by James Joyce
A few years ago Finnegans Wake was an inevitable exhibit in a exploration of ‘late style’ that my musicologist colleague Richard Kramer and I mounted – using Edward Said’s unfinished book on Late Style as our template – in an interdisciplinary doctoral seminar in which Professor Epstein was our guest expert on late Joyce. This exploration of Shakespeare’s Tempest, Britten’s Death in Venice, the Mozart/Da Ponte Così fan tutte, Wagner’s Parsifal, and so on, gave us the opportunity to place the Wake among a group of works that might have something in common in view of their ‘lateness’.1 In some cases, this contemporary befuddlement at new and strange style became a recognizable cultural response, especially in confronting the work of a formerly revered master of the craft. It is well known that even among Joyce’s earlier supporters and fellow modernists (Pound, Nabokov, Lawrence, Wells) there was a suspicion that Joyce had taken an improper step in composing in the dense, conflated language of ‘Work in Progress’ or Finnegans Wake.2 How, then, did those who had similarly respected, say, Beethoven, as a master of his craft respond to the late quartets? And might these responses be instructive in evaluating the status of late Joyce?
A contemporary critic of the Beethoven Quartet in E flat, Op. 127 (first performed on 6 March 1825) was unable to come to a position on the work, claiming that ‘one would have to hear it several times’. When confronted by the ‘monster’ of quartets (Quartet in B flat, Op. 130), the audience was bewildered by the ‘welter of discords’ and ‘the confusion of Babel’, especially in the long final movement, the Grosse Fuge (which Beethoven had to withdraw and for which he substituted a more conventional movement). But the words of the music critic for the Leipzig Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (10 May 1826) are perhaps most pertinent to Joyce: ‘However, we do not want to judge too hastily: perhaps the time will come when what appeared to us at first to be obscure and confused will be recognized as being clear and well constructed.’3 In other words, the musical ‘language’ of the Op. 130 could not be seen as falling within Beethoven’s familiar expressive or communicative norms.
In the context of such a reaction to an acknowledged master in another field, the range of contemporary responses to Finnegans Wake does not appear unusual. Against the rejection by Pound and Lawrence we must set not only the enthusiasm of Eliot and the collective support of Beckett, William Carlos Williams et al in Our Exagmination (1929),1 but the more measured account by B. Ifor Evans, writing in the Manchester Guardian (12 May 1939), that, due to its difficulties, the book ‘does not admit of review’ and claiming that perhaps ‘in twenty years’ time, with sufficient study and with the aid of the commentary that will doubtless arise, one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it’. This is precisely the position taken by the Leipzig Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung with regard to the Beethoven Op. 130. The similarity becomes even more striking when Evans goes on: ‘The easiest way to deal with the book would be […] to write off Mr Joyce’s latest volume as the work of a charlatan. But the author of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses is not a charlatan, but an artist of very considerable proportions. I prefer to suspend judgment.’
Another way of measuring cultural acceptance is the degree to which a work is adopted as a text in other media: literature in, for example, musical settings – an appropriate test given the musicality of Joyce’s language.2 And while there have been several settings of Joyce’s earlier work, particularly the poetry (with Joyce happy to promote such settings), the most widely known settings of passages from Finnegans Wake are by those composers with a reputation for the same sort of rejection of traditional expressive modes as found in the Wake itself. For example, John Cage’s Roaratorio: an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake combines a ‘collage of sounds’, with Cage reading his Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake, itself one of a series of five writings based on the Wake. Cage also set two passages from Finnegans Wake as songs, ‘The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs’ (1942) and ‘Nowth upon Nacht’ (1984). In both of these songs, Cage refuses any concession to expected or accepted performance norms, by, for example, restricting the soprano vocal line to three pitches and instructing the pianist not to touch or even open the keyboard but to rap, tap and bang on the cover.
A more overt link between literary and musical sensibilities occurs in Tod Machover’s Soft Morning City, where the composer clearly regards the music as a parallel expression of Anna Livia Plurabelle’s final monologue in the Wake:
Joyce achieves the closest thing to the temporal parallelism of music by snipping each layer of narrative into short, constantly varying and overlapping phrases. The great beauty is that Joyce creates not the eclectic choppiness that such a procedure might suggest, but a majestic form of tremendous power and sweep. It seems to me that Joyce achieves this through an organization of the over-all sound of the passage in an unprecedented way. Listening to a reading-aloud of the text, one is carried by its cadences, tidal flows, crescendos and dying-aways, even while being sometimes only half-sure of the meaning of certain words. It is the rare combination of polyphonic verbal richness with inherent sonic structure that makes it ideal for a musical setting.1
Music is of course a linear art, the melody balanced by the simultaneity of the harmony. But a second sort of linearity – a recursive, circular mode – has also always been vital to a reader’s understanding of Joyce’s method in Finnegans Wake. In an interview with Adolph Hoffmeister,2 Joyce made it clear that ‘[the action of the Wake] is a simultaneous action, represented by the novel’s circular construction. Wherever the book begins it also ends.’ This insistence is reinforced by Joyce in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver of 8 November 1926: ‘The book really has no beginning or end … It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence.’ The latter quotation just means that ‘A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the’ at the apparent end of the text links directly with ‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s’ at the beginning, a recursive continuation of the second part of the same sentence.3 Whether or not Joyce was playing on the religious inference of alpha and omega and ‘in my end is my beginning’, a sort of ‘eternal golden braid’, the circularity is obvious as long as we recognize that it is still linear; that is, one must read through to omega before proceeding on to alpha. But the first quotation is more significant: it is not just that the end is the beginning but that there is no beginning and end, unlike the clear chronological structure of Ulysses. The important word in the first quotation is ‘wherever’: at any point in the book there is a beginning and an ending. The snake swallows its tail.
There is an external structure to the Wake as a ‘night’ narrative, with the Liffey’s tidal turns determining where we are, so that the ‘turn’ of ‘loved a long the’ is not completely arbitrary. It comes at that moment on the cusp of night and day, just as the more overtly structured external reference of Ulysses takes us from morning, through the events of a day, and back to the beginning of another day. So while the text of Finnegans Wake might, by Joyce’s prescription, begin and end anywhere, the correlation with a putative nocturnal pattern – what we could call ‘external fact’, a matter of great concern to textuists1 – would be compromised by a decision to start at, say, ‘there and then, on a lovely morning’ and to end at ‘after that, not forgetting, there was the Flemish armada, all scattered, and all officially drowned’ (FW2, 301.10-11). Some critics have declared that chronology is not uniformly used throughout Finnegans Wake. Epstein, for example, following Rose, declares that Book I ‘shows very little narrative flow. It is only at the end of I, viii that Time truly “begins” ’ and then cites2 Geert Lernout’s claim that ‘the Wake may well be one of the first books to lack an overall temporal framework’. But while Finnegans Wake does not have Ulysses’ rigorous relationship of external reality to fictive representation, the progress of the night is a continuous presence in the organization of Finnegans Wake, especially in Books II (nightfall) and III (the ‘watches of the night’). Without the con
stant corrective of external fact, the lack of another level of meaning takes the Wake closer to Greg’s formulation that any of Joyce’s preceding works.
Given this non-linear negotiation of the text of Finnegans Wake, it would be easy to argue that no fixed-print edition of the novel is a proper representation of its formal properties – it might be possible to incorporate an endless loop into a digital edition, but even electronic text tends to use pages as if they were meaningful units. And while it is tempting to take Joyce at his word and to start and end Finnegans Wake at a different moment from the familiar ‘riverrun’, the problem is that this so-called opening phrase has become so culturally familiar that an edition with another beginning would be regarded as inauthentic – an error at the macro level of structure.
We are back to Greg’s challenge on the text without meaning, and because the beginning and the end of the text are constantly shifting, these have multiple and even infinite meanings. ‘Meaning’ now involves largescale form as well as linguistic expression. Even Greg could be nervous about abandoning form: despite his previously cited rejection of linguistic meaning he still held on to form, though this can be interpreted at the level of specific local signs in a text and not its shape as a whole.3
Lurking behind the Finnegans Wake conundrum there is another Finnegan, as in the children’s ditty:
There was an old man named Michael Finnegan,
He grew whiskers on his chin-again,
They grew out and then grew in again
Poor old Michael Finnegan, begin again…
Joyce was clearly aware of Michael as well as Tim, as shown in the passage ‘a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell’s well; such is manowife’s lot of lose and win again, like he’s gruen quhiskers on who’s chin again, she plucketed them out but they grown in again. So what are you going to do about it? O dear!’ (FW2, 93.03ff).
The significance of ‘Michael Finnegan’ to the structure of Finnegans Wake goes beyond the good-natured jollity of Tim Finnegan’s whiskey-soaked funerary celebrations that are the source of much of the comic element in the Wake. In the eternally recursive loss and re-growth of Michael Finnegan’s whiskers, it is the unavoidable ‘begin again’ at every verse of the rhyme that best captures the alpha and omega of the form of the Wake. The song is so open-ended that it is continually in danger of careering out of control, with ‘begin again’ being shouted by the children, unwilling to let the song come to a close.1 It is only in the concessive ‘stop’ thrown in quite arbitrarily at any point that we can escape out of ‘Poor old Michael Finnegan’. Joyce’s use of both Finnegans – Michael and Tim – gives the novel in one case its form, and in the other its tone. … Stop!
DAVID GREETHAM
Afterword
The electronic hypertext edition of Finnegans Wake, out of which the new reading text was generated, is, to put it succinctly, a model – an attempted re-creation – of the entire sixteen-year-long history of the composition of the novel. As such, it is a natural extension of the procedures that led to the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses published in 1984. If a modern website developer were to look at the system of paired diacritics dotting the left-hand pages of that edition, he or she would surely exclaim: why, these are hypertext mark-up tags – the stuff you’d see if you clicked on a source file on the World Wide Web. In the mid-1970s, however, when the diacritics were devised (at first independently, then jointly, by the present editors and Hans Walter Gabler), the Web was still a long way in the future. The diacritic display was originally intended to permit a reader to visually deconstruct a ‘synoptic’ text into the sequence of drafts that led to the final reading text.
Those 1984 Ulysses pages probably approach the manageable limit of a visual presentation. Logic is logic, nonetheless. What a scholar can do by following a rule, a computer can do a lot faster: it can go through all the motions and it can generate the results (the earlier drafts) in a matter of seconds. Nor will it balk at any level of increase in the number and complexity of the interlocking diacritics (the tags). It will also allow any number of linkages and inter-linkages between any other number of other tags in other documents.
Such is the logical prehistory of the hypertext of Finnegans Wake. Having begun life as a parallel project to the Ulysses edition, it soon became clear, however, that our isotext1 might exceed the limit of reasonable readerly ease of comprehension – a consequence of the relatively greater number of draft stages in Finnegans Wake and the even greater number of both inter- and intra-documentary revisions we needed to code. Matters became yet more complex when we came to incorporate the notebook information into the system.
The manuscripts of Finnegans Wake are grouped into two major classes: the manuscripts proper, the drafts, which comprise handwritten drafts, typescripts, proofs and marked-up copies of the interim publication of sections of the book in transition magazine and elsewhere; and the notebooks, a sequence of ‘textual diaries’ in which, in the form of long lists of words and phrases, we find the accumulated gatherings of Joyce’s reading over the entire period of the writing of his book. The notebooks, it turns out, provided the raw materials out of which the early drafts were crafted and by means of which these drafts were subsequently repeatedly revised and expanded.
Once Joyce had re-copied a manuscript of composition (a draft), or when it had been typed or printed (with revisions incorporated), he sent it to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver. She in turn bequeathed these to the British Library.1 A smaller number of pertinent drafts went astray and never reached Miss Weaver. Of these, many have re-surfaced and are now part of the holdings of the National Library of Ireland, the University of Texas at Austin, the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, Yale University and the University of Buffalo. A very few are in private hands.
Joyce retained the notebooks, keeping them by him in case he needed (which he usually did) further words and phrases to stitch into his work in progress. After his death, the set of Joyce’s notebooks was sold en bloc to the University of Buffalo.2
The manuscript of the novel is spread out over several hundred separate documents comprising some 20,000 pages. No single document contains the full text of any of the chapters or other significant sections of the book in Joyce’s hand. At the same time, no document is identical with any other. Our first task, prior to editing the text, was to identify, order and date all the documents involved: that is, to establish the correct interrelationships of all extant and inferred non-extant manuscripts and to ascribe to each a stable code reference. These references provide the basis for the system of diacritics (or tags). They also provided the basis for a page-by-page rearrangement of the facsimiles from their arrangement in the British Library and elsewhere as presented in volumes 44-63 of The James Joyce Archive, a monumental facsimile edition of all the then-known and available manuscripts relating to the works of James Joyce.1 In this way, the draft coding underpinning the Finnegans Wake hypertext matches point for point the arrangement of the facsimiles in the Archive.2
In putting these pages into a coherent order for the Archive, we divided them into seventeen groups of papers, each relating to one of the Wake’s seventeen chapters. If one examines the genesis of the book, it soon becomes clear that Joyce did not compose the individual chapters at one time as a single extended narrative unit,3 as was the case with the episodes of Ulysses; rather, he created each chapter by combining individually pre-developed subunits, or narrative blocks. These sub-units are termed sections. This division of the chapters into sections is not apparent from the printed text, but only from the evidence of the manuscripts. Sometimes, sections themselves are comprised of even smaller narrative modules, or subsections, which form the smallest structural units.
Working from a scheme (or skeletal plan) of the narrative events planned for inclusion, Joyce invariably began by drafting the text of a single (sub)section developing one of these events. This he then revised, copied at least once and laid aside before he moved on to the drafting/re
vising of another (sub)section developing another narrative event, and so on, with the number of (sub)sections and acts of revision/transcription varying according to chapter.
At some point, in making a fresh copy of some part of the work in progress he joined together the text of two or more previously drafted (sub)sections to form a larger unit, a copy of which he then revised as a newly formed textual continuum. Finally, joining all these components together, he formed a new stretch of text – that of the chapter – which, from then on, he revised as an unbroken unit. When one chapter had been completed to a sufficient degree, he laid it aside and went on to the next, beginning once again with the drafting of a section or subsection and repeating the process.4
Eventually, the different chapters, when developed, were juxtaposed to form larger units, the four Books (or ‘Parts’) into which the text is structurally divided. These larger units were then subjected to further levels of revision. Finally, in the summer of 1940,1 a year after the book had been published, he read through the first-edition text one last time with the help of his friend Paul Léon, concerning himself mainly with the correction of minor typographical errors. He was not allowed to alter the typesetting.
