Table Of ContentJOYCE-AGAIN'S WAKE
An Analysis of Finnegans Wake
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An Analysis of Finnegans Wake
BERNARD BENSTOCK
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UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
SEATTL E AND LONDON
Copyright© 1965 by the University of Washington Press
library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-239o8
Printed in the United States of America
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY FATHER
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Preface
It is hoped that Joyce-again's Wake will be many things to many
people, but most important that it will serve the increasing number
of "middle-range" readers (those with enough patience to be will
ing to participate in the work necessary for an understanding of
Joyce's masterpiece, but without that ideal insomnia being simulat
ed by Joycean scholars). As such this "analysis" hopes to bridge
the specialized and vital work being done by Joyceans and the
boundless country of Joyce's Wake. I have leaned heavily upon the
indispensable handful of books hitherto. available, especially those
which have miraculously reduced every Joycean's work from a
matter of decades to a matter of years: Mrs. Glasheen's Census,
Atherton's The Books at the Wake, the Campbell-Robinson Skele
ton Key (despite my reservations it has been highly important in
opening many doors, especially at a time when no other keys were
available) , the Hodgart-Worthington Song in the Works of James
Joyce, Harry Levin's James Joyce, and more recently the two Clive
Hart books, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake and A Con
cordance to Finnegans Wake. And Richard Ellmann's definitive bi
ography of Joyce has proved itself vital to any work on any aspect
of James Joyce.
I have endeavored to quote copiously from Finnegans Wake, in
the belief that it is essentially the sound and sense of Joyce's own
words that work the necessary magic for the reader of the Wake,
and that the greater the familiarity the reader has with those words
the closer he comes to understanding for himself much more than
any commentator can offer in explication. In some instances I have
even attempted to be exhaustive in tracking down echoes in the
Wake, and in these instances any missing item is due to ignorance
rather than reticence. I have taken the liberty of eliminating open-
v•w•• Preface
ing and closing ellipses in these quotations for easier readability.
Inclusive page-and-line numbers are given from the 1939 Viking
Press edition of Finnegans Wake with corrections made from
Joyce's list of "Corrections of Misprints in Finnegans Wake."
Line references are counted from the top of each page and follow
the period; thus 101.6-9 means page 101, lines 6 to 9· In chapter
10, marginal notes are designated by the letters Rand L, indicating
right and left on the page, and footnotes are numbered and noted
by a lower-case "n." Other Joyce books from which I quote are
also listed by page in parentheses and indicated with D for Dub
liners (Compass edition), AP for A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (Compass edition), and U for Ulysses (Bodley Head
edition, 193 7).
The "working outline" that follows is included here for easy
reference for the reader. It is not intended as a synopsis of the
Wake (I have very definite prejudices against synopses), but is
merely a guide which I used while working on this volume in order
to remind myself of the context of a particular quotation, and
which may be profitably used by the reader for just such a purpose.
It gives no more than a surface suggestion of what may be happen
ing in a particular portion of the Wake, or even just a heading for
one of the more self-contained sections.
.Acknowlet:/gments
I am indebted to several learned Joyceans for their assistance, par
ticularly Fritz Senn of Zurich and Clive Hart of Newcastle, co
editors of A Wake Newslitter, and Thomas F. Staley, editor of the
James Joyce Quarterly, all three of whom have read through the
manuscript and raised suspicious eyebrows at necessary instances.
Mrs. Adaline Glasheen, the Wake census-taker, will find that some
of the elements of our correspondence has crept into the text, and I
am grateful for her opinions.
An important service was graciously rendered by Lawrence A.
Wiggin, who donated the product of his knowledge and close
reading of the Wake to the analysis of the Prankquean portion
found in the Appendix. Prof. Laura Jepsen of the Department of
English at Florida State University was instrumental in getting me
started on all this many years ago and Michel T. Blouin of the
Department of English at Louisiana State University helped me
proofread when it was all finished, while special thanks goes to the
Graduate School of Louisiana State University for typing the manu
script.
Portions of this book have appeared in the following places, and
I am indebted accordingly for permission to re-use the material:
aspects of Chapters 3 and 5 appeared in the Bucknell Review as
"A Portrait of the Artist in Finnegans Wake"; a segment of Chap
ter was printed in the James Joyce Quarterly (University of
1
Tulsa Press) as "The Quiddity of Shem and the Whatness of
Shaun"; a draft of the second part of Chapter was titled "The
2
Final Apostasy: James Joyce and Religion" in ELH, A Journal of
English Literary History,· and an abbreviated version of Chapter 4
was included as "Here Comes Everybody: Finnegans Wake as
Epic" by editor Donald E. Stanford in Nine E.rsays in Modern Lit-
x Acknowledgments
erature (Louisiana State University Press). The Viking Press has
granted permission for the extensive quotations from James Joyce's
Finnegans W ake, and I am also indebted to the numerous publish
ers from whose works I have included quotations to a lesser extent,
and I acknowledge these in initial footnotes.
