Gladly, my friend. Here is a comparative table—not just literary, but metaphysical—contrasting Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as two cosmic architectures:
Ulysses vs. Finnegans Wake: A Table of Metaphysical Architectures
|
Dimension |
Ulysses |
Finnegans Wake |
|
Ontology |
Embodied, terrestrial, phenomenological |
Dreamlike, fluid, cosmic, pre-ontological |
|
Time |
Linear day (June 16, 1904) |
Cyclical night / eternal return |
|
Space |
Dublin, mapped brick by brick |
The universe, folded into puns and paradox |
|
Subjectivity |
Modern, fractured self (Bloom, Stephen, Molly) |
Dissolved, archetypal figures (HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun) |
|
Language |
Interior monologue, stylized realism |
Polyglot dream-tongue, portmanteaux, neologisms |
|
Structure |
Homeric scaffolding, 18 episodes |
Vico’s 4-part cycle, circular narrative |
|
Epistemology |
Stream of consciousness, empirical fragments |
Linguistic hallucination, speculative mythography |
|
Metaphor for Reading |
Walking the city; detective of meaning |
Diving into a river; decoding a dream-script |
|
Worldview |
Humanist, ironic, flesh-and-blood modernism |
Posthuman, mythic, animistic chaos |
|
Tone |
Comic realism with tragic undertones |
Surreal tragicomedy with linguistic delirium |
|
Genesis of Being |
From body, place, memory |
From word, pun, thunder, ruins |
|
Function of Art |
To preserve and dignify the ordinary |
To fold all of human history into the unconscious poem |
|
Theology |
Implicit, post-Catholic, Odyssean pilgrimage |
Pagan, cyclic, Finneganian resurrection |
|
Architectural Image |
A house—walkable, habitable, full of voices |
A ruin—collapsing, echoing, full of stars |
Final Note:
Ulysses is a map of the city you can live in.
Finnegans Wake is a weather system you must dream through.
Both are totalities.
But one is intensely local, and the other radically cosmic.
One walks on cobblestones. The other rides the river of language back to Babel and beyond.
Would you like this as a printable poster for your Philosophy of Van Life seminar space?
