The Restored Finnegans Wake

729 Pages·2012·2.76 MB·English

by  James Joyce

JAMES JOYCE
The Restored Finnegans Wake
Edited and with a Preface and Afterword by
DANIS ROSE and JOHN O’HANLON
Note by
SEAMUS DEANE
Appendices by
HANS WALTER GABLER and DAVID GREETHAM
PENGUIN CLASSICS
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Note on the new edition of Finnegans Wake by SEAMUS DEANE
Preface by DANIS ROSE and JOHN O’HANLON
FINNEGANS WAKE
Appendix 1 by HANS WALTER GABLER
Appendix 2: ‘Begin Again…Stop!’ by DAVID GREETHAM
Afterword by DANIS ROSE and JOHN O’HANLON
Acknowledgements
Note on the new edition of Finnegans Wake
This should never have happened. It was, from the outset, an impossible
task. But here it is. I still find it hard to believe that all the obstacles
have been cleared, although I find it easy to believe that I actually don’t
know the half of it, all the difficulties encountered in research, funding,
travelling, overcoming scepticism and hostility and then in finding the
resource to sustain a commitment that certainly would have made my
heart fail. It is astonishing and pleasing beyond measure to find that we
now have a critical edition of Finnegans Wake.
Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon have achieved what has been for many
readers unimaginable. They have given us both the archaeological
sedimented layers and the structuring principles of the famous Work in
Progess and then, out of that, the clear reading text. We already knew
from Danis Rose’s work on the Notebooks that the scholarship involved
was vast and painstaking. We also knew that the text of Finnegans Wake
was, in one sense of the word, composed of those notebook materials
and yet, in another sense, created out of them. This is a fascinating
example of composing and composition, of one becoming the other and
yet both remaining distinct. The sheer agglomerative scale of Joyce’s
undertaking and the narrative form in which he rendered it have always
provoked, since it first began to appear, a degree of outrage, derision,
various denunciations and announcements that the author had finally
been inundated by the miscellaneousness that had menaced Ulysses and
had surrendered completely to the wild pedantry that had at times made
it so funny and monotonous.
There has always been a large majority of readers for whom Finnegans
Wake is, as part of its rationale, unreadable; indeed, unreadability has
always been part of its attraction, the pseudo-suave explanation for
never having read it. That view of, approach to and refusal of the work
are all now outdated. The new edition brings Finnegans Wake to its
audience again, but this time with the barriers of twentieth-century
critical reception (if that is the word) cleared away.
It is a different matter for Joyceans. They have long been acclimatized
to this architecture, this Beaubourg of the literary arts, and have also
been acclimatized to enduring and representing the ridicule that is
generated by the clash between research and creativity that inspires and
is parodied by Joyce’s late work. With this edition that antinomy too
begins to crumble. It is not the clash but the intimacy between research
and creativity, between information gathering and its mobilization in
structural forms, that Finnegans Wake has always asserted. The most
recondite and the most proverbial forms of knowledge share a kinship;
but to see that kinship materialize in the form of art is a miracle.
This wonderful edition makes the miracle visible to us; it has been
waiting to happen for a long time. It is now seventy years since the wait
began. A salute to the editors, Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, who have
ended the wait and given us an opportunity – created against incredible
odds – to break out of our critical slumber and see this masterpiece as it
should be seen, clean and radiant again.
SEAMUS DEANE
Preface
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake represents the summit of twentieth-
century literary production in the English language. This work – not
least because of its fabled difficulty and the extensive period of its
complex composition – requires critical editing more than any other
modern novel. The available reading text is corrupt and has hardly
changed from its original publication in 1939. Furthermore, the book as
book has never been typographically reset so that, page by page, its
physical appearance has remained static, allowing its familiarity to seep
into the very words themselves, diminishing the impact of their radical
beauty. The present edition rectifies this by offering a fully restored and
emended reading text of Finnegans Wake in a typographical setting that
has been thoroughly overhauled and redesigned. It is not a replacement
for the 1939 edition – for the received version will always retain its
historical importance – but an alternative to it.
The new reading text is restored in that it seeks to recreate and
recover the text precisely as James Joyce wrote it – in notebooks, drafts,
fair copies, typescripts and proofs – over the course of a sixteen-year
period. It is emended in that – given the long passage of time and the
enormous number of documents involved – absolute precision in
recovery is unattainable; the desired ideal of a definitive edition is
practically, if not theoretically, impossible. It can at best be
approximated. The gaps in the material evidence can only be filled by
what textual scholars term editorial judgment. From time to time an
editor must call upon his or her knowledge and experience – of the
accepted practices of scholarly editing and of the particular author and
work at issue – in order to evaluate alternative readings that have
differing degrees of reliability and probability. For a reading text, that is
to say, for a realization of the work as a work of literary art for the
general public rather than as a comprehensive analysis of the evidence
suitable for scholars, decisions ultimately have to be made.
Such a deep analysis, one that has occupied the editors for more than
thirty years, has nevertheless been achieved. The publication of this new
reading text is an end-result of that protracted labour. The full analysis
will be made available to scholars and to the interested public in the
form of an electronic hypertext as soon as circumstances permit. The
hypertext is described in greater detail in the afterword that closes this
short introductory volume.
The new text differs from the old in about 9000 instances. This sounds
grander than it is. Finnegans Wake comprises some 220,000 words, or
about six times that number of characters: letters, spaces and
punctuation marks. The changes vary from corrections in the spellings of
individual words (yes, even in Finnegans Wake such errors occur!) to the
restoration of missing conjunctions and marks of punctuation, to the
realignments of phrases (when these ended up other than where Joyce
intended) and to the repair of inadvertently fragmented sentences.
Overwhelmingly, the changes pertain to the syntax (the flow of the
words) rather than to the semantics (their individual meanings).
Syntactic changes are more important than they might at first seem.
Finnegans Wake has often been described as music: as such, it is music of
sense as much as it is music of sound, and, like all music, it must flow
unhindered to be heard.
Gentle reader, were you to ask How should I read this book? we would
answer: passively, like any good book, neither too fast nor too slow. Do
not pause because you cannot understand a word or words: you are not
expected to understand it all. Imagine yourself a child, leaning over the
banisters, listening to the grown-up banter going on below. You are
learning a language: a night language. Morning will come and the clouds
of unknowing will begin to dissipate.
In an enterprise as ambitious as the preparation of a critical edition of
Finnegans Wake, perfection is unattainable. Errors of execution will
inevitably occur. For these we apologize, yet we are confident that they
represent only a tiny minority of the changes that have ensued in the
reading text and for which we are responsible. In particular, the Estate
of James Joyce is not responsible for any of the details of the new text,
nor should it be.
This preface follows a prefatory note by Seamus Deane (novelist, poet,
critic and editor of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing) and precedes
appendices by Hans Walter Gabler (editor of the Critical and Synoptic
Edition of Ulysses, with which our edition of Finnegans Wake began its
life as a companion project) and by David Greetham (author of the
standard text-book on critical editing, Textual Scholarship: an
Introduction, and founder of the Society for Textual Scholarship) and,
finally, an afterword by the editors.
DANIS ROSE and JOHN O’HANLON
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