by James Joyce
The classification of the documents of transmission into print is determined by two main headings: the spatial division into sections and subsections, and the temporal succession of drafts and revisions. Combining these we can succinctly set out all the information regarding the history of a chapter in coded form in a table or ‘stemma’.
The stemmata provide an overall architectural structure for the hypertext.
Having developed this model of the compositional process, we devised a methodology to facilitate the coherent analysis and recording of all types of textual events revealed in the manuscript record: additions, replacements, transpositions, scribal as opposed to authorial inscription, virtual transformations, and so on. The method is logically and mathematically consistent and allows us to generate the extraction from the isotext of all possible constituent subtexts and/or editorial interventions, including, naturally, the final clear-reading text. A grand synthesis of all the ‘pre-texts’ of Finnegans Wake was thereby created.
With each of the drafts available for inspection and comparison, the hypertext acts as a rich and relevant ‘author’s commentary’ on Joyce’s frequently obscure text. Looking at any part of the book thus analysed backwards or forwards, as it were, we can see it shrink (or expand), occasionally reform, simplify (or complicate) itself, and finally reduce itself to its seminal condition (or crystallize into its final form) in a process that at each step sheds new light on what is going on. What might at first seem an arid classification of manuscripts thus opens up a whole field for future interpretation and exegesis.
Turning now to the notebooks, research over the past thirty years has confirmed the hypothesis first put forward by Danis Rose2 that, for the most part, the Wake text – from the first draft onwards – is a composite of words and phrases: words and phrases that we find inscribed in a completely different arrangement in one or more of the fifty-odd notebooks.1 Analysis of their contents has revealed that they are primarily straightforward (though unacknowledged and usually untitled) lists of words and phrases that Joyce jotted down from whatever book, magazine or newspaper he was reading at the time. When, after diligent searching in libraries,2 we identify the source for any such list (and one notebook can contain dozens of these lists or indexes) we can establish the original meaning and context of the notebook contents where Joyce first encountered them, and can therefore use that original sense in the explication of the word or phrase as it is used in the Wake. This enables us to penetrate the text’s obscurity in thousands of instances.3
The hypertext allows one to link the words in the text directly to their counterparts in the notebooks, to commentaries and glosses, and, where known, to the original sources. In this way it provides a system of annotation of the individual words of Finnegans Wake grounded on manuscript – and therefore historical – evidence. The annotations, coupled with the deconstruction of the sentences into their genetic profiles, assist a reader to resolve much of the ambiguity of the text and to clarify it to a point of illumination not hitherto imagined possible.
The process of composition is not random; it can be demonstrated to be a complex, highly rational series of acts of compilation and agglutination. Although we may at first glance be perplexed at Joyce’s apparent lack of traditional ‘creative’ imagination in composition, stringing a text together in this way from apparently random strands of words, we can only marvel at his unprecedented brilliance in superimposing onto it a complex and coherent narrative. Indeed the very constraints that he imposed upon himself as a writer by working in this way seem to have acted continuously as a necessary spur to his bizarre creativity. In a very real sense, Joyce surveyed and pillaged the library of mankind to make the lesser world inhabited by his own protagonists a microcosm of our own. The scale of this undertaking dwarfs even his ambitions to make Ulysses encyclopaedic.1
Apart from their value in the study of the text of Finnegans Wake in which their component elements are embedded, the notebooks allow us to map out alongside the draft development of the text a chronological sequence of the broad themes with which Joyce was concerned. Thus, some periods show an intense interest in the history of languages, others in hagiography, others in popular ballads, and so on. We can identify in a precise and specific way the classes of information that Joyce gradually introduced into the work in progress. We can see, for example, that he was at one point concerned with Armenian elements and was enriching the text of a particular draft with words in that language. A complete analysis of the notebooks as allied with the drafts allows us to discern what particular words (used to) ‘mean’, while giving us an idea of the concentration of certain themes in Finnegans Wake.
Given the scale and complexity of Finnegans Wake, it is hardly surprising that a gradual accumulation of transmissional error arose through the convolute process of composition. Many of these would have been hard to avoid even under optimal conditions. In fact, the heroic sixteen-year-long process took place in circumstances that not only impeded a smooth error-free transmission of the text but continually threatened to bring down the whole edifice. Most serious were the unpredictability of Joyce’s physical and emotional health and the series of eye operations that periodically brought his work to a halt. Sporadic bouts of ill-health or depression wreaked havoc with the work in progress. For example, one extended passage (the longest chapter, III.3) had to be typed ENTIRELY IN CAPITALS so that Joyce could read it; yet on being subsequently retyped as regular text hundreds of previously present and intended capitals were inadvertently reduced to lower case, and vice versa, with only inadequate and intermittent subsequent re-correction.
Incidental participants in the enterprise included numerous typists Joyce employed and the typesetters for the little magazines wherein early-draft versions of his work appeared. The printed versions (which Joyce tore out of the magazines) were then used as documents of transmission, subjected to revision and dragged inexorably into the compositional record. Few of his collaborators were able to cope competently with Joyce’s manuscripts and each draft stage introduced a new crop of errors. This was made worse by his poor eyesight and also by his reading of proofs not solely to correct errors but, more emphatically, to add another layer of fresh material, leaving typists and printers to set still more handwritten text.
As a result of the author’s working methods and the complexities of the text’s development, an exceptionally high level of demonstrable, unintended variation contaminates the first edition of Finnegans Wake.
In the versions of the Finnegans Wake drafts critically edited for the hypertext, ascertainable textual corruptions are rectified and described. In most cases they are relatively easy to detect: the careful collation of a typescript, say, against the original from which it was typed will readily reveal the most glaring of these, particularly omissions and misplacements of text elements. Where the context remains invariant thereafter, the correction can be safely made.
Through the linking up of the draft reading with the notebook index we have a powerful tool to assist us in determining otherwise elusive errors arising in the transmission. In many cases, even when Joyce aimed at clarity of inscription, ambiguities remain in the unfamiliar, apparently nonsense words. For example, in many documents it is difficult to distinguish between such common letters as ‘u’ and ‘n’.
In a well-known pioneering essay1 on the dilapidated state of the printed text of Finnegans Wake, the late Jack Dalton pointed out the inherent instability of both Ulysses and the Wake.2 He intended to highlight the difficulties faced by commentators and glossators in view of the clearly demonstrable inadequacies of the published text of Finnegans Wake in all its available forms. In one sample section of Book IV, Dalton was able to detail how the accidental eye-skipping of a line of text in its copying from one level to another wrecked the rainbow of carefully constructed patterns that Joyce had painstakingly embedded in the narrative.1
In preparing the present clear-reading text – in which the dynamics of its shaping an
d reshaping is of course invisible – the editors, vigilant of this dynamism, have naturally concerned themselves with correcting the many manifest errors that occurred as the text was repeatedly copied. This was nonetheless the less important of the editorial tasks in seeking to arrive at a stable, relatively error-free version.
The greater task lay in the restoration through emendation of the syntactical coherence of individual sentences as they underwent periodic amplification under the writer’s revising hand. What is important is that the root sentence, considered as a logical linguistic structure expressed through syntax, retains its essential structure irrespective of its often complex expansion. In practice, yet not invariably, damage to this coherence was corrected by Joyce or one of his helpers. Otherwise it is visible in collation as a simple error. In other instances the loss or part-absence of the syntactical structure was not noticed and, as the sentence was further amplified, the damage intensified, often to the extent that its original and essential coherence is irrecoverable short of a full genetic analysis.
The ultimate function of a book, however, is to be read, not to be looked or picked at. As this pervasive form of corruption is repaired, the text of Finnegans Wake is greatly clarified and can thus be read with substantially greater ease.
James Joyce declared that he wanted his books to be pored over by scholars for a hundred years. Soon, he will have had that wish fulfilled. But he also wanted something more – much more – namely, that his books should be read by ordinary people for pleasure.
Textual criticism is the area of scholarship that has kept, at least for most of its existence, both these ends simultaneously in view. The hypertext model of Finnegans Wake may seem on its own sufficient to control the potentialities of an intrinsically unstable text within a spectrum and superposition of valid texts. This, however, is not the case. The hypertext was created for a dual purpose. First, for the furtherance of scholarship; second, to facilitate the production of the most authoritative clear-reading text that can be achieved using rational principles of editorial judgment: a text faithful to the art of its author in a material form designed for lovers of literature.
DANIS ROSE and JOHN O’HANLON
Acknowledgments
The editors wish to thank all those kind people – too numerous to specify in full – who have aided and abetted us in one way or another over the years in the realization of this edition. These include, in particular: Peter Alexander, Robert Anthoine, Marshall Best, Gavin Borden, Christine Clear, Tom Cowan, Seamus Deane, Peter du Sautoy, Grace Eckley, Antony Farrell, Chuck Feeney, Michael Forde, Hans Walter Gabler, Karl Gay, David Greetham, Michael Groden, Liam Hackett, Clive Hart, David Hayman, John Healy, Robbert-Jan Henkes, Bob Joyce, Paul Keegan, Hugh Kennedy, Celestine and Kenneth Killian, Alexis Kirschbaum, Alexis and Anna Maria Léon, John F. McCarthy III, Ed Maggs, Martino Mardersteig, Ken Monaghan, Lionel Munro, Maureen O’Hanlon, Terence and Hilary O’Hanlon, Conor O’Malley, Haven O’More, Jonathan Riley, Catherine Rooney, Fritz Senn, Wolfhard Steppe and Djinn von Noorden. To all of these, named and unnamed, on earth or in heaven, we say: thank you again.
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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Finnegans Wake first published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber 1939
This critically emended edition first published by Houyhnhnm Press Limited 2010
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2012
This edition copyright © Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, 2010
Note copyright © Seamus Deane, 2010
Appendix 1 copyright © Hans Walter Gabler, 2010
Appendix 2 copyright © David Greetham, 2010
All rights reserved
Designed by Martino Mardersteig
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-14-196045-6
1. Rawmeash, quoshe with her girlic teangue If old Herod with the Cormwell’s eczema was to go for me like he does Snuffler whatever about his blue canaries I’d do nine months for his beaver beard.
2. Mater Mary Mercerycordial of the Dripping Nipples, milk’s a queer arrangement.
3. Real life behind the floodlights as shown by the best exponents of a royal divorce.
4. When we play dress grownup at alla ludo poker you’ll be happnessised to feel how fetching I can look in clingarounds.
5. Kellywick, Longfellow’s Lodgings, House of Comments, 111 Cake Walk, Amusing Avenue, Salt Hill, Co. Mahogany, Izalond, Terra Firma.
1. Groupname for grapejuice.
2. Bhing, said her burglar’s head, soto poce.
3. Jussive smirte and ye mermon answerth from his bellyingplace below the tightmark, Gotahelv!
4. O Evol, kool in the salg and ees how Dozi pits what a drows er.
5. A goodrid croven in a tynwalled tub.
6. Apis amat aram. Luna legit librum. Pulla petit pascua.
7. And after dinn to shoot the shades.
> 8. Says blistered Mary Achinhead to beautifed Tummy Tullbutt.
9. Begge. To go to Begge. To go to Begge and to be sure to reminder Begge. Goodbeg, buggey Begge!
1. Huntler and Pumar’s animal alphabites, the first in the world from aab to zoo.
2. We dont hear the booming cursowarries, we wont fear the fletches of fightning, we float beyond the meditarenias and we come bask to the isle we love in spice. Punt.
3. And this once golden bee a cimadoro.
4. And he was a gay Lutharius anyway, that Sinobiled. You can tell by their extraordinary clothes.
5. Startnaked and bonedstiff. We vivvy soddy. All be dood.
1. When you dreamt that you’d wealth in marble arch do you ever think of pool beg slowe?
2. Porphyrious Olbion, redcoatliar, we were always wholly rose marines on our side every time.
3. Now a muss wash the little face.
4. A viking vernacular expression still used in the Summerhill district for a jerryhatted man of over forty who puts two fingers into his boiling soup-plate and licks them in turn to find out if there is enough mushroom catsup in the mutton broth.
5. Googlaa pluplu.
6. H’dk’fs h’fp’y.
7. Tomley. The grown man. A butcher szewched him the bloughs and braches, I’m chory to see, P. Shuter.
8. I believe in Dublin and the Sultan of Turkey.
9. I have heard this word used by Martin Halpin, an old gardener from the Glens of Antrim who used to do odd jobs for my godfather, the Rev. B. B. Brophy of Swords.
1. Ravens may rive so can dove deelish.
2. A question of pull.
