You may not yet have heard of the MaMaLuJo Project, but you will soon. It's the brainchild of Dubliner and Joycean scholar Danis Rose, who has spent the best part of 20 years working as a textual scholar on Finnegans Wake. MaMaLuJo is a CD-ROM, which, when complete, will provide the ultimate Finnegans Wake resource. "It's a text," Rose explains, "and at the press of a button you'll be able to go anywhere inside Joycean scholarship - even to photos of where Joyce was staying when he wrote a particular word. "There will be a lexicon dimension and you'll be able to trace any word in the text. We will guide you through Joyce's structuring of the text. We will synopsise the narrative lines at every level and will show how the final sentence was achieved. It will be like having Joyce standing beside you, explaining every sentence in the book. It will allow everyone to share in the creative process - to get inside Joyce's head." In Ireland, Rose is probably best known for his controversial Ulysses - a Readers Edition, which was published in 1997. The book, highly acclaimed by some, heavily criticised by others, remained on the Irish bestseller list for five months. Rose calls it "the maximumly intelligent edition of Ulysses".
His meticulous examination of Joyce's texts has done much to illuminate the writer's work for scholars. To many people, though, Rose remains an enigma. "I'm a well-known recluse," he shrugs. "I don't attend meetings or conferences." Instead, he gardens passionately on three acres in Dublin's Strawberry Beds and works from home in his high-tech library.
Rose's life has been a series of twists and turns and it was a chance meeting that lead him to Joyce. Serendipity? No way, he says. More like Karma. "I'm a great believer that everyone of us has a destiny if only we can identify it." Rose grew up in the comfortable Dublin suburb of Mount Merrion. A high achiever at school, he dropped out of UCD after a very short time. He'd won a scholarship from Oatlands College, Stillorgan, Co Dublin, to study applied maths. He couldn't stand it. When his scholarship money arrived, he took himself into town and booked himself on a plane to Vancouver, Canada. He spent the next year travelling round North America, at a time when the hippie movement was in full swing.
Back in Dublin, he got a job as a student actuary in the Irish Pensions Trust. He lasted three months. "I was adding up figures all day and I couldn't bear it," he recalls. He returned to the US. There, a chance meeting with a professor of Roman Law, Tom Cowan, changed his life. "He was interested in Joyce's use of Roman law in Finnegans Wake. He invited me to stay with him and use his home as a base while I visited the great collection of Joyce's manuscripts in Buffalo, New York." Rose was hooked. By this stage, "I was trying to decode a section of Finnegans Wake using pure logic, but I wasn't getting very far. "I spent three weeks working on Joyce's notebooks. It seemed to me that they were the key to unlocking Finnegans Wake. Later, I came to realise that the notebooks are in fact textual diaries. They're a whole sequence of indexes containing nothing original to Joyce but were collected by him from other sources." Rose returned to Dublin, working in local libraries here on collections similar to those that Joyce had used. "Using the notebooks and combining their evidence and evidence from the composite manuscripts of Finnegans Wake in the British Library, I came to understand that there was a direct relationship between the draft text of Finnegans Wake and the notebooks." Rose was astounded. "It meant that every word of Finnegans Wake was potentially explicable. It is the most contrived and controlled text ever written, despite its reputation of being the exact opposite - a fluid dream, the thoughts of a writer who had gone insane. "To prove it, I edited a sample notebook and was able to trace its contents to the source texts involved."
Because of his system for ordering Joyce's manuscripts, Rose was invited to join a team of top Joycean scholars, including Prof Hans Walter Gabler, who were making a facsimile of all Joyce's manuscripts. Rose worked on Finnegans Wake and ordered 31 of the project's 60 volumes. "I subsequently decided that it would be possible to edit Finnegans Wake to show its development from the ground up, through its 20 stages of rewriting," he recalls. At the same time, Gabler was working on a similar venture with Ulysses and had received a large grant from the German government. Rose was invited to join the project, which was based in the University of Munich. The project culminated in the late 1980s, in what Rose describes as "the ultimate scholarly work on Ulysses". The Ulysses' project completed, Rose returned to Dublin and continued to work on Finnegans Wake, without funding and whenever he could. Nowadays, he works closely with Dr John O'Hanlon, a quantum physicist and computer expert. MaMaLuJo, named for the chroniclers in Finnegans Wake - Mathew, Mark, Luke and John - and largely funded by the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, is, he says, a natural development of his work on Finnegans Wake. Rose plans that the project will be sufficiently developed by 2004 - the year of the centenary of Ulysses - to demonstrate it to the international scholars who will be visiting Dublin at that time.
Already, interest in the project is growing. A group of Chaucerian scholars from Oxford University are due to visit Rose shortly to examine MaMaLuJo. "The MaMaLuJo copyright," he promises, "will be invested in the Irish State and the Irish people. The hypertext will be freely available. We want to share the knowledge and we want people to share it."
