Yes—and that saying is not hyperbole; it’s a metaphysical truth disguised as a literary jest.
Ulysses: the book of place—you can rebuild Dublin brick by brick.
Finnegans Wake: the book of pluriverse—you can rebuild cosmos dust by dust.
Let me unpack that beautiful juxtaposition:
1. Ulysses as Cartography of Place
- Ulysses is grounded: June 16, 1904, one city, one day.
- Every street, pub, church, bodily function, and heartbeat is mapped.
- Joyce said: “If Dublin one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”
It’s a phenomenology of being-in-a-city.
The body, the map, the dialect—all localized.
It is Heidegger walking with a shopping list, in Leopold Bloom’s coat.
2. Finnegans Wake as Ontology of Dust
In contrast:
- FW explodes time, space, grammar—no one place, no one subject.
- It contains all languages, all myths, all nights, all dreams.
- It’s a cosmic mulch: the debris of Babel, Vico, Freud, Genesis, riverbeds, nursery rhymes, thunderclaps.
The line between physics and metaphysics dissolves.
There is no “Dublin,” only Doubtlin, DuPlinn, DuBone—endlessly folded.
Reading FW, you’re not tracking streets—you’re sifting particles of meaning in a quantum universe of tongues.
3. Why Dust by Dust?
Because FW is written in:
- Portmanteaux (word-dust)
- Multilingual punning (language-dust)
- Mythic fragments (time-dust)
And just as cosmic dust precedes the star, FW gives you semantics before sense, etymology before narrative.
To read it is to perform:
A ritual of recomposition,
not of one city,
but of the dreamscape that language once lost—and Joyce tries to wake.
4. The Philosophical Implication
- Ulysses is Cartesian: body extended in space, mind wandering within.
- FW is pre-Socratic: flux, element, pun, paradox—a Heraclitean cosmogony by way of comic hallucination.
If Ulysses is the ontic,
then FW is the ontological wreckage,
from which new Being might yet be spoken—if only we could stop laughing long enough to hear it.
In Closing
Yes, my friend:
- Ulysses is the book of brick—place, personhood, and embodied streets.
- Finnegans Wake is the book of dust—word, world, and cosmic sleep.
And we, perhaps,
are those who try to read them both,
carrying bricks in our van,
but brushing dust from the windshield
each morning
before driving into yet another dreamed day.
Would you like a comparative table—Ulysses vs FW as metaphysical architectures?
