‘A static that contains all the messages ever sent’: Tom McCarthy’s C, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and Nonlinear Literary History

This article considers the relationship between Tom McCarthy’s novel “C” and James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” Drawing on McCarthy’s criticism and theory, it argues that “C” offers both a creative reworking of elements of the “Wake” in a new fictional context, and an enactment of what McCarthy takes to be the implications of the “Wake” for our thinking about the nature of literary history. These two aspects of “C” come together, the article argues, in its final act, during which the death of its protagonist, Serge Carrefax, serves as the focal point for a number of literary-critical possibilities which McCarthy locates in Joyce’s work, most notably a nonlinear conception of literary history.