Penguin Classics the Restored Finnegans Wake

by James Joyce

  As a publisher (and no doubt too with Finnegans Wake in mind), Peter du Sautoy confessed his unease: ‘An author entrusts his text to us, his publishers. We have a duty to preserve it intact as it has been handed to us.’ To which I had the temerity to respond: ‘But in those cases where – as with James Joyce – it is demonstrable and already widely recognized that what was published is in much detail not Joyce’s authentic text, do you not, as Trustee of the Estate, have a duty and responsibility towards Joyce that must override your publisher’s conscientiousness?’ The point was taken, gloriously to the benefit – I believe – of documentary and textual scholarship in Joyce. If anything, the awareness it entailed strengthened the Estate’s continuing support of the James Joyce Archive. From out of it, too, both our Ulysses edition and Danis Rose’s and John O’Hanlon’s editorial work on Finnegans Wake were set on their tracks. The Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses was published in 1984 and celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2009.

  Respective conceptions for a comprehensive compositional and textual analysis of Finnegans Wake, on the one hand, and a genetically oriented edition of Ulysses, on the other hand, began separately. But when Clive Hart, the Joyce world’s unrivalled authority on Finnegans Wake in the 1970s (and, as it happened, soon to join Peter du Sautoy as Trustee of the James Joyce Estate) learnt of the plans for Ulysses, he put Rose and Gabler in touch with one another; for, already relied on for advice on Finnegans Wake, he recognized the similar innovative approaches of both to their respective target works in Joyce’s œuvre.

  Approaches for both enterprises were soon to diverge. The James Joyce Estate encouraged them both, acknowledged the scholarly independence of each, and devised the contractual framework for the scholarly editions eventually to be published. Here, in patient consultation between Peter du Sautoy for Faber & Faber, London, and Marshall Best for Viking, New York – the two original Finnegans Wake publishers – a contractual matrix was worked out, tailored mainly to Finnegans Wake. It was only when the work on Ulysses was nearing completion (while Finnegans Wake still had a long way to go) that the matrix was adapted to the Ulysses edition of 1984. The Finnegans Wake enterprise remained what it had been since the late 1970s: an autonomous project of comprehensive textual research with complex editorial aims, understood to be progressing towards eventual publication with the cognizance and encouragement of the James Joyce Estate, as well as the enthusiastic cooperation of Gavin Borden of Garland Publishing Inc., the publisher of both the James Joyce Archive (1978-1980) and the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses (1984).

  In the present volume we see the first public result of Danis Rose’s and John O’Hanlon’s immersion of some thirty years into the Finnegans Wake universe of documents and texts. It offers a re-established text of the last literary endeavour in Joyce’s writing life, an endeavour first published whole, as one book, in 1939. This circumlocutory description of what we have before us is not a gratuitous one: if Finnegans Wake is in every respect a special case in the world of literary art and writing, it is also so as a book, and as a text in a book.

  For almost the entire final third of his lifetime, Joyce’s creative energies were trained on accomplishing the single work in his œuvre to succeed Ulysses. This new work, which he was so extensively engaged upon, he called ‘Work in Progress’ and he insisted that its several sections, diversely and successively published in literary journals and individually in slim booklets, should be bracketed under that title. Throughout the years of gestation, there appears to have been a master plan – or had one better say a blueprint – to inform and, one suspects, to re-energize the writing in progress. Nonetheless, the several units of ‘Work in Progress’ individually published over the years may legitimately claim their autonomy as texts. Only in retrospect, as it were, do they become ‘pre-publications’ towards Finnegans Wake. Yet this they eventually do by virtue of the major creative effort that went into fusing the work-in-progress into one book. Nobody could more succinctly have indicated the metamorphosis this represented than did James Joyce himself, who would not reveal the title for the work until it had all been brought together in one book: Finnegans Wake.

  Finnegans Wake stands as witness to outstanding creativity, imagination and thought. Today, we may say it is a widely recognized cultural landmark of the twentieth century. Both as a work and as a book – meaning in terms of its materiality, both as an artefact of the printing trade and in respect of the text imprinted in its pages – it is man-made. This is a condition with which in our cultural awareness we must always engage. By way of explication and interpretation, we will wish to reassure ourselves of the significance of the text, and thereby the work, that a book conveys. But to do so, we need to reassure ourselves equally of the book, and to do so first in terms of the book’s materiality as artefact and as text-in-print. For this, our culture has for millennia developed the techniques of textual criticism and editing. Thanks to these, we trust editors to mediate material transmissions in editions, for the edited texts of which, on their own responsibility and the strength of their integrity as scholars, they answer.

  The book Finnegans Wake of 1939 – to be questioned, in principle, as is every book – receives its edited counterpart in the present volume. This is not to say, however, that this volume, as a book, replaces the first edition of 1939 as the cultural landmark it is. Nor does the text it presents invalidate (let alone erase) the text of the first edition. Instead, the text offered in this volume positions itself in dialogue with the text of the first edition. This dialogue, while insistently inscribed throughout into the material realization of the present volume, needs yet to be vitalized through acts of comparative reading. What these will comprehensively confirm is that Finnegans Wake has not become other as a work, or as a reading experience, through the editing. A main quality of conscientious and critically informed editing is to sharpen our perception of the work through adjusting text that has been, on occasion, disturbed and perhaps deteriorated in transmission; clarifying it time and again and thus focusing it; and, frequently, correcting straightforward errors in it. The success of the editorial measures undertaken to accomplish this fresh bid for a reading text for Finnegans Wake should stand the test of the reader’s engaging in the dialogue between the presentation of Finnegans Wake unmediated as in its first-edition public appearance and the work’s text as here editorially mediated.

  Adjustments of the text in print followed immediately upon the publication of the first edition. Acting as corrector was the author himself; and, needless to add, he was thereby the first to acknowledge the man-made nature of both the text and its realization in print as it had gone through his own mind and hands, as well as the hands of his amanuenses and the publisher’s editors and typesetters. Listing blemishes that caught his eye in the reading of the book in print, he (in one sense) extended his attention to the text of Finnegans Wake beyond its moment of publication. In another sense, the corrections he stipulated were probably the least characteristic ever of the labours expended on ‘Work in Progress’ over the years of its evolution towards Finnegans Wake, and thus less than even the tip of the iceberg of that evolution.

  In order consistently to establish an edited text responding to the first-edition text involved for the editors the casting of an immensely wider net than simply registering, and working in, the post-publication corrections stipulated by the author. These corrections had over the years already, though reluctantly, been seen to by the Finnegans Wake publishers, loath as they had otherwise been to reset the text that had been apparently ‘once-and-for-all’ laboriously accomplished typographically in the 1939 first setting. (Every edition over the past seventy years has essentially continued to reproduce that setting.) A universe of materials, one may be tempted to say, has been preserved from the years of conception, composition and revision of the writing and the texts that coalesced in Finnegans Wake. It is these materials – notebooks, drafts, typescripts, proofs; individual (pre-)publications; rev
isions of the typescripts, proofs, and pre-publications; and lastly printers-copy and proofs again for the book – that all needed to be analyzed together to serve as seedbed for establishing this volume’s critically revised text for Finnegans Wake.

  If there can be talk of the tip of an iceberg at all, it is the text of the first edition of 1939. That text should be seen as raised above the subaquacious mass of materials confluent towards Finnegans Wake. What has been raised now is a twin peak over those same masses: in shape, once more, of a text for Finnegans Wake. It results from Rose’s and O’Hanlon’s endeavours of thirty years, in the course of which the entire complex of Finnegans Wake-related materials preserved for posterity among Joyce’s papers has been digitized, scrutinized, analyzed, interlinked and, most importantly, digitally interwoven with the correspondingly digital record of the published text of 1939. The interweaving has sharpened the textual focus throughout. The first-edition text has consequently been found to be in need of modification appreciably beyond James Joyce’s own initial corrections. The text now offered in newly typeset book pages is, as said, an end result of the editors’ engagement with the ‘Work in Progress’ materials. The fruits of their long-sustained and complex text-critical and editorial labour are for the present laid out as a freshly considered reading text alone for Finnegans Wake.

  A puzzling insistence, perhaps. Is ‘a freshly considered reading text’ not always the be-all and end-all of scholarly editing? We must grant, it is true, that editors need to battle with every scrap of preserved evidence for the text, or texts, of a work so as to be in a sufficiently safe position of awareness and knowledge out of which critically to establish the edited text they offer. Yet we do not, as general readers and users of their editions, demand of them to lay open to us every cranny of that material. By traditional understanding, admittedly, their mediating texts through editions puts the onus on editors to provide all necessary information to buttress their edited texts, so as to enable the assessment of the quality of their editorial labour. But by standard conventions, this duty is fulfilled by means of arcane systems of meta-coding and apparatus listing. These are considered largely inessential for the mere reading of the edited text. An independent interest in an edition’s supplementary provision of materials is usually not recognized. That these should have an autonomous standing and quality is commonly neither expected nor granted.

  In exemplary fashion, the case is otherwise with the two works central to Joyce’s œuvre, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Literary criticism today recognizes the dimension of time in the writing process as co-equal in interpretive significance to the integrity the literary text achieves at the moment of its publication as a work of literature. Consequently, literary criticism nowadays reaches out for the material basis from which the dimension of time in writing can be measured and assessed. This basis is given in the documents of conception, composition and revision. Such documents, to be assumed for every work, though irretrievable for many, have been preserved to a breathtaking extent for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. This is not fortuitous. It was James Joyce himself who, with a growing awareness of the autonomy of the processes of writing he was engaged in, saved his manuscripts in increasing numbers. For ‘Work in Progress’, the saving became a systematic habit. Regularly over the years, he mailed to Harriet Shaw Weaver, his benefactress in London, bundles of papers he no longer needed. Even so, situations occurred when, even after many years, the need to inspect these again would arise: Joyce remembered specific documents in Harriet Weaver’s keeping and would ask to have them returned. Harriet Weaver, on her part, towards the end of her life entrusted her Joyce papers to the British Library. This was an important, though not the only, mode by which the materials for ‘Work in Progress’ were preserved for posterity.

  James Joyce himself ensured the rich survival of the materials that went into the writing. This sometimes happened by accident, though also in a sustained manner by design; and always as if by uncanny foresight – as if by foreknowledge of the use to which these would one day be put and the insights that would be gained from them. The material documents constitute the objective correlatives – together of course with the texts he published – of Joyce’s much-cited assertion that he would ensure his survival in memory by keeping the professors busy for hundreds of years.

  Here is yet another field in which the opening sentence of Richard Ellmann’s Joyce biography of fifty years ago stands proven once more: We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries. The significance of his working materials that Joyce intuited is only now becoming seriously recognized, and hence actively explored, in Joyce studies. What is publicly accessible so far is the core of the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses: its left-hand pages with their stratification of the compositional and revisional development of the text from fair copy to first edition. This edition was published in 1984, yet it is only in our present day that what it reveals about Joyce’s writing processes is beginning to be exploited. One reason for this advance is the intense exploratory energy invested over the past decade or so, under precepts of genetic criticism (or critique génétique, in France), in the Finnegans Wake Notebooks. This is currently the prime area of genetic study in Joyce criticism and scholarship. A tremendous leap could be made – in terms of a pre-ordered accessibility to the entire, digitally multiply cross-linked body of ‘Work in Progress’ / Finnegans Wake materials from which the present offer of a fresh reading text is derived – the moment the entire data bank is allowed to go public.

  A subsidiary function of this data bank will be that of explaining and, where need be, of justifying the text proposed in this volume. It is regrettable that an ‘apparatus’ comes neither here, with the reading text, nor separately in electronic form. However, what we are thus saved from (for the time being) is jumping straight to conclusions as to whether the readings we find to differ from those in the first edition are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Simply setting the two texts in dialogue with each other – and, with hope, finding the exercise stimulating – we may naturally surmise that an alteration encountered in this printing is indeed a correction to the 1939 edition. On other occasions we may feel less sure, while curious about where the frequent verbal modifications that we observe might be in the ‘Work in Progress’ materials. In a passage, for example, where the narrative happily gives its audio record of HCE’s stutter (‘Shsh shake, co-comeraid! … I am woowoo willing to take my stand, sir, upon the monument, that sign of our ruru redemption’), we now find HCE overtaken by his speech impediment yet once more: ‘… upon the Open Bible and befu before the Great Taskmaster’s eye (I lift my hat)…’ (page 29 in the present edition, as against page 36 in the rendering of 1939, which reads: ‘… upon the Open Bible and before the Great Taskmaster’s (I lift my hat)…’). Are we to suppose design behind the elided ‘eye’ (with ‘apostrophe-s’ left standing)? Is the omission collateral damage, perhaps, owing to the stutter, that we – securely versed in Milton as we are – easily compensate? Such rationalization is of course possible. Yet it does not disprove the modified text that spells out the intertextual reference.

  While we await information from the data bank on support for the reading offered in this case, we may take it on general trust from the editors that modifications such as this one are not extraneous emendations. Rather, they are amendments to the first-edition text drawn from the array of compositional and revisional documents scrutinized. They represent textual paths not taken into the particular rose garden of the first edition. Yet these untaken paths generally occur at points of less than full authorial command over the course of the pre-publication progress of the text. It follows that the amendments – which are not, to be distinct in terminology, emendations, let alone conjectures – to the text in this edition are essentially restorative. They introduce textual elements where such elements for no definable reason fell by the wayside during the stages of writing, pre-publication transmission and interim publication. Cueing this general assert
ion to our example, what we will appreciate is that the alternatives ‘before the Great Taskmaster’s’ and ‘befu before the Great Taskmaster’s eye’ both have the true Wakean ring. Neither of them can be adjudicated as strictly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The range of usage allowed in the universe of language erected in Finnegans Wake as a whole renders both phrasings possible; and the documents for the book realize them both materially. In their dialogic relationship the alternatives highlight the nature of texts as artefacts in language: man-made as they are in their writing as in their reception and interpretation, texts can always also be otherwise.

  Activating a dialogue between the two reading texts for Finnegans Wake may open up for us a window on the work’s ubiquitous dialogic reflection upon itself. Its echo-chamber reverberations are already familiar from the text as first given to the public. It will become all the more manifest from the wealth of materials testifying to the processes of gestation and writing. The full digital record of these materials we will one day eagerly explore. Finnegans Wake in the multiplicity of its texts and textual states promises to stand out through such exploration as being what we always already have intuited it to be: a radically textual universe, an artefact in language originating in one mind, realized (since materialized) in multiple acts of writing, yet released through these acts of materialization into an autonomy as text beyond ultimate subjection to authority or intention.

  Conventionally invoked by editors and readers alike, authority or intention should be rightly seen for what they are: namely, controlling forces to arrest written and published texts as supposedly stable and definitive. Reaching out to the limits and beyond of literary art in language, Finnegans Wake has the power to question this cultural assumption. The stability of texts is, in truth, ever only momentary. Once their temporal dimension is taken into consideration, inscribed in the processes of their writing and progressive revision, intention can be tied but to fleeting instances of stability, each reflecting an author’s intention valid only at its moment in time. The range of materials preserved for Finnegans Wake manifests and offers for analysis the continuous dialogue enacted between such moments. This renders the notion of a ‘definitive text’ an illusion. Instead, the pervasive dynamics generated from the ‘Work in Progress’ / Finnegans Wake body of materials are indicative of a vitality inherent in a work and its texts, ever re-energized from the life forces of language itself. With the present offering of a reading text alongside the first-edition text of 1939, we gain a second window onto the ceaseless dynamics of Finnegans Wake, ultimate achievement of James Joyce’s art.