Professor Jones vs. The Time Philosophy

Abstract

Abstract Finnegans Wake persistently returns to the notion of time. This is because, as Joyce was writing that novel, his frenemy Wyndham Lewis accused him of adhering to Bergson’s radical time philosophy. Joyce responds to this accusation in book one of the Wake by casting the character of Shaun as a caricature of Lewis named Professor Jones, an angry academic who is vehemently anti-Bergsonian. This chapter shows that Joyce uses Jones to highlight the similarities and the differences between himself and Lewis. In doing so, Joyce not only refuses Lewis’ attempt at defining their relationship as oppositional; he also reveals the essential ambivalence of his attitude towards Bergson’s time philosophy. Joyce supports Bergson’s notion of a discord between internal time and external time, but he also calls into question the idea that those two temporal modes can be viewed as separate. Joyce’s understanding of Bergson matters because Bergson is the central time theorist of literary modernism.