by James Joyce
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.
HANS WALTER GABLER
Appendix 2: ‘Begin Again … Stop!’
If a work has no beginning, middle and end, how can it have an introduction? Leaving this as a conundrum to be taken up later, I turn to the father figure of textuists, W.W. Greg, the begetter of so-called copytext editing – the most influential school of Anglo-American textual editing in the twentieth century. In a rare moment of speculation, he set a strange challenge: in ‘Bibliography: An Apologia’, published in The Library,1 he mused that it might be ‘an interesting exercise … to edit a text that had no meaning’, having earlier asserted that ‘the study of textual transmission involves no knowledge of the sense of a document but only of its form; the document may theoretically be devoid of meaning or the critic ignorant of its language’.
What would Greg, who was well versed in the idiosyncrasies of Renaissance scribes and printers, have made of Finnegans Wake? Would he have recognized that its layers of textuality were based on English? What would editing Finnegans Wake have meant, in both theory and practice, to a textuist who is most remembered for having made a distinction between the substantives (the words themselves) and the accidentals (the surface features: spelling, punctuation, capitalization and so on) of a text?2
Until the publication of the present edition,3 all editions of Finnegans Wake reproduced both accidentals and substantives of the 1939 first edition,4 even though the composition process of the Work in Progress stretches over decades and can be accessed not only in serial publication but also in the numerous notebooks, manuscripts, typescripts and proofs that have been subjected to intense critical attention by the Joyce industry. In fact, the existence of this textual cornucopia could be invoked as a reason for not following Greg’s eclectic theory, which was founded on the lack of similar evidence in the textual production of English Renaissance drama.
One might argue that there is too much Joyce to make the most influential editorial procedure of the last century viable for editing his work. Yet even that admission of defeat does not begin to address what Greg meant by the challenge of an ‘unreadable/meaningless/unEnglish/inaccessible’ text. Surely a text to be edited must first be readable?
We can approach this problem through two other texts, the first being Lewis Carroll (specifically ‘Jabberwocky’), although Joyce – perhaps disingenuously – claimed not to have read Carroll.1 Anthony Burgess2 writes that the ‘verbal technique comes straight out of Lewis Carroll … and it is Humpty Dumpty who explains the dream-language’. Jabberwocky’s ‘slithy’ is a portmanteau-word carrying the shards of ‘sly’ and ‘lithe’ and ‘slimy’ and ‘slippery’. While this recognition may provide an entry into the dream language of Finnegans Wake, it is not a guide to editorial principles: ‘slithy’ is not an error or variant for any of these other words any more than, say, Joyce’s coinages ‘scripchewer’ (FW2, 320.08) or ‘pennis in the sluts maschine’ (FW2, 384.37-8) could validly be normalized to ‘scripture’ or ‘pennies in the slot machine’. An editor who subscribed to such a reductive procedure would need to be familiar not only with the extant textual forms but with a residue of morphological, phonological and semantic linguistic analogues, roots and connotations. If anything, such an editor would need to know more about the language and its potential meaning than an editor content to submit to the tyranny of the copytext. Being aware that Joyce’s portmanteaus are related to, even descend from, Lewis Carroll, is a textually useless tool.
This dismissal rests on considering the portmanteau in its singularity, as an isolated verbal play without syntactic context. Context is all in ‘Jabberwocky’ and in most of Finnegans Wake, as it has to be in English, a language in which meaning derives from word position more than from inflections. ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe’ ought to make sense as a grammatical construction even though the vocabulary is not part of the English lexicon. The same can be said a fortiori of ‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle & Environs’ (FW2, 3.01-3). Once sentence structure rather than vocabulary is accepted as normative, variant becomes more usable and error acceptable. If the opening and closing of Finnegans Wake read ‘shore of swerve’ or ‘swerve shore of’ instead of ‘swerve of shore’ then the regulatory function of word order could be called on to question the reading.
The second exemplar for the Wake (or at least its method) could be Dr Seuss’s Oh, the Thinks You Can Think.1 The ‘thinks’ are, in Milton’s phrase, ‘things unimagined yet in prose or rime’ and include ‘snuvs and their gloves’ and ‘Schlopp. Schlopp. Beautiful schlopp. Beautiful schlopp with a cherry on top.’ Again, sentence structure can be used as a corrective even though the vocabulary is, at best, incipient and lacks the conflation of Carroll and Joyce. Children love the strange and even disturbing challenge of Seussian vocabulary. This experimentation by Seuss and his child readers is demonstrated at both syntactic and morphological level in Kornei Chukovski’s From Two to Five,2 where some of the linguistic formulations made by children not yet fully constrained by the grammatical or semantic rules of adult language could very well be the products of Dr Seuss or James Joyce,3 especially when Joyce himself co-opts the language of children’s verse as the linguistic base for his puns: ‘This liggy piggy wanted to go to the jampot. And this leggy peggy spelt pea’ (FW2, 385.24-5). Even the neologistic title of the Seuss book is prefigured in a phrase that encapsulates the basic linguistic technique of Finnegans Wake: ‘two thinks at a time’ (FW2, 454.06-7).
Are Seuss and ‘Jabberwocky’ editable? Do they meet Greg’s speculation about a ‘meaningless’ text, and what are the implications for Finnegans Wake? Both ‘Jabberwocky’ and Dr Seuss create their strangeness in language by constructing neologisms, and while an occasional portmanteau word from ‘Jabberwocky’ has made it into the common stock of English (e.g., ‘chortled’ = ‘chuckle’ + ‘snort’, ‘galumphing’ = ‘gallop’ + ‘triumphant’ and �
�burbled’ = ‘bleat’ + ‘murmur’), most of the invented lexicon of ‘Jabberwocky’ is peculiar to that poem. A nonce-word absorbed into common language can be regarded as having acquired a recognized meaning.
None of the neologisms in Dr Seuss have made this transfer into common language and they do not consistently attempt the double- or triple-portmanteau sense of ‘Jabberwocky’, although a coinage like ‘schlopp’ might be regarded as derived from German schlag (= ‘cream’) + ‘slop’. However, the reader should probably regard the unrecognized words as pure nonsense, as glossable but uneditable, especially in the sense of restoring a putative correct reading from which the text version is an error.
My first editorial assignment – a section of John Trevisa’s ‘On the Properties of Things’ – presented similar editorial problems, since Trevisa (1342-1402), a Cornish contemporary of Chaucer, was translating the Latin of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum into Middle English, which lacked the fuller lexicon of the original Latin. Trevisa had to invent possible Middle-English words derived from the Latin, and he is frequently cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as having successfully created neologisms that did make it into the common stock. But his attempts at neologisms were not always taken up, particularly by the scribes charged with copying this new language into general transmission. For example, Trevisa coined the word ‘constrain’ (as a translation of the Latin coartatur) but the scribes did not recognize the word and rendered it as ‘contained’ or ‘conveyed’ or even ‘conceived’. They thus produced a nonsensical text.1 In these cases, an editor might postulate that a lost ‘correct’ neologistic reading from the scribal variant was morphologically acceptable, but did not carry the right meaning of the text.
Can the editorial treatment of ‘Jabberwocky’, Dr Seuss or Trevisa provide any guidance to the neologistic creativity in Finnegans Wake? The text of Finnegans Wake has not generally added to the common language, even though it is usually made up of that stock as portmanteau words. The occasional transfers are mostly conveyed by a deliberate linguistic gesture. The most-cited example of this determined co-option is of quark by Murray Gell-Mann, which is worth quoting in full as it shows how an intelligent reader can both negotiate and make use of Joyce’s text:
In 1963, when I assigned the name ‘quark’ to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been ‘kwork’. Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word ‘quark’ in the phrase ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark’. Since ‘quark’ (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with ‘Mark’, as well as ‘bark’ and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as ‘kwork’. But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the ‘portmanteau words’ in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark’ might be ‘Three quarts for Mister Mark’, in which case the pronunciation ‘kwork’ would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature (1994: 180-1).1
None of this suggests that the text of Finnegans Wake can be edited to produce ‘quart’ rather than ‘quark,’ even if Gell-Mann’s speculation about the calls at the bar is correct. Joyce is closer to Carroll and Seuss in the use of neologisms, and not to Trevisa, whose transmitted text can indeed be edited back to a putative correct form.
The compounding of meaning in Finnegans Wake presents the opposite of Greg’s challenge: there is more rather than less meaning in Joyce’s text, but these neologisms are, like those in Dr Seuss, nonce-words not intended for adoption into the lexicon of English or any other language. Yet they have a special function in Finnegans Wake that is very different from the ‘pure’ nonsense of Dr Seuss. Joyce laid out his plan for this Wake-specific language in a letter to Max Eastman:
In writing of the night, I really could not, I felt I could not, use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages – the conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious. I found that it could not be done with words in their ordinary relations and connections. When morning comes of course everything will be clear again … I’ll give them back their English language. I’m not destroying it for good.2
In the same vein, Joyce told Beckett ‘I have put the language to sleep’, so that, on waking, the language would presumably return to its daytime clarity. The same claim of linguistic specificity could be made of ‘Jabberwocky’, of Thinks You Can Think, and even of Trevisa.
The answer as to whether these works fall within Greg’s formula for the editing of meaningless text is twofold: yes, in our recognizing if something has gone ‘wrong’ with the syntactic or more often the semantic system; but equally clearly no, in that doing so would still require the skeletal outlines of a language-type (if not a specific embodiment of this type) and would thus still require meaning. And it is this assumption that Joyce is determined that we recognize: ‘For if the iridated lingo gasped between kicksheets, however basically English, were to be preached from the homosapuel mouths of wickerchurchwardens and metaphysicians …’ (FW2, 92.29-31). The ‘lingo’ is so ‘basically English’ that even the compound nouns (‘kicksheets’ and ‘wickerchurchwardens’) are no longer semantically extraordinary once the units of the compounds are separable, and even ‘homosapuel’ and ‘iridated’ could arguably be regarded as morphological variants on an underlying correct English usage. In fact, John Bishop claims1 that the very concept of the ‘foreign’ is more limited than we might imagine, with ‘languages like German, French, or Latin, that are historically related to English’ operating under roughly the same principles as the English vocabulary. Bishop prefers the identification of foreign states rather than languages in Finnegans Wake’s use of, for example, Armenian and Swahili in their appropriate narrative contexts.2 And while Armenian and Swahili are clearly linguistically distant from English, they are not meaningless in Greg’s sense.
If we turn to Alice as a gauge of readerly response to apparent meaninglessness, we find at least two voices: the first is ‘ “It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” ’ – an aesthetic judgment apparently independent of meaning. But she then goes on: ‘ “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are!” ’ Edmund Epstein acknowledges3 that, when confronted by the plenitude of Finnegans Wake, he ‘began with a state of complete bewilderment’ from which he has been moving ‘into a condition of partial enlightenment’. And isn’t this precisely what the richness of the language of Finnegans Wake might hope to achieve: to fill the reader with ideas without necessarily making every idea distinct and separable? It’s unclear whether Greg’s speculation would allow for this aesthetic response and semantic abundance without clarity, but Alice’s two critiques seem to give some focus to the editorial challenge of ‘meaninglessness’. A text like ‘Jabberwocky’ or Finnegans Wake may acquire meaning as the veins of its archaeology are uncovered: such partial enlightenment may be the most satisfying way to experience these texts, especially if we accept Bishop’s warning that ‘the only way not to enjoy Finnegans Wake is to expect that one has to plod through it word by word making sense of everything in linear order’.
A traditional scholarly editor (against whom we must assume that Greg was reacting) would probably respond that plodding through a text word by word is exactly what is required of the philological method whose aim is indeed to make sense of everything, even while acknowledging that such an aim may well be beyond any individual competence. As G. Thomas Tanselle has frequently reminded textual critics, full access to meaning in our literary monument
s is usually unattainable: ‘we shall never know with certainty’ what is the ultimate meaning of a text since the ‘written statements’ that comprise the received forms of the text are ‘alien’ and ‘damaged’ … ‘through the intractability of the physical’.1
But what if a text constructs and celebrates its ‘alien’ status as something beyond such traditional philological aims? Insofar as these philological aims are often conceived in terms of the elimination of error, surely Vicki Mahaffey in justified in claiming that ‘intentional error’ is built into the ‘errorland’ (Ireland) of Finnegans Wake, which ‘welcome[s] adulteration, chance, the transmigration of written characters through time’, so that if the main editorial task is indeed to remove error, then ‘if literally carried out in the editing of Joyce [this] would obscure his modus operandi in Ulysses and eliminate Finnegans Wake entirely’.2 Of course, this is a very narrow interpretation of error, linked to Shillingsburg’s acceptance and promotion (1986) of what he calls a ‘feasible grammar’.3 Given the earlier analysis of the formal requirements of a recognizable syntax (or at least potential syntactic relationships based on word position) in both Finnegans Wake and ‘Jabberwocky,’ it is by no means clear that the whole of Finnegans Wake would be eliminated by the sort of error Mahaffey has in mind. Indeed, the fact that Joyce could have issued a list of ‘misprints’ in the 1939 edition should surely be enough to suggest that, even at the morphemic level, errors are recognizable as such.4