“Samuel Beckett's first published work, in the selection of critical essays on James Joyce entitled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, is "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce". In it, Beckett sees a profound influence of Vico's philosophy and poetics—as well the cyclical form of the Scienza Nuova—on the avant-garde compositions of Joyce, and especially the titular Work in Progress, viz. Finnegans Wake.”, what’s the influence of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) upon Joyce? (ChatGPT, 2025-5-3)

 Ah, the Vico–Joyce connection—a secret architecture undergirding the chaos of Finnegans Wake. You’ve cited it precisely: Beckett’s early essay “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” identifies Vico’s Scienza Nuova (The New Science) as one of the foundational keys to the Wake’s deep structure.

Let me lay it out in five parts, each tracing a thread of Vico’s philosophy into Joyce’s poetics:

1. The Viconian Cycle: Corsi e Ricorsi

Vico’s central concept is the cyclical nature of history—corsi e ricorsi, the recurring epochs through which human societies pass:

1. The Age of Gods (divine law, myth)
2. The Age of Heroes (aristocracy, symbolic justice)
3. The Age of Humans (reason, democracy, decay)
4. Then a collapse into barbarism, which begins again.

Joyce’s Adoption:

• Finnegans Wake is structured around four books, mirroring this cycle.
• The entire work performs a Viconian return, not narratively, but mytho-linguistically.
• The fall of Finnegan and his resurrection echo this eternal return, this anthropo-linguistic spiral.

The Wake ends mid-sentence—“A way a lone a last a loved a long the…”—and loops back to the beginning—“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…”

Thus, the Wake is not a novel, but a Viconian machine—history dreaming itself.

2. Vico’s Philosophy of Language and Myth

Vico argued that:

• Early humans thought poetically, not rationally.
• Language emerged from metaphor, myth, gesture, and sound, not logical abstraction.
• Poetry is the first mode of knowing.

Joyce’s Response:

• FW is written in a language that is pre-rational, dreamlike, myth-soaked.
• Puns, neologisms, portmanteaux—these are not nonsense, but a return to primal meaning-making.
• Joyce enacts Vico’s claim that poetry is pre-conceptual knowledge.

In this sense, Finnegans Wake is an experiment in pre-linguistic epistemology—a song the species sang before it knew it was speaking.

3. Vico’s “Verum Factum” Principle

Verum esse ipsum factum — “The true is precisely what is made.”

Vico claimed that we can only know what we ourselves have made. Thus:

• Human history is knowable because we made it.
• Truth is not discovered—it is constructed, fabricated, factified.

Joyce’s Turn:

• The title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress is a Joycean parody of Vico’s language.
• Joyce doesn’t just write about the world—he makes a world through writing.
• FW becomes a constructed truth, not a representation of truth.

Joyce is not a novelist. He is a Viconian historiographer of human consciousness—rebuilding the cosmos through pun, echo, and collapse.

4. Vico’s “Universali Fantastici” (Imaginative Universals)

Vico believed:

• Mythic figures (Jove, Neptune, Hercules) are not fictions, but “imaginative universals”—ways early societies symbolized universal forces.

Joyce’s Application:

• HCE (Here Comes Everybody), ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle), Shem and Shaun—these are not “characters” but archetypal figures.
• Joyce re-creates Vico’s mythic mind, where a thunderclap or a fall off a ladder becomes cosmogony.

The Wake’s cast is Vico’s symbolic humanity, dreamed anew in multilingual kaleidoscope.

5. Vico and the Collapse of Modernity

Finally, Vico thought:

• The “Age of Man” (rationalism, law, commerce) ends in decay, barbarism of reflection.
• But this is not the end—it is the condition for beginning again.

Joyce’s Hope:

• The Wake is post-collapse—after Babel, after trauma, after loss of shared meaning.
• And yet—language still flickers, still carries residual myth, still dreams.
• Thus, the Wake is a text of exhaustion, but also recommencement.

In that sense, it is also deeply postmodern, or even posthuman—yet grounded in Vico’s 18th-century intuition:

We end in ruins—but ruins speak.

In Closing: The Vico-Joyce Axis

Vico	Joyce
Corsi e Ricorsi	Circular structure of Finnegans Wake
Myth as primal language	Language as dream-logic and myth-residue
Verum Factum (truth = made)	Fiction as cosmogenesis
Imaginative Universals	Characters as archetypes, not subjects
Collapse → Renewal	Language collapse → resurrection through pun

So yes: Vico is not a source for Joyce—he is a framework, an ontological accomplice.

And Beckett knew this. That’s why he titled his essay with ellipses:

“Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce”

Because each ellipsis marks a threshold, a recurrence, a wake.

Would you like a visual spiral diagram mapping Vico’s cycle onto Finnegans Wake’s structure?