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This chapter traces the story of a waning life and its self-understanding when looking back, looking first at the chapter that precedes the finale of the book. Important though ALP is to the Wake—and her significance is underscored by assigning her the closing words—the dominant figure throughout is her husband, HCE. His guilt, his shortcomings, his failures pervade the entire book. Since for both husband and wife the value of their lives is bound up with the success of their life together, either can speak for both. This chapter of the Wake presents a kaleidoscope of scenes, sometimes with abrupt shifts. As ALP knows, and HCE should know, there is more to their union, more to their love, than sexual expression. Age may bring sexual failure without invalidating the love or forestalling its full elaboration in other ways.

The main issue that arises with I-2 centers on understanding the significance of what appears to be a grotesque and senseless story; I-3 poses the challenge of discerning some order in a sequence of rapidly shifting scenarios where there is constant confusion of identity. The next chapter, I-4, introduces a new collection of difficulties. Its individual episodes are less dense than those of its predecessor, but the order and connection of them is, at first sight, baffling. ALP represents both a potential object for HCE's devotion and an embodiment of an attitude that he can bring to her and to their marriage. A major work of that chapter has been to bring her persona and her voice clearly into the dream sequence of the Wake; much of the rest of the book is devoted to making it stronger, clearer, and firmer.

Central in the Wake among the many Joycean virtues are those of kindness, understanding, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness. Embodied in, and voiced by, ALP—most evidently in her closing monologue, but also at the very end of I-4—all are conceived in a distinctive way. Part of Joyce's conception of them involves a sense of struggle, of prior honesty in facing the realities of situations, of determination to explore those realities no matter how sordid or repulsive they may seem to be. Although Joyce's vision is one of the great versions of humanism, it would be hard to overlook the religious backdrop to his sense of human virtue. The principal task of this reading of the Wake is to understand that movement—to return to ALP's closing monologue, to its earlier anticipations and variations, with fuller appreciation. However, the second and third parts of the Wake should be examined first.

At the very beginning of Part III, there is a sleepy stirring, a dim awareness that this is all a dream. It offers a kaleidoscope of scenes where HCE and ALP appear as young parents, calming the night fears of young children, and as much older. The drawing back of the covers, the unmasking of the marriage bed, reveals the course of the lives of HCE and ALE. They encounter obstacles and have to steer through difficulties. Although they fall in one sense, declining toward death, in another they do not. For they are not driven off course, their “tableau final” is a recognizable development of how they began. At the end, one can shed sympathetic tears for their decline as they approach their deaths. But one can also applaud their power to endure, to continue to delight in their ordinary lives together.

Joyce interposes more than twenty pages before giving another letter from ALP and allowing her the Wake's last words. This intervening material involves short vignettes that recall other parts of the long dream, vignettes that often seem to have little relation to the worries that have been dominant since the end of Part I. In the end, the memory of the last leaf, conjures up the mood of her opening, her turn to HCE, the joy in waking beside him. Then it was a mingled celebration of the past of their marriage and a hope for renewal in the future, the natural illusion that has hung over this ricorso. Now, however, she understands completely that there will be no renewal, and she has anatomized her past. So, for her, and in her, the Joycean virtues—kindness, understanding, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness—can be realized.

The Dreyfus Affair split the moderate republicans. Drefusards formed the Alliance démocratique, which until 1906 was allied to the Left. The Antidreyfusards organized in the Fédération républicaine, which was liberal, anti-socialist, and increasingly nationalist and pro-Catholic. To the Fédération's right was formed the ALP, which grouped partisans of the Ralliement.Party formation should be understood in the light of ongoing religious conflict, the principles of collective psychology, and the elite–mass distinction. The Alliance and Fédération endeavoured to preserve elite leadership through parties that used simple ideas to mobilize the electorate, while allowing liberty of judgement to deputies in parliament. The ALP was a mass party that incorporated a host of Social Catholic movements, from women's groups to agricultural cooperatives. For a combination of social and religious reasons, many in the ALP opposed their leaders’ desire for compromise with moderates. Thus, class and religious issues divided the opposition.

After 1906, party organizations declined; the Right fragmented, and lost ground electorally. Yet a network of Centre and Right politicians, businessmen, academics, and journalists crystallized around an aspiration for ‘organization’ of society, economy, polity, and the family. The organizational movement took from crowd theory its emphasis on organic hierarchy, which it believed could be materialized through proportional representation and representation of business interests in parliament. ‘Organization’ would reinforce the leadership of the competent at a time when the victories of the Radical-Socialists appeared to represent the triumph of mediocrity. As always, Centre and Right disagreed concerning the nature of competence, notably because religion and economic philosophies still posed problems. Nonetheless, on the eve of war, a nationalist campaign for three-year military service reinforced conservative unity, and paved the way for the wartime Union sacrée. This would be a unity from above: until the mid-1920s, popular conservatism was relatively marginalized.

Although Right and Centre initially backed governments of national unity, the Great War ultimately provoked Right and Centre to unite against the Left. Conservatives associated the left with the German enemy, and saw Socialist efforts to ‘organize’ the war economy as evidence of a Germanic fetishisation of organization. Right and Centre accepted the need for total war, but came to agree that prosecution of the war required the expulsion of the Left from government. Conservatives embraced an alternative organizationalism designed to restore the predominance of the male elite in an organic hierarchy, improve the quality and quantity of the population, counter degeneration, win the war, and defeat Socialism. Religious and other tensions among conservatives remained, but a fundamental realignment had occurred, which would be perpetuated in the post-war Bloc national. The war reinforced the domination of elitist, male, bourgeois conservatism.

In 1919, the conservatives won their first election victory since the establishment of the Republic. The transfer of the culture of war from the German to the Bolshevik enemy reinforced unity, while opposition to the excesses of wartime ‘organization’ provoked convergence around a liberal version of the organizational project. Thus, a parliamentary coalition captured the brew of anti-communism, nationalism, and expectation of change that led to Fascism in Italy. By 1923, most of the Bloc's partisans believed that it had failed, and a gulf opened between Right and Centre. Some centrists turned to the Left, which they saw both as a guarantor of secularism and as the vehicle for a revived organizational project. The Right turned to orthodox liberalism or to a regionalist, corporatist organizationalism. As disenchantment with the Bloc grew, activists began to revive party organizations as a means to ensure that deputies did not betray them again, and some turned to the extreme right. The hegemony of elitist parliamentary conservatism began to fracture.

This chapter discusses the relative obscurity of Leo Isacson, the American Labor Party (ALP) nominee for Congress who was running in a special election to be held in the Bronx. The morning after the election, news of Isacson's astonishing two-to-one victory grabbed frontpage headlines across the country. In trouncing “boss” Edward J. Flynn's Democratic organization, Isacson, the candidate backed by Henry Wallace and his third party movement, sent shock waves through the political establishment. Pundits claimed that his victory would have national, even international repercussions, while jubilant Wallace supporters proclaimed that the results amounted to a wholesale repudiation of the Truman administration. As panicked Democrats and independent liberals scrambled to distance themselves from the allegedly “unelectable” Missourian, expectations within Gideon's Army swelled to an all-time high as various state and local organizations sprung up across the country.

John Terrill reads Finnegans Wake as impossible detective fiction, with its proposed ciphers remaining beyond readerly solution. He connects these mysteries to biblical prophecy, the book of Daniel in particular—an important pretext to I.1 that has been glossed in annotation but never explained. Terrill proceeds to delineate the ambiguous status of several male prophets: their roles as creative and sexualized beings, as slavish translators of preauthorized meanings, or as privileged amanuenses to higher sources of knowledge. He then turns to the function and place of women in these largely androcentric hierarchies of linguistic transmission. Focusing on Kate and ALP, Terrill illustrates how women on occasion escape the position of passive repository of the logos, by creating eclectic and restive semantic systems, in female voices or writings.

In her innovative ecocritical approach to I.8, Margot Norris explores the inseparability of river and women through the “figure” of ALP: the constrained but lively and liquid Liffey and the oppressed but strong and evolving female being. Norris calls for a more nuanced reading of ecocriticism that is attuned not just to nature in the raw, but those aspects of nature overlaid with culture so as to be unrecognizable—the urban environment and the modern body. The essay demonstrates the way the human can destroy and pollute the earthly world, but with the latter never succumbing to dominance. Joyce simultaneously emphasizes that the “figure” of ALP is fluid and mutating: exploring the plurabilities of her form and image, Norris demonstrates how he avoids representing nature through an essentializing lens.

Harry Bridges, longtime leader of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU, representing Pacific Coast workers), was born in Australia in 1901 and came to the United States in 1920. Bridges brought Australian concepts of labor and politics to the docks of San Francisco in the early 1930s and injected Australian examples into his discussions of US working conditions and politics thereafter. When faced in 1939-1955 with deportation for being a Communist, he always attributed his political outlook to his early experiences in Australia. Bridges was frequently demonized in the US press, and a similar process occurred in Australia as the press there drew upon the US press in presenting Bridges. Just as business groups and conservatives in the United States saw Bridges as a dangerous radical, so too did conservative Australian politicians let their fear of Bridges carry them into a Quixotic campaign to prevent him from sneaking into their country. However, the Australian dockworkers’ union, the Waterfront Workers’ Federation, looked to Bridges and the ILWU as inspiration and exemplar, and Bridges and the ILWU worked closely with their counterparts in Australia. With the thaw in the Cold War aecline in anticommunist rhetoric in both nations, Bridges could be celebrated in both places as a “labor statesman.”

Beginning in May 2009 we fielded a monthly Internet survey designed to measure total household spending as the aggregate of about 40 spending components. We developed a unique summary table which permits a respondent to correct erroneous entries. This paper reports on a number of outcomes from 30 waves of data collection in panel. These outcomes include sample attrition, indicators of data quality such as item nonresponse and the variance in total spending, and how the variance is affected by the summary table. Total spending in our sample aggregates closely to total spending in the Consumer Expenditure Survey as reported in published estimates. We conclude that high-frequency surveying for total spending is feasible and that the resulting data show expected patterns of levels and change.

This chapter examines the paradox presented by the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The party was created by the labour movement and unions affiliated to it have traditionally dominated the party machine. They retain a prominent role in the party’s formal decision-making processes as well as in its more informal structures. In particular, through their position in the party’s system of highly organized factions, they have been able to have a significant behind-the-scenes role, particularly in areas such as the selection of candidates for elected office, in the allocation of ministerial portfolios, and in leadership contests. The affiliated unions have retained this role in spite of pressures to ‘delink’. Yet, this central role has done little to impede the gradual adoption by the party of a more economically liberal, catch-all strategy aimed at attracting the median voter.