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From Finnegans Wake: A Sentence in Progress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

David Hayman
David Hayman*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas, Austin 12
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Extract

Although it has often been described as a work of destruction, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake was designed to be a triumphant reconstruction. It was in reference to this characteristic of his last book that Joyce is reported to have remarked during a visit to Stonehenge, “I am fourteen years trying to get here.” The task of reproducing with words the aesthetic unity of the past was an arduous one. For seventeen years Joyce, having at his disposal all the means of knowing and all the methods of expressing, labored to resolve the “proteaform” mass of modern learning in a “faustian fustian” of words. Such a process, the mixing and blending, the ordering and composing, the choosing and discarding, was necessarily a lengthy one entailing numberless revisions which bear “hermetic” testimony to the nature of the creative act while recording the artistic mind in a state of flux. It is self-evident that Joyce's manuscripts for Finnegans Wake are of immense importance to the scholar and that the French critic Louis Gillet, intimate though he was with Joyce's creative process, expressed a very limited view when he stated: “On ne comprendra vraiment la pensée de Joyce que le jour où nous l'aurons dans son premier état, avant toutes les retouches dont il l'a compliquée ... .” As material for the study of Joyce's intentions, as a “key” to the Wake, the primitive (first-draft) manuscripts to which Gillet refers are of surprisingly little value; for they generally expose little more than the armature of the work, the fundamental action which the reader might otherwise discern for himself after a brief syntactical search. On the other hand, as an aid to exegesis, the complete manuscripts are invaluable. They provide a basis for study of Joyce's method, his progressive elaboration upon a theme. They furnish material for a close examination of the mental process behind this style and of the organization which enabled Joyce to control the chaos from which he drew his inspiration. To this end, I believe a word-byword study which questions each aspect of a single sentence in progress would be of greater value than a more generalized discussion of a longer passage. If feasible, a series of such exegetic analyses might aid in more thoroughly illuminating the total stylistic of the book.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 136 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

1 Statement by Mrs. Kathleen Griffin on the BBC Third Program, Pt. ii, “The Artist in Maturity,” 17 Feb. 1950.

2 Stèle pour James Joyce (Marseille, 1941), pp. 127–128. A remarkably complete collection of the Finnegans Wake MSS is now in the possession of the British Museum where it was deposited by Miss Harriet Weaver. In the course of this article, these manuscripts, BM Add MSS 47471-89, will be referred to by their catalogue numbers. For a brief account of the nature of the collection see John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, 1882–1941 (New Haven, 1953), pp. 145–148.

3 “I could sit on safe side till the bark of Saint Grouseus for hoopoe's hours, till heoll's hoerrisings, laughing lazy at the sheep's lightning and turn a widamost ear dreamily to the drummling of snipers, hearing the wireless harps of sweet old Aerial and the mails across the nightrives (peepet! peepet!) and whippoor willy in the woody (moor park! moor park!) as peacefed as a philopotamus, and crekking jugs at the grenoulls, leaving tealeaves for the trout and belleeks for the wary till I'd followed through my upfielded neviewscope the rugaby moon cumuliously godrolling himself westasleep amuckst the cloudscrums for to watch how carefully my nocturnal goose-mother would lay her new golden sheegg for me down under in the shy orient” (New York, 1947), p. 449. For the sake of brevity I shall designate sections of Finnegans Wake by means of Roman capitals (Joyce's: I, II, III, IV); chapters falling within sections will be indicated by lower-case letters (Ii, IIii, etc.); page and line numbers will be separated by a diagonal line.

4 In a letter dated 21 May 1926, Joyce tells Miss Harriet Weaver that he finally has the book “fairly well planned out in [his] head.” The final plan was fixed only after the inclusion of Ii in Dec. 1926, more than 3 years after he had begun writing (Add MS. 47489).

5 Ibid., letter to Miss Weaver, 8 Nov. 1926.

6 In Dublin's Joyce (Bloomington, 1956), p. 362, Hugh Kenner convincingly develops Finnegans Wake's liturgical analogies in sequential order. According to his analysis, the 14 stages of the cross are confined to Ch. IIIii. Although Kenner's arguments supporting this last contention sound very convincing, Joyce indicated clearly in his letter of 24 May 1924 (above) that he thought of the Shaun chapters as a solid unit. As it happens, the 2 other analogical levels mentioned by Joyce clearly hold for all 4 chapters. Indeed, the first 2 chapters were composed and, for 3 consecutive drafts, revised as a unit. Furthermore, Kenner's liturgical progression would be somewhat reinforced by the inclusion of IIIi and IIIiv in his calculations. For purposes of this study, therefore, I shall assume that Joyce applied the via crucis to both the chapter and the section simultaneously, making Jaun a priest in the smaller unit and a Christ in the other. In all events, it should be stated that no single level of analogy can provide the “key” to Finnegans Wake, which depends for its meaning on total effects.

7 For further details see my study, Joyce et Mallarmé, ii (Paris, 1956), 80–84.

8 This movement may also be applied to the stages of the Vichian cycle.

9 These too are representative symbols of many of the aspects of Finnegans Wake: the multiplicity of a democratic age which destroys the tendency to exert a unified effort; the nature of broken light which has lost its whiteness, being dispersed by a prism; the disappearing process of the hero, whose virtue lies in his essentially macrocosmic nature.

10 Joyce first conceived this passage in 1924 while revising the 3rd draft of Ch. IIIii. In the course of this early revision he interpolated a multitude of additions, but as this is an attempt to isolate the fundamental elements upon which the paragraph is constructed, most secondary and tertiary revisions are omitted from the citation of what appears to be Joyce's first continuous sentence. Italics and small capitals indicate respectively the 1st- and 2nd-degree additions which I have felt obligated to include.

11 BM Add MS. 47482b, p. 30.

12 Joyce was revising IIIii and IIii practically simultaneously.

13 I have deliberately glossed over the greater part of the implications of this paragraph in an effort to simplify the presentation of the skeletal elements. In like manner I shall generally avoid indulgence in too meticulous a reconstruction of the many phases of Jaun's existence as they are effected by Joyce's retouches. The analogical aspects which will be alluded to throughout the exegesis should suffice to establish the extent to which Joyce integrated his material.

14 Draft 4,1924 (BM Add MS. 47482b, pp. 53b–54).

15 Most of Joyce's changes are of this order. Rather than revise an entire sentence, he customarily used his primary idea as a base upon which to construct a more complex thought-expression unit.

16 In Draft 5, which Joyce completed before Oct. 1924, our sentence remains unchanged.

17 According to his letters Joyce reworked Shaun abc in 1925 and again in 1926 (BM Add MS. 47489).

18 Draft 6 (BM Add MS. 47483, p. 117). This version is only an approximation of the 2nd stage of the sentence's chronological development.

19 Page 430/6, 29, 17–18, 23, 20.

20 Harold Bayley describes the Greek festival of the laurel bearer where the principal actor wears his hair loose under a golden wreath as he leads a band of maidens. The author cites in this connection a Guernsey harvest dance known as “A mon beau Laurier.” “In this ceremony the dancers join hands, whirl round, curtsy, and kiss a central object, in later days either a man or a woman, but, in the opinion of Miss Carey, ‘perhaps originally either a sacred stone or a primeval altar’ ” (Archaic England, London, 1919, p. 541). Much of the data used in this article to explicate Joyce's mythological analogies is to be found in Bayley's 2 books on symbology, The Lost Language of Symbolism and Archaic England. These books contain such a surprising number of clues to the esoteric meanings of this sentence and, in general, to the analogies in Finnegans Wake that I am strongly tempted to place them among Joyce's source books.

21 Bayley, The Lost Language of Symbolism, i (London, 1951; first pub. 1912), 93–94—hereafter referred to as Lost Language. Like Joyce, Bayley equates these with the tale of the goose that laid the golden egg.

22 Draft 6 (BM Add MS. 47483, p. 117).

23 In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce describes Stephen's impressions of a rugby game: “He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fearful of the flashing eyes and muddy boots, bent down to look through the legs. The fellows were struggling and groaning and their legs were rubbing and kicking and stamping” (New York, 1916), p. 4. This same image reappears in Ulysses where a more mature Stephen watches a game from Mr. Deasy's window: “Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life.” Joyce continues with an evocation of the “uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain ...” (New York, 1946), p. 33.

24 ‘A fiend or incubus formerly supposed to oppress people during sleep’ (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary).

25 See Joyce's “perish the Dane.”

26 In another context Bayley mentions the existence of an “Adam's Grave” or “Giant's Grave near Edenhall by Penrith ...” (Archaic England, p. 746). For further information on the derivation of Joyce's Giant see Joseph Prescott, “Concerning the Genesis of Finnegans Wake,” PMLA, lxix (Dec. 1954), 1300–02, and Walton Litz, “The Genesis of Finnegans Wake,” N&Q (Oct. 1953), pp. 445-447.

27 Draft 6 (BM Add MS. 47483, p. 117).

28 See Joyce's application of this theme in Ulysses: “My mother's a jew, my father's a bird” (p. 20).

29 ALP is elsewhere called “Mrs. Moonan” (p. 157/15).

30 A Portrait of the Artist, p. 264.

31 See also William Y. Tindall's article, “James Joyce and the Hermetic Tradition,” JHI, xi (Jan. 1954), 23–39.

32 Max Müller, Egyptian, in The Mythology of all Races, xii (Boston, 1918), 34.

33 In IIiii, which recounts the conquest of the sun, HCE is variously named “ahorace” (p. 325), “horces” (p. 322), “Horuse” (p. 328).

34 On p. 122 we witness the comic battle between God and O'Mara, while on p. 460 “Mrs. A'Mara makes up” with “Mrs. O'Morum.” See also p. 407, “Mara O'Mario.”

35 A positive interpretation of Lucifer's role is also possible. Lucifer is the moral garbage collector who makes Christ's work possible. Bayley explains brother killing as the murder of love by learning. After cataloguing the pairs of opposites he states that “probably Lucifer, the fallen angel was originally the twin brother of his opponent Michael ... subsequently one revolted against the other ...” (Lost Language, ii, 28). In mystic lore, love and learning are the 2 sons of wisdom (see ALP) (ibid., i, 272).

36 See the repeated use of “till” in our sentence.

37 A citation taken from A Portrait of the Artist illustrates the fact that Joyce has woven his own terror into the fabric of this sentence. “I fear many things,” says the demonic Stephen Dedalus, “dogs, horses, firearms, the sea, thunderstorms, machinery, the country roads at night” (p. 287). Earlier, in reference to his aesthetic, Stephen said, “Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause” (p. 239). Seeing himself as the mirror of the human “constants,” the artist has bestowed fresh life upon his youthful theory.

38 Draft 7, clean copy of 1st typescript (BM Add MS. 47483, pp. 144–145).

39 Stuart Gilbert, Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (Paris, 1929), p. 70, sees in “westasleep” a reference to the song “The West's Asleep.”

40 Draft 8 (BM Add MS. 47483, p. 173).

41 Draft 11, April 1928—1st Transition Mag. proof sheets (BM Add MS. 47483, p. 188).

42 Draft 12, 16 May 1928—2nd Transition proof sheets, many changes (BM Add MS. 47483, p. 198). Third-level additions are indicated by boldface.

43 London, 1914–17, xi, 70, n. 2.

44 Lost Language, i, 267. Bayley also states that the“khu or intelligent portion of the Egyptian soul was figured as a crested bird [or Phoenix], perhaps the crested bird known nowadays as a hoopoo or pupu; Khu was the God of Light, and in ordinary use the word khu meant glorious or shining” (ii, p. 117).

45 See Portrait of the Artist, pp. 193, 274, 187, 255, 262, etc.; for Ulysses see Tindall, James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World (New York, 1950), p. 10.

46 We are told that the “signa tau or signature” is the “mark of enlightenment mentioned in Ezekiel as being branded on the foreheads of the elect” (Lost Language, i, 293).

47 Joyce establishes this association in one of his notebooks (Univ. of Buffalo collection of Joyce MSS).

48 “The expression ‘last’ is generally misunderstood in this connection, the truer implication being the end of the last days and the dawn of the new era or beginning” (Lost Language, i, 73).

49 See Jane Harrison, Prolegomena (New York, 1955), pp. 8–9.

50 Traditionally thrown to Hecate “at the meeting of three ways” (ibid., p. 38).

51 See Belleek as a Baalbec or shrine to Baal, the sun (Lost Language, i, 150). The “belleeks,” like the “tea,” have both light and dark significations.

52 Adolph Erdman, La religion des Egyptiens, trans. Henri Wild (Paris, 1937), p. 86.

53 On one level Jaun associates himself with birds. Thus he is the hoopoe; he exchanges nightingale calls with the frogs; he lodges with the “pheasant.” Indeed he is the “phaynix”; “Shoot up on that, bright Bennu bird!” (473/17).

54 Draft 14 (BM Add MS. 47483, p. 217).

55 Jaun is referring to his physical position as the sunset.

56 Added July 1926 (BM Add MS. 47472, p. 15), FW, p. 12/14–15.

57 Two of these drafts are complementary parts of a single revision of the corrected proofs. The 3rd, however, is composed mainly of corrections for a poorly set final Transition proof sheet.

58 Draft 13, 5 June 1928—3rd Transition proof sheets, many revisions (BM Add MS. 47483, pp. 209, 217).

59 Draft 14, 13 June 1928—4th Transition proof sheets, obviously reset, numerous omissions (BM Add MS. 47483, p. 225).

60 Draft 1 (BM Add MS. 47483, p. 83), FW, p. 415.

61 J. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York, 1956), pp. 31–33.

62 Galley proofs for Anna Livia Plurabelle (New York, 1928) (BM Add MS. 47474, p. 259). See FW, p. 197, for a final version.

63 Plutarch's Lives, Modern Lib. ed. (New York), p. 507.

64 The major portion of this was already present in fair copy dated 27 Aug. 1928 (BM Add MS. 47473, p. 231).

65 Cf. J. Campbell and Henry M. Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (New York, 1944).

66 Draft 16, completed 1936 (BM Add MS. 47486a, p. 88)—Transition pages annotated in the margins in ink at different periods, the annotator's handwriting varying from addition to addition.

67 Lost Language, i, 87–88; Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 138–139.

68 Draft 17, Transition pages and typed correction sheets (BM Add MS. 47486b, pp. 325, 391). Joyce, in an effort to make his changes clear to the printers of Finnegans Wake, listed on separate sheets all the revisions included in Draft 16; but a final rereading seems to have lead to further corrections both on the separate sheets and on the Transition page proofs.

69 By adding a reference to Hell to his next draft, Joyce gave weight to this interpretation.

70 BM Add MS. 47487, p. 170b; all but leaves which is to be found in FW, p. 449.

71 Though we may suppose that these clusters are not the only ones devised by Joyce for this pattern, I will content myself with these few tentative observations designed to illustrate the thoroughgoing nature of Joyce's organization, his manner of underlining desired effects. It may be noted in passing that these letter aspects belong to Joyce's later innovations, that they are consistently and deliberately emphasized by the author, that their function is pre-eminently reiterative.

72 Lost Language, i, 329. In applying this word Joyce is juxtaposing 2 fires, that of life and that of death.

73 Joyce has succeeded in making the ritual contemporaneous with the act and both contemporaneous with the reader's perception of them. “Only in its twofold unity of then and now does a myth fulfill its true essence. The cult is its present form, the re-enactment of an archetypal event, situated in the past but in essence eternal” (W. F. Otto, “The Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries” in The Mysteries, New York, 1955, p. 29).

74 Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1945), p. 869.

75 Diaries, 1914–23 (New York, 1949), pp. 40–41.