'Under the shadow of the Monument': on first looking into Finnegans Wake

Focusing on the author’s first encounters with Finnegans Wake, this chapter reexamines the distinction between what is supposedly “intrinsic” and what is “extrinsic” to the experience of reading. The context in this case was not simply apartheid South Africa in the mid-1980s. More directly relevant, at least for one initiate into the mysteries and global effects of the Wake, was the looming presence of the 1820s Settler Monument in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, a center for the arts inaugurated in 1974 and designed to commemorate British settler traditions and celebrate the English language. Joyce’s last and most eccentric foray into literary writing, it turns out, constitutes a powerful refutation of the monument’s founding assumptions and of the act of monumentalization itself.