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Abstract: In his enigmatic last work, Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce was in all probability compiling a detailed scientific inventory of human psychology based on literary and historical prototypes. Decoding this will require a close study of his surviving notebooks and drafts, but a considerable selection of these are now available on the Net.
Joyce invented a new language of puns for Finnegans Wake, that's so brainy it's still only partly understood. But a few points are generally agreed on: it's certain that the book is written so the last sentence rejoins the first ("A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun..."). It tells the story of an archetypal family, whose sons are always at war (with each other and with their father) and whose daughter competes with the mother for the father's love. The father suffers a public disgrace, the son and mother write a letter that accuses or exonerates him, the children play a game and do their homework, the father closes his pub after an evening of gossip and debate... etc. Various literary and historical prototypes can be glimpsed at every point.
Since 1950, half a million words of James Joyce's most intimate thinking about FW-- the fifty notebooks he kept during its composition-- have been available to scholars at the Lockwood Library of the University of Buffalo... but after some fifty years, they remain almost entirely unedited, untranscribed, and published only in expensive facsimile! And the leading Joycean journal, the James Joyce Quarterly, has barely acknowledged their existence. (In the last 1700 pages of JJQ, for example, there have been some four brief mentions.)Virtually all the scholars who have studied these notebooks (in particular, Danis Rose and David Hayman) have agreed on one main thing-- that twelve months after he'd completed the most disciplined masterpiece of 20th century literature, Ulysses, this same James Joyce set about his new work (FW, begun October 1922) with no definite plan, and scant inspiration...
So is this credible? Are the earliest notebooks nothing but random jottings?
Not only do we have nearly all the FW notebooks, but we have almost all the levels of drafts available in the British Museum Library in London as well. (Hayman edited a selection of these in 1963, and Rose now claims to have finished that task.) We know perfectly well what pieces were written first... but these have received even less critical attention than the notebooks. So is it even remotely plausible that they conceal no hidden structures?
What are we to make of Joyce's (universally dismissed) comment in August 1922, that his next work would be "a history of the world"? What sort of world-history could he have been building, from the startingpoints we find in those first records?
The first sketch paints a comic portrait of the last fallen king of Ireland, destitute and drunk. The second shows a puritanical saint, pursuing enlightenment in his maximally-isolated bathtub. The third summarizes an ancient druid's religion-lecture to saint Patrick-- 'enlightenment means seeing the rainbow as seven shades of green'. The fourth lampoons the love scene of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. The fifth offers a threefold portrait of a tollkeeper being dubbed 'Earwicker' by his king, then enjoying great wealth, and finally becoming the target of scandalous gossip. ('Earwicker' is the archetypal family's primary name, so this vignette is widely taken to be the 'start' of Joyce's thinking about FW.) A sixth, longer piece presents the nostalgic rambling of four senile historians about a great man's disgrace, or their own when younger. And a seventh, much longer still, follows the chaotic curve of Earwicker's decline, as he publicly betrays his guilty conscience, and suffers in consequence relentless persecution...
This FAQ is an invitation to Joycean newcomers to get in on the ground floor of the study of this material. I have made available some 2.5 megabytes of transcriptions of Joyce's work on FW during 1922-23, plus a portion of Ulysses from 1920, using a new literary discipline I call "genetic close-reading". This involves collating all relevant notes and drafts, tracing the evolution of motifs, and speculating on the author's meanings. The following files are now offered:
[If these versions are unavailable, earlier drafts of most of them can be easily retrieved from the fwake-l archives: instructions]
These files attempt to scour, as thoroughly as possible, all the materials for 1922-23, looking for the hidden patterns that may bring Joyce's intent into focus. The general hypothesis is this:Various branches of scholarship have been searching for centuries for a universal categorization of human experience-- Aristotle, Spinoza, Vico, Roget, Dewey (and his Decimals), Polti (and his 36 Dramatic Situations), and the Yahoo Web index ...and now especially the AI (artificial intelligence) community desperately need a concise inventory of psychological themes:
Joyce to Georges Borach, 1917: "There are indeed hardly more than a dozen original themes in world literature. Then there is an enormous number of combinations of these themes. Tristan und Isolde is an example of an original theme."So we may hope that the early FW vignettes show Joyce spelling out his theories on this topic, based on the meticulous researches he did as he composed Ulysses (itself an inventory, sorted into eighteen chapters).
But he seems to have taken it a step further by combining these vignettes into a continuous family-lifecycle, with names and identities liable to change on every page:
1929: Vanity Fair asks: Are the sketches in [FW] to be consecutive and interrelated? Joyce answers:
"It is all consecutive and interrelated."A handful of early notes seem to trace the evolution of this drama of generations, focused on the kernel-image of a father meeting his own shadow-twin, in the person of his son:
Oct 10.01 "Polyphemous is Ul's shadow" Ulysses vs the Cyclops Oct 10.02 "son turned out badly" Dec A-Circe 44 "afraid you may kill your father" Oedipus, surely Dec 10.40 "Cycles of hist. W. Tone Childers" Wolfe Tone, Erskine Childers Dec 10.44 "Sororicide, matricide, fratricide, no word for figlicide" Jan 10.92 "kick his reflection (soul) [kick his] shadow [kick his] form (bed) : LB meets self" Leopold Bloom, of Ulysses Feb A-Eolus 51 "said to his father (only lector knows 'tis his father)" Apr 3.13 "the son's life repeats the father's. He does not see it. Make the reader see it" May 3.94 "a phrase spoken 1500 AC repeated 1923 AD" May 3.94-95 "annalists repeat themselves" the four old historians May 3.108-109 "3 generations to make a gentleman (Guido Cavalcanti)" Jun 3.129 "2 Tristans (Doppel ganger)" Jul A-Exiles2 46 "Trist. meets self" Jul A-Exiles2 91 "Tantris is shadow of Tristan (EP)" Ezra Pound! Jul A-Exiles2 107 "T steps aside + has a look at himself" Jul A-Circe 262 "unknown beggar comes to bigtimer in day of triumph to tell of a past betise"
[Key: "10.01" is page one of notebook VI.B.10, filled between October 1922 and January 1923. VI.B.3 was filled between April and June. These were pocket stenopads of 100-200 pages (see the more-complete chronology below).]
["A-Circe 44" means the 44th note on the 'Circe' pages of a much larger, 1000-page notebook (VI.A or 'Scribbledehobble'). Late in 1922, Joyce sectioned it into fifty uneven divisions, headed with the names of his various works-- all the stories of Dubliners, all the chapters of Ulysses, the three acts of Exiles, etc. He gradually sorted 3500 notes into these categories between October and the following August.]
Though a familiarity with Joyce's life and his works is very useful, I've tried to fill in a lot of this in my postings, so a broad appreciation of literature's classic themes ought to be enough. The texts I rely on most heavily are:
Herring "Joyce's Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum" 1972
Gifford and Seidman "Ulysses Annotated"
McHugh "Annotations to Finnegans Wake"
Concordances for U and FW
Various dictionaries (English, French, etc), and histories and maps of Ireland are also useful.
Briefly, it looks like the fallen king is at the midpoint of his lifecycle (as was Dante entering the Inferno), and will recover somewhat as he gains wisdom. The druid is that older, wiser self, achieved via the chaotic decline. Tristan and Isolde are complementary halves of a single narcissistic personality, possessing all that the king will have lost. The saint is regressing to the womb even as he dies, spiritually. And the senile historians are also regressing to childhood, so Joyce's lifecycle seems to fold the symmetrical poles of youth and age into one!During 1924, Joyce settled on a handful of central personalities, whom he denoted with stylized lettersigns or 'sigla' including:
"E" = Earwicker (rotated E makes M for Mark) also Roderick O'Conor [a triangle] = his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle "[" = his son Shem (a stylized C, for Cain) also Berkeley the druid "/\" = Shem's brother Shaun (A for Abel) also Kevin the saint "T" or "/[" = Tristan, Earwicker's son and successor, combining /\ and [ "I" (or a rotated T) = E's fair daughter Isolde, or her dark twin "X" = the four historians, Mamalujo (Matthew Mark Luke John)(These are conventionally designated as sigla via a prefixed "$": $E, $A, $[, $/\, etc.)
The fashions of criticism have led to a comparable neglect of the surviving Ulysses notes, though there were fully edited by Phillip Herring in 1972 (the last 1700 pages of JJQ include some six mentions of these). But a comparison of the Ulysses and FW notes shows that Joyce's methodology remained very much the same for both, involving a meticulous literary craftsmanship, an encyclopedic mastery of the symbolic weights of words, and a passionately held philosophy of life and society. Some guidelines:
from Danis rose's 'Textual Diaries of JJ' Lilliput 1995 [least-flawed]
(x = lost notebook; b3 = bflo vi.b.3; c/d/raph = raphael transcription)
1922: vi.a (Oct-Aug'23), vi.b.10 (Oct-Jan'23)
1923: x1 (Feb), ROC, T&S, b3 (Apr), Kev, b25 (Jul), B&P, T&I,
b2 (Aug), HCE, Mmlj, b11 (Oct), Cad, x2 (Dec)
1924: Rev, I.5, b6 (Jan), I.7, I.8, b1 (Feb), b16 (Apr), III.1-2,
b5 (May), b14 (Aug), d3 (c4-5, Dec), III.3
1925: b7 (Mar), d2 (c3, c15, Apr), d1 (c2, May), b9, b8, b19,
III.4, vi.a, b13
1926: b20, b17, b12, II.2, d5 (c8-9, c10, c16), b15, I.1
1927-29: b18, I.6, x3, d6 (c1); b21, b22, b26, eyes, b23; b4, b27, b24
1930-32: b29, b28a, b32, II.1, x4; b28b, b33, vi.a, b31; b35, sheets.i
1933-34: b34, II.2, sheets.ii, b43?, raph.i, sheets.iii; b36
1935-36: b40, sheets.iv, raph.ii; sheets.v, b38, II.3, b39, b37, raph.iii
1937-39: b44, b42, sheets.vi, b46; b45, IV, x5, b41, b47, b30; b48
1940: c2, ?rumor.i
See http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/genetics.html for a long intro to Joycean genetic studies, partially out-of-date.
Ulysses:
chapters:
summary :
anchors :
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12a
12b
13
14a
14b
15a
15b
15c
15d
16a
16b
17a
17b
18a
18b
notes:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
reference:
Bloom :
clocktime :
prices :
schemata :
Tower :
riddles :
errors :
Homeric parallels :
[B-L Odyssey] :
Eolus tropes :
parable :
Oxen :
Circe :
1904 :
Thom's :
Gold Cup :
Seaside Girls :
M'appari :
acatalectic :
search
riddles:
overview :
Rudy :
condom :
Gerty :
Hades :
Strand :
murder :
Eccles
maps:
Ulysses :
WRocks :
Strand :
VR tour :
aerial tour :
Dublin :
Leinster :
Ireland :
Europe
editing:
etexts :
lapses :
Gabler :
capitals :
commas :
compounds :
deletes :
punct :
typists
drafts:
prequel :
Proteus :
Cyclops :
Circe
closereadings:
notes :
Oxen :
Circe
Finnegans Wake:
txt:
[I.1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
II.1
2
3
4
III.1
2
3
4
IV] :
[HTML]
shorter:
main :
I.1-4 :
5-8 :
II.1-2 :
3-4 :
III.1-2 :
3 :
4 :
IV
reference:
thunder :
Quinet :
waves :
[MP3 ALP] :
FrALP :
ItalALP :
ch4 digest :
Finn's Hotel :
JAJquotes :
search
drafts:
NewGame :
ROC :
Kev :
B&P :
T&I :
HCE :
Mmlj :
Cad :
Rev :
Pacata
closereadings:
notes :
ROC :
T&S :
Kev :
B&P :
T&I :
HCE :
Mmlj :
Cad
theory:
AI :
archetypes :
WakeOS :
notes :
origin :
Scribble
Portrait:
ref:
main :
ch1 :
ch1 notes :
ch2 :
3 :
4 :
5a :
5b :
Pinamonti :
[notes] :
[Cave] :
[Gabler]
SHero:
outline :
quotes :
PoA04
Dubliners:
etexts:
Sis :
Sis04 :
Sis05 :
Enc :
Araby :
Evel :
After :
2Gall :
Board :
LitCl :
Cntr :
Clay :
Pain :
Ivy :
Moth :
Grace :
Dead
guides:
main :
[Cave] :
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