When Is a Man not a Man?: Deconstructive and Reconstructive Impulses in Finnegans Wake

The question of Shem the Penman that opens chapter seven of Finnegans Wake—When is a man not a man—and the range of answers that it elicits, represents just one of many instances in which phenomenological pursuits and the concomitant inadequacy of terms come to the foreground of Joyce's work. No matter whom one reads, however, in any given situation labels / signifiers / designations more often than not generate as much ambiguity as certitude. The following quotations, for example, come from works by two of the men most often linked to British Modernism—T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, yet a scrutiny of either author immediately raises doubts about the efficacy of such a characterization: "In my beginning is my end" (T.S. Eliot); "A way a lone a last a loved a long the . . . riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs" (James Joyce). Neither writer is British, and the quotations cited reflect markedly different aesthetic assumptions from those commonly singled out as traits of Modernist writing.