Savage Gods

Abstract References to W. B. Yeats’s A Vision abound in “The Triangle” section of Book II, Chapter 2 in Finnegans Wake; this essay argues that those references must be triangulated through Alfred Jarry, the iconoclastic, avant-garde writer, whose riotous premiere of Ubu roi was attended by Yeats himself. Jarry forms a crucial model for Joyce in the creation of an actively contestatory mode of reception that defies the coteries of Symbolist literary production. Joyce and Jarry radicalize Symbolist suggestion through comic polysemy, cutting out the salon and the literary circle as sites of reception and constructing instead a direct relation with their readers. This relation is dramatized in geometrical and mathematical language. Comically, these symbols, which should communicate universal, essential, eternal truths, are marked by cartoonish, uncertain visual rhymes that include the authors’ faces, as they prankishly stand in for the transcendental signified.