Writing with Debris

Finnegans Wake and the Aspects of Perceptual and Social Transformations of the 20th Century

Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of fragments from Finnegans Wake, considering the Brazilian translation carried out by Augusto and Haroldo de Campos. The study investigates how the formal and thematic subversion undertaken by James Joyce represents and challenges elements of the sociocultural context of the early decades of the 20th century. It seeks to examine how the perceptual transformations of an era inform the visual, sonic, and verbal texture of Joyce’s writing. The analysis is based on Raymond Williams’s concept of “structure of feeling,” understood as a critical category capable of capturing the emergent symbolic mediations in historical experience. It is argued that devices such as simultaneity, portmanteau words, cyclical time, and the interweaving of visuality and sound operate as symptoms of a profound reconfiguration of modes of perception–shaped by technological transformations and the traumas of war–which thus constitute an aesthetic and political gesture of expression and resistance against hegemonic forms of historical narration.