thought at the heart of the book via at least two aspects: i) ‘Wrunes’ - in the ruins, recycling and renewal of human history and the natural world; and ii) ‘Explosition’ - in the experience of interpenetration and entanglement of language and of animate and inanimate things and beings. Keywords interpenetration, entanglement, wrunes, explosition, chaosmos, woid In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you’re in the unbewised again, vund vulsyvolsy.” - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake Finnegans Wake by James Joyce is without a doubt one of the most intimidating and difficult books ever written. Since its publication in 1939, professors and students in literature and philosophy and readers outside academia have been perplexed, bewildered and angered in trying to find a way to simply read it - let alone decipher it. Yet there is another story that diverges from this standard judgement and perception of this final work by Joyce. It is a story of approaching the book as a vivid and vibrant experience in radical experimentation and 1 joyous dissidence, and a vision of ecological thought for the twenty-first century and beyond. Finnegans Wake never accommodates the reader to any comfortable narrative sense; it demands our energy and powers of patience and open-mindedness on every page and often every line of its 628 pages. This introductory essay presents Joyce’s final masterwork as a multiple expression of movement, sound and vision for contemporary and future ecological thought. First, I will link Finnegan Wake and what I mean by contemporary ecological thought and perspectives; second, I will ask and play with the question of what the actual artwork of Finnegans Wake is and can be?; and third, I will delve deeper into this extraordinary work in arguing that there is a profound ecological thought at the heart of the book via the word ‘wrunes’ - in the relation between ruins, recycling and renewal of human history and the natural world; and ‘explosition’ - in the experience of interpenetration and entanglement of language and of all animate and inanimate things and beings. 1. Contemporary Ecological Thought as a Prelude to Finnegans Wake As the increasing damage to this planet is becoming more and more clear to us over the last two decades, an increasing number of innovative writers have emerged in the humanities -from philosophy, anthropology, ethnography, environmental studies, literature and contemporary art practices. Within the last ten years, I am thinking, for example of works such as Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009) by Jane Bennett; The Ecological Thought (2010) and Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016) by Timothy Morten; How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn (2013); The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) by Donna J. Haraway; Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (2016) by Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder; The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018) by Emanuele Coccia; and What is Philosophy for? (2018) by Mary Midgley. What is this varied contemporary ecological thought being shared and discussed in the last few years and how does it connect to Joyce’s monstrous Finnegans Wake? Why are we returning to Finnegans Wake? The question should perhaps be: have we ever had a chance to return to the Wake? Reading these various writers of ecocriticism, ecofeminism and plant-thinking on a damaged planet and in the age of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene has given me a new understanding of Finnegans Wake. This is not an essay about the current writers in vogue on ecological thought, but is an essay on Finnegans Wake. 2 Nevertheless, I will just mention a few aspects, sentences, words, expressions and perspectives from a few of these authors that has led me back to Finnegans Wake – a book which is now waiting and ahead of us again in the age of devastating environmental crisis. I am reminded of the opening line of Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce: “We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries, to understand our interpreter.”1 I will just mention three contemporaneous writers and two artists before entering Finnegans Wake. Let me first glance at Timothy Morten’s The Ecological Thought. In this short book, he gives various descriptions, elaborations and definitions of what the “ecological thought” is today. On the second page, he writes: This book argues that ecology isn’t just about global warming, recycling, and solar power – and also not just to do with everyday relationships between humans and nonhumans. It has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion, depression and psychosis, capitalism and what might exist after capitalism; with amazement, open-mindedness, and wonder, doubt, confusion and skepticism. It has to do with concepts of space and time. It has to do with delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, irony, and pain. It has to do with consciousness and awareness. It has to do with ideology and critique. It has to do with reading and writing. It has to do with sexuality. It has to do with ideas of the self and with the weird paradoxes of subjectivity. It has to do with society. It has to do with coexistence […] Ecological thinking is to do with art, philosophy, literature, music, and culture.”2 Later in the book, Morten describes the ecological thought as “a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite centre or edge”3; as “radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise”4; that it “imagines a multitude of entangled strange strangers”5; and that “all the way down, it’s mutation, mutation, mutation.”6 And, regarding the relationship between art and the environment, he writes that “art forms have something to tell us about the environment, because they can make us question reality.”7 And, crucially, in my thinking of Finnegans Wake, “Ecological art is something, or maybe it does something.”8 1 (Ellmann 1982: 3) 2 (Morten 2012: 2, 4) 3 (Morten 2012: 8) 4 (Morten 2012: 8) 5 (Morten 2012: 15) 6 (Morten 2012: 64) 7 (Morten 2012: 8) 8 (Morten 2012: 11) 3 In his more recent called Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, Morten writes that - “Our sense of planet is not a cosmopolitan rush but rather the uncanny feeling that there are all kinds of places at all kinds of scale […] Places contain multitudes.”9 In The Ecological Thought, he introduces the idea of “dark ecology”: I explore the possibility of a new ecological aesthetics: dark ecology. Dark ecology puts hesitation, irony, and thoughtfulness back into ecological thinking. The form of dark ecology is that of noir film. The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly external situation, form a supposedly neutral point of few, only to discover that she or he is implicated in it.10 Donna Haraway declares in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene: “I am a compostist, not a posthumanist: we are all compost, not post-human […] The edge of extinction is not just a metaphor; system collapse is not a thriller. Ask any refugee of any species.”11 She coins the word “Chthulucene”, which she explains “is a compound of two compound of two Greek roots (khthôn and kainos) that together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth.”12 Joyce will refer to the “chaosmos”13 of everything living and dying in “this timecoloured place”.14 She explains that Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, or freshness. […] Chthonic once are beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to the-minute […] Chthonic ones are not safe; they have no truck with ideologues; they belong to no one; they writhe