by James Joyce
1 Murray Gell-Man, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (W. H. Freeman, 1994).
2 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 546.
1 In his Introduction to the recent American edition of Finnegans Wake (Penguin, 1999).
2 Not invariably, however, as Joyce occasionally rearranges English words to imitate ‘foreign’ syntax.
3 E. L. Epstein, A Guide through Finnegans Wake (University Press of Florida, 2009).
1 G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
2 Vicki Mahaffey, ‘Intentional Error: The Paradox of Editing Joyce’s Ulysses’. In George Bornstein, ed. Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation (University of Michigan Press, 1991).
3 Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age. 3rd ed. (University of Georgia Press, 1996). For a discussion on this point, D. C. Greetham, Theories of the Text Oxford: (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 165.
4 Danis Rose informs me that, in editing Finnegans Wake, neologisms were treated in exactly the same way as ‘normal’ words. This approach applies also to Carroll. If, for example, an editor found that ‘the transmigration of written characters through time’ had converted ‘Jabberwocky’ into ‘Jobberwacky,’ a ‘correction’ back to ‘Jabberwocky’ would be in order. This is one way, perhaps the only way, to respond to Greg’s challenge: assume meaningfulness.
1 Theodore Adorno, for example, famously and opaquely declares that ‘[i]n the history of art late works are the catastrophes’. See Adorno: Essays on Music. ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (University of California Press, 2002).
2 Joyce was courteous, but ultimately dismissive of their criticisms. Of Pound’s, for example, he wrote: ‘It is possible Pound is right but I cannot go back. I never listened to his objections to Ulysses as it was being sent him once I had made up my mind but dodged them as tactfully as I could’ (Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1 February 1927).
3 The quotes are taken from Monika Lichtenfeld, ‘On the history of the origin and reception of the late Beethoven quartets’, trans. John Coombs. Ludwig van Beethoven. Die Späten Streichquartette. LaSalle Quartet. DGG 1977.
1 Although the title of the collection was presumably one of Joyce’s coinages, it was not until eight years later (in 1937) that he wove it into Finnegans Wake: ‘Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim!’ (FW2, 386.01-2).
2 As is forcefully shown in Joyce’s own reading of his work, noted by Eugene Jolas in 1929: ‘Those who have heard Mr Joyce read aloud from Work in Progress know the immense rhythmic beauty of his technique. It has a musical flow that flatters the ear, that has the organic structure of works of nature, that transmits painstakingly every vowel and consonant formed by his ear’ (Our Exagmination).
1 Machover, Soft Morning City (1980). New York: Composer Recordings, Inc., 1984.
2 Epstein, op. cit., Introduction, n. 13.
3 It should be noted, however, that the ‘end’ of the sentence was drafted in 1926, some twelve years before the ‘beginning’ was written.
1 The most comprehensive study of the problem of ‘external fact’ is G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘External Fact as an Editorial Problem’ Studies in Bibliography 32: 1-47 (1979).
2 Epstein, op. cit., p. 119.
3 In the opening sally of the same ‘bibliography’ essay, Greg issues another challenge: ‘I start with the postulate that what the bibliographer is concerned with is pieces of paper or parchment covered with certain written or printed signs. With these signs he is concerned merely as arbitrary marks; their meaning is no business of his’ (121-2).
1 That ‘Michael Finnegan’ is not an isolated example of the endlessly recursive in children’s songs can be seen in, for example, the 1992 Shari Lewis Lambchop television series where Ms Lewis continually fails to stop ‘This is the song that never ends’ from repeating, except by the force majeure of putting her hand over the mouth of Charlie Horse, one of the puppet characters. Similarly, the children’s song ‘I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves’ has the identical endless loop, ending (and beginning again) with ‘and it goes something like this’. Clearly ‘Michael Finnegan’ and Finnegans Wake are just two tokens of a ubiquitous type, of which Eric Rücker Eddison’s The Worm Ouroborus, where both the narrative situation and the beginning and final paragraphs are identical, is yet another.
1 This expression is based on the fact that there is an isomorphic (one-to-one) relationship between the ‘isotext’ and its constituent draft stages. Gabler’s essentially equivalent term ‘synoptic text’ indicates that all the constituent draft stages are displayed simultaneously.
1 Harriet Weaver originally intended to give the Finnegans Wake MSS to the National Library of Ireland. A dispute that arose between the then Irish Government and Nora Joyce made this unrealizable. Miss Weaver instead contrived to pass on to Dublin the manuscript of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a sort of consolation prize.
2 The sale took place in late 1949 when a large cache of Joyce’s manuscripts, including the notebooks, were exhibited at the La Hune Gallery in Paris. The funds for the purchase were donated by Margarita E. Wickser in memory of her late husband, Philip J. Wickser.
1 Published by Garland Publishing of New York, 1977-78: volumes 44-63 (the Finnegans Wake drafts, typescripts and proofs) were prefaced by David Hayman and arranged by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon; volumes 25-43 (the Finnegans Wake notebooks) were prefaced and arranged by David Hayman and Danis Rose.
2 Working with facsimiles rather than originals had some unexpected benefits. We were able on occasion to reproduce the same page twice (i.e., in two different locations in the Archive) where that page had been used twice by Joyce (i.e., in two different draft stages).
3 The eighth chapter, ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’, is the sole exception.
4 The order in which Joyce composed the chapters, and indeed the sections, does not always reflect the order in which they appear in the final text. Thus, the opening chapter was drafted in 1926, long after chapters 2-5, 7-8, 13-16, and immediately before chapter 6. This, however, need not concern us here.
1 The Joyces were staying at the time in Saint Gérand-le-Puy in Vichy France.
2 In The Index Manuscript (Colchester: A Wake Newslitter Press, 1978), the first fully annotated edition of a Finnegans Wake notebook.
1 Reproductions of the notebooks can be found in volumes 29-43 of the James Joyce Archive. In The Textual Diaries of James Joyce (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1995), Danis Rose estimated that ten of the notebooks are missing. One of those hypothesized notebooks reemerged for sale in Paris in 2004, only to vanish again within months. It was sold to an unidentified collector. The National Library of Ireland had an opportunity to secure it but, regrettably, failed to follow through.
2 More recently, the vastly easier task of searching the Internet has rendered much, though not yet all, of this hunting in libraries unnecessary.
3 That is, they can supply us with reliable annotations. A word of caution, however, should be sounded. The extra-textual references often do not bear directly on the narrative proper. They are erudite and not-so-erudite jokes, not unlike the footnotes in T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, intended as re-readings for the connoisseur. They often come in pairs. For example, the reference to a Milton sonnet in the phrase ‘under the great taskmaster’s eye’ alluded to in Hans Walter Gabler’s foreword is counterpointed by the realization that Joyce’s hapless protagonist is being looked down upon by the Wellington Monument, a giant granite obelisk.
1 With his last novel Joyce achieved a level of complexity that has been neither equalled nor surpassed in the Western canon. In order to produce and control his text he devised the highly individual methodology outlined above. While earlier works had also been dependent on note-taking, his most original notes were based on personal exp
erience and observation crystallized into the textualized images known as epiphanies. Mixed with these were miscellaneous notes from his reading, e.g. in Aristotle, or Aquinas. During the composition of Ulysses, the basis of his note-taking shifted as the book gradually developed an encyclopaedic scale and sweep of reference, requiring more and more reading-based data drawn from street directories, newspapers contemporary with the novel’s action and an assortment of books and miscellaneous ephemera. It is a moot point whether the composition drove the methodology or was driven by it. Early on, the process was similar to the sort of research undertaken by most novelists wishing to lend a realistic veneer to their narratives: notes on tuberculosis for The Magic Mountain, say, or on music for Dr Faustus – yet the sheer range and density of usage sets Ulysses apart from any other contemporary work. By the time Joyce began Finnegans Wake, the process was taken to such extremes that, even by the standards set by Ulysses, the resulting text – a kind of literary ‘Holohan’s Christmas Cake’ – yielded an unprecedented degree of plumpness, richness and density of detail.
1 Jack Dalton, ‘Advertisement for the Restoration’, in Twelve and a Tilly (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).
2 One of Dalton’s comments in this essay neatly identifies the editor’s task: ‘I find the text [of Finnegans Wake] less than perfect and I have determined to carry out a textual critique, to result commonly in emendation. This task entails systematic analyses of all known and discoverable extant material, upwards of 20,000 pages, of which the majority is atrociously difficult even to decipher, but it is a task which can and will be accomplished in time. I think it is a task eminently worthy of all the erudition and passion which can be brought to it, for the understanding of this endlessly fascinating book depends upon it.’
1 Other scholars that have made invaluable contributions to our understanding of the corruption in the 1939 edition include Fred H. Higginson in his ‘Notes on the Text of Finnegans Wake’ (JEGP 55: 451-6, 1956), Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Making of a Chapter (University of Minnesota Press, 1960), and ‘The Text of Finnegans Wake’ (New Light on Joyce from the Dublin Symposium, ed. Fritz Senn, Indiana University Press, 1972); Clive Hart in ‘Notes on the Text of Finnegans Wake’ (JEGP 59: 229-39,1960), and ‘The Hound and the Type-bed: further notes on the text of Finnegans Wake’ (A Wake Newslitter III: 77-84,1966); Walton Litz in The Art of James Joyce, (O.U.P, 1961); David Hayman in A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (University of Texas Press, 1963); and, more recently, Erik Bindervoet and Robbert-Jan Henkes in the annotations to their translation of Finnegans Wake into Dutch (or should we say ‘brockendootsch’) published in Amsterdam in 2002 by Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep.
