by ANDY MERRIFIELD
For a long while, I’ve had a peculiar fantasy of bringing volume two of Marx’s Capital into dialogue with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I’ve always thought both books existed in a strange parallel universe, where capital courses alongside the Joycean “riverrun” (the river Liffey), and each shares some profound connection, an unexpected gravitational pull, like that between quantum mechanics and fluid dynamics.
“In a constantly rotating orbit,” says Marx in the sequel to volume one of Capital, which he subtitled The Process of Capitalist Circulation, “every point is simultaneously a starting point and a point of return.” “Thus we have seen,” Marx continues, “that not only does every particular circuit (implicitly) presuppose the others, but also that the repetition of the circuit in one form includes the motions which have taken place in other forms of the circuit. Thus the entire distinction presents itself as merely one of form, a merely subjective distinction that exists only for the observer.”
Thus “the book really has no beginning, or end. It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence.” So wrote Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, describing the seamless flow between the closing and opening lines of his great masterpiece: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the…riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
Anybody who’s ever leafed through Finnegans Wake will quickly recognize that we’re not dealing here with a standard novel, just as anybody leafing through Marx’s Capital will know we’re not dealing with standard economics. In Capital, vol. 2, there’s constant intertwining of appearance and disappearance of various forms of capital; in Finnegans Wake, protagonists come and go in assorted guises, too, in various transfigurations, ranging from mythological characters to entire geographical structures—like trees, rivers, and mountains. Marx said he didn’t like classical political economy and Joyce admitted he never liked conventional “storytelling,” or writing books that had a linear narrative; and in the Wake there’s no real tale to follow. Joyce said his book “has significance completely above reality; transcending humans, things, senses, and entering the realm of complete abstraction.”
The two principal characters, Anna Livia Plurabelle and husband Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, “are at the same time the city and its founder, the river and mountain; there isn’t even a chronological ordering of the action,” Joyce says. “It is simultaneous action, represented by the novel’s circular construction.” Anna Livia becomes a representation of the River Liffey (its Latin name is Amnis Livia), as well as of all the rivers that appear in Finnegans Wake (the first chapter contains allusions to over three hundred of them).
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