Focusing on the author’s first encounters with Finnegans Wake, this chapter reexamines the distinction between what is supposedly “intrinsic” and what is “extrinsic” to the experience of reading. The context in this case was not simply apartheid South Africa in the mid-1980s. More directly relevant, at least for one initiate into the mysteries and global effects of the Wake, was the looming presence of the 1820s Settler Monument in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, a center for the arts inaugurated in 1974 and designed to commemorate British settler traditions and celebrate the English language. Joyce’s last and most eccentric foray into literary writing, it turns out, constitutes a powerful refutation of the monument’s founding assumptions and of the act of monumentalization itself.

1. This chapter explores hitherto unacknowledged influences, including McLuhan and Ong, on Dusklands. New light is shed on the novels manuscript origins and its relation to satire.

Marxism has long been criticized for its failure to elaborate a theoretical analysis of war. Prioritising a commercial view of history, Marxism has treated war as either a tool of policy or an anachronistic aberration. However, a more foundational and determinate role for capitalism’s violence has begun to be elaborated by Marxist scholars concerned with the place of accumulation in the history of capitalism. Alliez and Lazzarato, for example, insist that the violence of primitive accumulation subtends all capital relations. Capitalism, they argue, has always depended upon the expropriation of nature and so operates as a form of colonial warfare. This chapter draws on their insights to examine Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Although the novel has been criticized by Marxist theorists for lacking a fully realised class analysis, its narrative of an unnamed Empire’s pitiless campaigns against barbarian forces offers an account of how commerce expropriates lives and land. This chapter argues that the personal ethics of corporeality, truth, and pain developed in the novel cannot be understood outside of this concern with the violent, collective experience of capital accumulation.