25 - Finnegans Wake, Modernist Time Machines and Re-enchanted Time

Summary

FOR MAX WEBER, the ‘disenchantment’ of the Western world – the process that led to what he saw as modern secularism – begins as far back as ancient Jewish thought, with Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah proclaiming ‘idols’ as powerless stones. For over 2,000 years, this theory proposes, magic gradually but progressively leaked out of the Western world. Many twentieth-century thinkers agreed that this long period of secularisation, beginning with the departure from magic, would conclude with the inevitable end of ‘religion’. More recent thinkers, however, have argued that ‘enchantment, no less than disenchantment, appears inherent to human consciousness’, often pointing to a kind of postmodern ‘re-enchantment’ and a return of magical thinking. In this chapter, I propose that modernist texts can reveal forms of magical re-enchantment through time travel. By building on H. G. Wells and Albert Einstein, working through short passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and his handwritten Notebooks, and ending with Dracula and the physical ruins of Whitby Abbey, I will think about how ideas travel through time, how texts and scriptures recreate and destroy, and how actual physical ruins enact, dramatise and inspire these time-travelling narratives. This process involves a reframing of what ‘modernism’ was and is. As Sarah Cole argues, ‘scholars of modernism have largely missed or misread Wells’, and we might make a similar point about Stoker; we need to find different ways to put authors like Joyce, Wells and Stoker into conversation, and one way to do this is to rethink our shifting relationship to time. Material and imaginative spaces like Whitby Abbey and the fading and rapidly decaying Finnegans Wake Notebooks encourage us to think about not only what once was, but also what will be and what will not be in the future.

While the dream of time travel is a modern phenomenon, trying to understand the complexities of time has long been tied to theology and religion. Augustine asked in the fifth century: ‘What was God doing before he made heaven and earth […] how can there be a true eternity in which an act of will occurs that was not there before?