Joyce StudiesAs well as being an important contribution to James Joyce studies, How Joyce Wrote 'Finnegans Wake' is also, more broadly, an important contribution to genetic textual scholarship, the study of the process of a writer's production.
Genetic studies are not geared, as textual scholarship normally once was, to the production of a definitive text - a concept that is now under heavy suspicion. Instead, geneticists study the writing process for its own sake, in order to see what can be learned about the work's origins and development from the shifts and deviations, the visions and revisions, that occur in the course of the writing. One side-effect of this has been a curious reversal of value: where Joyce himself and his contemporaries believed that the only valuable manuscript was a "fair copy" - a perfectly written, error-free, totally legible document (Joyce wrote out some such manuscripts in his best hand expressly and solely for sale) - now the greatest monetary and other importance is attached to what the Shakespeareans endearingly call "the foul papers", the writer's first and second thoughts, the earlier and more chaotic the better.
Within that context, Finnegans Wakerepresents a unique opportunity - and a challenge. Luca Crispi, one of this volume's editors, states in the very lucid and helpful introduction that "more than 25,000 pages survive of the textual record" of the book. This is an unprecedented amount of material, but of course, its very bulk makes it difficult to negotiate. Not all the textual record consists of versions of the work, in whatever form - there is also a large number of notebooks whose relation to the actual book produced is complex but crucial. Ever since the publication in 1979 of The James Joyce Archive, which made the bulk of these manuscript materials available in reproduction, a great deal of work has gone on to understand, decipher and interpret this material. The only slight drawback to all this activity has been an occasional sense of a disconnect between this work and what students of literature used to call, with such reverence, all those years ago, "the words on the page", between the text itself and its voluminous surrounding circumstances.
THIS MUCH-NEEDED BOOK - admittedly formidable in price but also in achievement - addresses that situation: it codifies, systematises and clarifies the ongoing work-in-progress. It does so by gathering together a group of scholars each of whom focuses on a particular chapter (or, occasionally, a couple of chapters) of the book. The editors admit that this procedure is slightly distorting, since the chapter divisions evolved in the course of the writing and were not preordained: they themselves have a genetic history. But Crispi and Slote quite rightly feel that this disadvantage is more than compensated for by the clarity and focus the method confers. Because the various scholars are committed to staying with, as it were, a particular chapter, tendencies to ramble (not entirely unknown) are discouraged and the analyses remain close to the segment of text involved.
Naturally, this being a collective volume, there are differences of emphasis and of achievement; moreover, some chapters are more responsive to genetic study than others. Part I, Chapter 1, for instance, is comparatively straightforward genetically, whereas Part II, Chapter 2, is a genetic nightmare: all credit to Crispi, who takes on the chapter himself, for disentangling it as far as is possible in the space available. Part II, Chapter 4 is also highly complex genetically, made even more so by the recent National Library Finnegans Wakeacquisition: Jed Deppman's patient deconstruction and reconstruction greatly enrich our understanding.
Pleasingly, there is scope in this work for the odd interpretive crux that is part of the fun of Finnegans Wake: Sam Slote, in his fascinating study of Part II, Chapter 1, speculates at large (with considerable wit) on the word "nunsibellies" (Finnegans Wake, page 233); this is derived from "nun's belly", a Portuguese dessert, (barriga de freira) which, being egg-based, is of a yellowish colour. (It has the same meaning in a letter from Joyce to Italo Svevo of January 5th, 1921 - and if all this sounds more than a little like Flann O'Brien, that may not be an accident.)
Far more important than these matters is the overall enhancement of the understanding of Joyce's procedures that this volume brings us: most striking, I think, is the sense that Finnegans Wake(and indeed, Ulysses) was written in blocks, or units, of text, blocks that were gradually extended with each subsequent redrafting. These blocks or units could be as brief as a paragraph or two to begin with - the very early draft of the third episode of Ulysses acquired by the National Library in 2002 shows this process clearly at work. And within the paragraph, or even sentence, the unit could be much smaller again - this is where notebook studies really come into their own. What happens on the micro level is replicated on the macro, in a process that finally expands to comprehend the whole text. How these blocks relate to each other - how this work is unified - is one of the key questions about this oeuvre, but to enable us to grasp this process in its very becoming, as this book does, is a huge achievement.
IT CAN FAIRLY be stated that approaches to Finnegans Wakeother than the genetic - more traditional lit-crit studies or those involving the newer "isms" - remain entirely possible and valid. But it would need to be a very strong reading indeed that could afford to ignore completely the materials gathered in this volume. To take a topical example, the account of the writing of Finnegans Wakeprovided in Carol Shloss's biography of Lucia Joyce, To Dance in the Wake - a kind of rhapsodic trance with Lucia dancing away in the background - is completely undermined by the evidence of this groundbreaking work. Book of the night or book of the dark it may be, but a more wideawake process of composition it would be hard to imagine.
It is a pleasure to state that both this book's editors are Dublin residents - Crispi works in the National Library and Slote in Trinity College Dublin. Another Dublin (well, Co Wicklow) resident, Roland McHugh, last year published the third, greatly expanded, edition of his essential Annotations to Finnegans Wake, a work first published in 1980, and without which none of these recent advances would have been possible. And the process will continue.
How Joyce Wrote 'Finnegans Wake' will be discussed by the book's editors, the reviewer, and Vincent Deane at the James Joyce Centre, 35 North Great George's Street, Dublin on Monday at 6.30pm. www.jamesjoyce.ie
Terence Killeen is the author of Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to 'Ulysses'. He is an Irish Times journalist
How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter by Chapter Genetic Guide Edited by Luca Crispi and Sam Slote The University of Wisconsin Press, 522pp. €58.85 Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Third Edition) By Roland McHugh The Johns Hopkins University Press, 628pp. €38.35