Motifs of Finnegans Wake in a story by Katherine Porter

Abstract

Katherine Porter´s collection of shorts stories, The Learning Tower and Other Stories, was published towards the end of the Second World War in 1944, amid a revival of interest in Joyce´s last work, Finnegans Wake (1939). This interest was aroused by the author’s death in 1941 and especially by the publication of A skeleton key to Finnegans Wake (1944) by Joseph Campbell, which revived attention among intellectuals and writers. Our purpose is to analyze the story “A Day´s Work” in dialogue with Finnegans Wake, an idea suggested by Porter herself, who names “Finnegan” an auxiliary character who appears fleetingly in a single scene. Although in length, form and genre both works are at the opposite ends, we argue that Porter´s story takes up the central motifs of Finnegans Wake and translates them into simple language with the same techniques (internal monologue, flashback, simultaneity, humor, circular history, mirror games) to describe the epic of common man. We consider that through a change in the gradation of the same avant-garde procedures and themes, Porter not only makes it evident that Finnegans´ motifs can be reducible, but also confirms Foerster´s (1968) statement that North American literature always kept its experimental prose within the framework of realism.