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"One Man Like a City": Masculinity and History in Finnegans Wake and William Carlos Williams's Paterson

Williams killed Joyce’s giants. In the cyclical structure and redemptive vision of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s giants had enjoyed immortality. But it was short lived. In his uses of the Wake in the composition of his American epic Paterson between 1946 and 1958, William Carlos Williams ensured that the cast of the Wake had a chance to meet the same fate as the rest of us. In the first book of Paterson, a reader of the Wake (in a state of chronic untreated insomnia) will encounter a familiar cast of characters: man/city and his mate, twin boys, and a spectrum of young women. But with a difference. Joyce’s and Williams’s constructions of character mirror their poetics in that Joyce’s characters accumulate identities while Williams’s disintegrate. Vike Plock has described Wakean characters as “transhistorical,” while Richard Lehan and Robert Spoo have called them “superimposed.”2 Scarlett Baron sees Wakean intertextuality, which shapes character as well as form, as mosaic.3 All of these observations rightly gesture toward a gathering. Although Robert Lowell has famously