Or la pensée ne m'est pas très agréable que n'importe qui (si on se soucie encore de mes livres) sera admis à compulser mes manuscrits, à les comparer au texte définitif, à en induire des suppositions qui seront toujours fausses sur ma manière de travailler, sur l'évolution de ma pensée etc (Marcel Proust, Correspondance: 1922, Tome XXI, ed. Philip Kolb, Paris: Plon, 1993. 372-3).Finnegans Wake criticism in its academic variety is little more than half a century old and it shows no signs of fatigue. Academics still write and publish articles and books on Joyce's last novel; conferences and symposia continue to devote time and energy on it. Every successive academic generation, every fashion and fad in criticism and theory, has found new ways of dealing with the enigma of the work. Although Finnegans Wake will probably never be such a happy hunting ground as Ulysses, it seems safe to assume that as far as academia is concerned, the book is still a growth industry.
Fifteen years ago, the facsimiles of the Finnegans Wake notebooks and all the manuscript material for the Wake were published. It is indicative of past blindness and current prejudice that not more of the academic Wake critics have taken note. The complete lack of interest in the way Joyce's works were written should not come as a surprise to observers of the academic Joycean scene. How else can one explain the fact that the famous "word known to all men"-passage could have come as a revelation to scholars of Ulysses? Did nobody apart from Hans Walter Gabler and his crew bother to check Clive Driver's edition of the Rosenbach manuscript? Although this issue of the European Joyce Studies may create the opposite impression, Wake scholars who read the notebooks are still a tiny minority. This has always been the case, although the early history of Wake criticism is marked by the considerable accomplishments of a very small number of academic Joyceans who did work on the genesis of the book.
The first was David Hayman. In 1956 his study of the relationship between Joyce and Stéphane Mallarmé made use of manuscript and notebook material, and two years later the PMLA published an essay on the development of a single sentence from the Wake. In 1963 Hayman published A First-Draft Version of "Finnegans Wake" which contains the first draft(s) of every section of the book. In the meantime Fred Higginson had published a study of the ALP-manuscripts (Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Making of a Chapter) and Thomas Connolly had produced an edition of notebook VI.A as James Joyce's Scribbledehobble. In 1961, between Hayman's first articles and First-Draft Version, A. Walton Litz published The Art of James Joyce, a book that included an important section on Finnegans Wake. In 1966 Twelve and a Tilly celebrated the Wake's twenty-fifth birthday with an essay by Hayman on the development of II.2, one by Litz on the uses and abuses of manuscripts and an essay by Jack Dalton on the need for a new edition of Finnegans Wake.
After 1966 and until recently, the two main protagonists lost interest in the history of the text of the Wake. Litz did not return to editorial or genetic matters, and Hayman only at the very end of the eighties. Interestingly, the impetus for manuscript and notebook study came from outside America and from outside the academy. The specialized journal A Wake Newslitter which had been established in 1962 by Fritz Senn and Clive Hart, began to publish short studies on the notebooks and the drafts in the sixties. Microfilm copies of the Buffalo notebooks were circulating as early as 1964, but the major impact in the Newslitter came in the late sixties. In April 1968 Leo Knuth looked at the Malay words in Notebook VI.B.46 and in 1970 he published "Dutch Elements in Finnegans Wake pp. 75-78 Compared With Holograph Workbook VI.B.46." The December issue of the same year published an ambitious essay by Roland McHugh on "A Structural Theory of Finnegans Wake" which would become the core of his books on the sigla. His brief article is preceded by a short note: "Parts of this theory are provisional, being based only on published material. I hope eventually to revise these, after some study of the Buffalo notebooks. I am not at present able to say whether this will disprove any of my conclusions" (Roland McHugh, "A Structural Theory of Finnegans Wake," A Wake Newslitter, V.3 [1968]: 83). Exactly one year later, Jack P. Dalton contributed to one of the competitions in the Newslitter for the latest historical event alluded to in the Wake and he made use of the manuscripts for establishing the moment when Joyce added relevant bits to the texts. In the April issue of 1970, Roland McHugh published the first identification of a source in the notebooks: some elements of the Pelagian heresy in notebook VI.B.14. Another set of tangible results were published in the April issue of 1972, when McHugh published his revised chronology of the Buffalo notebooks. More and more Newslitter contributors began to refer to the notebooks, Ward Swinson looked at Ossian in VI.B.45 and VI.B.46; Ian MacArthur referred to VI.A; Luigi Schenoni identified Amaro words in VI.B.35.
Surprisingly, work on these arcane matters (the drafts were in the British Library and the notebooks in Buffalo) was not the work of American academics on sabbaticals. Most of the contributors to A Wake Newslitter were British or Irish non-academics, and a few French university critics. Ian MacArthur published "A Textual Study of III.4" in 1976, in which he compared the different drafts of that chapter, followed in June and October by "A Textual Study of III.3" and in February of 1977 by a textual study of the Butt and Taff sequence. One of these issues also contained a brief note by Roland McHugh emendating his theories about the Wake after his study of the Buffalo notebooks. In the December issue Danis Rose published his first article based on notebook material: a list of corrections to Claude Jacquet's identification of L. Sainéan's La Langue de Rabelais in VI.B.45 which had been published in book form in 1972. Roland McHugh identified Joyce's use of The Book of Keruynge in VI.B.32 and VI.B.40 and in 1976 he published The Sigla of "Finnegans Wake," the first study of Joyce's use of the sigla.
1978 was a crucial year in the study of the notebooks. Danis Rose, a regular contributor to the Newslitter, published The Index Manuscript, an edition of VI.B.46. This was the first complete edition of a Finnegans Wake notebook since Connolly's Scribbledehobble and the last to date. Rose's work differs greatly from that of Connolly: the transcriptions are much more accurate, and Rose does not content himself with simply transcribing. Each list and every item within each list is annotated and compared (as far as possible) to the original source Joyce used. With John O'Hanlon, Danis Rose also published Understanding "Finnegans Wake": A Guide to the Narrative of James Joyce's Masterpiece in which the authors based their reading of the Wake's plot on an extensive use of manuscripts and notebooks.
In the meantime, everything had been quiet on the American academic front when, also in 1978, Garland published The James Joyce Archive, an ambitious project of 63 volumes of facsimiles of all of the still extant Joyce materials. General editor was Michael Groden, associate editors were Hans Walter Gabler, David Hayman, A. Walton Litz and Danis Rose. This gang of five were an obvious choice: they may well have been the only Joyceans in the world who could have been part of the project. The history of Finnegans Wake is more thoroughly documented than that of the other works: 36 volumes reproduce on the one hand most of the history of the text itself and on the other facsimiles of the notebooks that Joyce used in writing Finnegans Wake. Ninety-five percent of the genesis of Finnegans Wake is now available in most university libraries in the United States and in just a few libraries in Europe, but still the renaissance of notebook studies happened in Europe.
In 1978 A Wake Newslitter was in effect taken over by the notebook enthusiasts: from that year until its demise, the majority of the articles published were concerned with notebook or drafts study. This development is echoed in the first paragraph of Roland McHugh's review of The Index Manuscript: "Ignore this book at your peril. The times are past when the Buffalo notebooks could be casually dismissed with that perplexing ornament Scribbledehobble. We now have one notebook intelligently edited to constitute a functional component in FW glossary" (Roland McHugh, "Review of The Index Manuscript," AWN XV.2 [1978]: 35). The same group of non-academic Wakeans would continue to contribute to the Newslitter's successor, A Finnegans Wake Circular: Danis Rose, John O'Hanlon, Ian MacArthur, Roland McHugh and the new editor, Vincent Deane. The latter writes in his first editorial:
As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Wake, two objectives have come into special prominence: (1) The establishment of an accurate text. At present a synoptic version of FW is being prepared according to the same principles as the Gabler Ulysses, and a discussion of work in progress by its compiler, Danis Rose, will be included in the next issue of the Circular; (2) Complete and accurate transcription of the Buffalo notebooks and identifica-tion of their sources (Vincent Deane, "Editorial," A "Finnegans Wake" Circular 1 [1985]: 1).The editors have concentrated on the second half of the second of their objectives and A "Finnegans Wake" Circular continues to devote most of its energy to the identification of notebook sources.
In the meantime on the Continent, French critics were turning their attention to the notebooks. Jacques Aubert and Claude Jacquet had been among the pioneers in the seventies, but in 1982 at the International Symposium in Dublin a new generation of French academic critics, most of them students of Hélène Cixous, discussed the notebooks. This was the beginning of the James Joyce group of the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM): Daniel Ferrer, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and later Laurent Milesi took an interest in the notebooks that grew out of their readings of Finnegans Wake through the theories of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. They have published the results of their work both in France and abroad, and ITEM continues to organize conferences and publish books on the subject.
One of the American pioneers returned to the fray in 1990 with a book-length study of the early history of the Wake. Although David Hayman based the arguments of some of his chapters on three articles published between the mid-sixties and the late eighties, the book grew out of a new interest in the Wake's development and especially the "recent and repeated inspection of two crucial documents," VI.A and VI.B.10 (David Hayman, The "Wake" in Transit, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. ix). In the meantime Hayman has elaborated and developed the arguments in his book, helped by a group of young scholars in Madison. The essays in the present issue of the European Joyce Studies are proof of his continuing influence on the genetic study of Finnegans Wake.
That this approach to Joyce's last book is becoming more important both in the United States and in Europe should be evident from the most recent conferences and publications. What the co-existence of representatives of these different groups in the present volume tends to obscure is the difference between the theoretical assumptions on which the work of these groups is based. There seem to me to be three groups: the ITEM-group, the Madison group (Hayman and students), and the group of Dubliners publishing in A "Finnegans Wake" Circular (for reasons of elegance and--to a more limited degree--modesty, I have excluded my own work and that of my students from this survey). If work on the Finnegans Wake notebooks is to continue to grow and be productive it will be necessary that the representatives of these groups should become fully aware of the differences between their approaches.
The work of the French Joyce group should be placed in the context of French academic anglicistes and in that of ITEM. Whereas the pioneers of Joyce study in France, Claude Jacquet and Jacques Aubert have both made important early contributions to the study of the Finnegans Wake notebooks, the younger generation was trained first in theory. In The French Joyce I have already described a definite shift in the work of these two critics toward a genetic approach. This represents neither a break with Derrida and Lacan nor a return to philology. On the contrary, Daniel Ferrer, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Laurent Milesi stress the continuity of their theoretical work. In the most recent statement, Daniel Ferrer explicitly grounds a general discussion of the Finnegans Wake notebooks in the Mallarméan-Heideggerian tradition which I analyzed in my book. "Les carnets de Joyce: avant-textes limites d'une oeuvre limite" describes the notebooks in terms of the philosophical status of écriture, of writing. Ferrer opens the article with the case of the French prime minister whose diary happened to be displayed on his desk when it was photographed. In the diary, the words "Affaire fiscale Médecin" could be made out. For the press, this suggested that the prime minister planned a démarche in the fiscal affairs of the already well-compromised politician Médecin. The prime minister denied this: he had simply planned to talk to the minister of Economic and Fiscal Affairs about the fiscal problems of the medical profession. Ferrer believes that it is impossible to decide who was right since the case "concerned a piece of private writing, which implies no communication to somebody else and therefore no obligation to conform to a public code" (Daniel Ferrer, "Les carnets de Joyce: avant-limites d'une oeuvre limite," Genesis 3 [1993]: 45-61. 61, my translation). This is also true for a writer's notebooks: they have no addressee, they do not want to communicate, they have no proper logic. Ferrer quotes Michel Foucault's famous description in Histoire de la folie of a post-Mallarméan literature that "suspends the reign of language in a gesture of writing." The book that most closely resembles this definition is Finnegans Wake, which makes Joyce's last book very similar to a private notebook or "a monumental example of what is called in English `a private joke'" (Ferrer 1993, 46). A brief look at the structure of notebook VI.A leads to Ferrer's conclusion that Scribbledehobble is not simply a channel between two texts: "the notebook's function transcends the simple logic, the neutral and complete transferral of elements that are conceived or appropriated outside of it" (Ferrer 1993, 51). Since Ferrer considers VI.A as the first notebook, he can claim that this form of organization "soon disappears" and is replaced by an "equally structured, intrinsic system." The overt chaos hides "an extremely strong power of integration" which works in two ways: on the one hand the sigla and on the other the translation in a totally individual language. Ferrer believes that the C-series of notebooks shows that Joyce was fascinated by the mistakes and errors introduced by Mme Raphaël because they also form the implicit and explicit theme of Finnegans Wake. The D-series reminds us, Ferrer writes, that the virtual status of any textual element in the Wake resembles that of the lost and therefore virtual D-series notebooks, because "the 'definitive' text of the Wake [...] although it exists in its printed form, has been designed to remain for ever in a state of perpetual signifying and discursive suspension" (Ferrer 1993, 56-57). Ferrer's conclusion is that Joyce's Finnegans Wake notebooks at the same time do and do not comply with the philosophical definitions (by Derrida in "Signature, événement, contexte") of the major predicates of writing:
The work of writing that is evident in the notebooks is paradoxically founded on taking seriously those essential properties of writing that their status as notebooks seems to challenge. They are witnesses of that other essential predicate that Joyce will exploit ad nauseam: the "possibility of disengage-ment and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of semio-linguistic communication; in writing, which is to say in the possibility of its functioning being cut off, at a certain point, from its 'original' desire-to-say-what-one-means [vouloir-dire] and from its participation in a saturable and constraining context.There is a double movement at work here. On the one hand Ferrer places Joyce's notebooks and Finnegans Wake in a very specific literary tradition (Mallarmé, Valéry, Blanchot) and on the other hand the study of the notebooks itself in an equally specific critical tradition that is marked by the names of Foucault and Derrida.
The work of the Parisian Joyce-critics is part of the larger project of Louis Hay's Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes, a research programme of the C.N.R.F., the French national research council. Scholars at ITEM study the genesis of texts by quite a number of French, German and English writers, but all of them work within a theory of the text and the text's genesis that was pioneered by Louis Hay. In an article in the Encyclopaedia Universalis, Pierre Marc de Biasi has described this paradigm as a radical break with other literary theories or criticisms and his essay is probably still the best introduction to the aims and dimensions of la critique génétique. More recent theoretical and practical discussions can be consulted in the journal published by ITEM, Genesis.
The work in Madison should also be put in its own context, a context which should be so familiar to most North-American Joyceans that it has become invisible. In sophisticated academic literary criticism in the United States and Canada since the fifties, there is no room for the study of manuscripts or notebooks: New Criticism's sustained assault on the intentional fallacy took care of that problem back in 1946 and the different fads and fashions that followed New Criticism had no more sympathy for the author or his manuscripts. That this lack of interest in editorial or genetic matters was especially strong among Joyceans may explain the total absence of this kind of work in the boom of sophisticated Joyce studies in the seventies and eighties. It also explains the exculpatory tone adopted by the few critics who did turn to the manuscripts. In 1964 A. Walton Litz wrote in the preface to the new edition of his study that the controlling design he had been looking for in his study of the genesis of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake had eluded him,
and I have long since relinquished the comforting belief that access to an author's workshop provides insights of greater authority than those produced by other kinds of criticism. ... Therefore I claim no special authority for this study, although I have tried to found my conclusions on a factual survey of the manner in which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake achieved their final forms (A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce, New York: Oxford UP, 1961, 1986. v).In the introduction to The "Wake" in Transit, David Hayman was careful to distinguish his book from traditional philology and to align himself with the ITEM group, whose "careful study of the seemingly inchoate materials [in the notebooks] will very likely inspire serious and significant critical and theoretical approaches" (Hayman 1990, 7). Later on in the introduction, Hayman stressed the role of Claude Jacquet in establishing the Joyce-group within the structure of ITEM, but in a footnote he added that Hélène Cixous was the critic who got all of the younger generation of Joyceans interested in Joyce. On the other hand, Hayman distinguished his work from that of Danis Rose, his collaborator on the Garland edition of the notebooks, whose expertise in manuscript details is unfortunately "not always matched by his critical acumen" (Hayman 1990, 6).
Hayman's book is by far the most ambitious study of the genesis of Finnegans Wake, dealing as it does with the history of the book between the first notes in late 1922 and the spring of 1926 when the eighth of the eleven "turning-points" in that history occurred. The "Wake" in Transit offers a clear and coherent picture of the development of the book from the notes in Scribbledehobble in which Joyce used the frame of his earlier works to sort materials he was going to use in his new book, to the establishment of a female plot counterbalancing the male plot.
Danis Rose, sometimes in collaboration with John O'Hanlon, is the most productive exponent of the Dublin school and his guide to the narrative of Finnegans Wake attempts to make available to a larger public the insights gained in the study of the Finnegans Wake drafts and notebooks. In this respect Understanding "Finnegans Wake" resembles Roland McHugh's Annotations to "Finnegans Wake" which is also directed at non-specialist readers, and, especially in the second edition, based on notebook evidence. But this is not the most important difference with Hayman and ITEM. In the margins of the edition of VI.B.46 and of Understanding "Finnegans Wake" Rose and O'Hanlon presented an explicit theory about the nature of the notebooks that is radically different from that of David Hayman or the French. In the introduction Rose presented "three logically separate propositions" about the role of the notebooks in the genesis and therefore the structure of Finnegans Wake:
1. Finnegans Wake is an ordered aggregate of elements each of which can be identified with a unit entered in one of the notebooks.In an appendix to Understanding "Finnegans Wake," the two authors tested Rose's theory in what is called "The H.C.E. Project": the text of "Haveth Childers Everywhere" (532.06-554) serves as the testing ground for three hypotheses based on the earlier theory:2. The notebooks are primarily compilations of units, each of which can be identified with a fragment appearing in some external source.
3. The translation of each unit from notebook to draft was intermediated by referring that unit to one of a small number of contextual invariants (Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, Understanding "Finnegans Wake," New York: Garland, 1982. xiii-xiv).
(1) that each grew out of its predecessor by the method of numerous discrete additions and augmentations (more bricks than onionskins); (2) that these additions are single (or multiple conglomerates of) units deriving from the work-books; and (3) that the collections of units in the work-books are lists (indexes) taken from external sources (Rose and O'Hanlon, 332).The three hypotheses are confirmed, the first without too much trouble and the second to a large extent, although missing notebooks, Joyce's unmediated use of sources, and the critics' imperfect searching may be responsible for the missing items. For this section alone, Joyce took elements from the following notebooks: VI.A and-with the exception of VI.B.3, 9, 18, 22 and 42-all of the first thirty notebooks and VI.D.4 and VI.C.6. This certainly proves the extent and range of Joyce's use of notebook material. The third hypothesis was much more difficult to verify, although half of the total number of words in the text as it appeared in the Wake was taken from only three notebooks (VI.B.24, 28 and 29). Of the entries in these notebooks, 95% were traced to specific external sources.
It is clear that Rose and O'Hanlon's interpretation of the role of the notebooks differs from that of the Madison group and the French. Both Hayman and ITEM start their discussion with the special position of Scribbledehobble, which is seen as a channel between Ulysses and the new book. Ferrer writes that VI.A has its own logic, that it is an air-lock in which the material undergoes a process of assimilation. Hayman sees it as a "base of operations" in which Joyce used the reference to his earlier works (the title and chapter titles of Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles and Ulysses, and five extra categories) to elaborate the first germs of what would later become the Wake. Recent research has shaken this view of Scribbledehobble: Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon on the one hand, and Jorn Barger on the other, have shown that Scribbledehobble cannot be the first of the post-Ulysses notebooks. The former showed that the procedure of titled entries was not new, that Joyce had used a similar stratagem when he was completing Ulysses and that there is enough circumstantial evidence to prove that Joyce began VI.B.10 in November 1922, and the latter that elements in VI.A were even copied from VI.B.10. Both Vincent Deane's work on the Bywaters trial and my own work on Joyce's use of the Irish Times have confirmed this new dating.
If the Dublin group has a view of Scribbledehobble that differs from that of the Madison and Paris groups, the Index-hypotheses have important implications for the other notebooks too. Both David Hayman and the French see the notebooks as the place where Joyce was rehearsing thoughts and expressions, where he tried out ideas or puns, wrote down dreams or narrative sequences. For example, Daniel Ferrer describes the contents of VI.B.19 as "[Joyce's] usual heterogeneous mixture of references, wordplays, ideas for scenes and notes from the books he was reading" (Daniel Ferrer, "The Freuddul Couchmare of /\d: Joyce's Notes on Freud and the Composition of Chapter XVI of Finnegans Wake," JJQ 22.4 [1985]: 367-382. 367). The Index hypotheses consider the notebooks as a repository of material taken from extraneous sources. The difference between the two positions is not just considerable from a theoretical perspective, the practical results are far-reaching, as should be clear when we look closely at the way the different critics read the notebooks.
David Hayman's reading of VI.B.3 in chapter four of The "Wake" in Transit is typical, as is the military language in the chapter title: "Regrouping, Reconnoitering, Advancing: Notebook VI.B.3." Hayman analyzes a sequence of notes on VI.B.3: 63-64 that he transcribes as: "Is has a dream- it is interpreted by Jung/ Uncle John presented to me [a version of] Jackdaw of Reims/ Mop spat in WC/ letterman (Holohan's cake)/ emergency man/ She drank an orange/ SD wrote themes for Leo Wilkins, Willy Fallon." The name Holohan is linked by Hayman to the figure in "A Mother" and to the gentleman named Holohan who had tried to seduce Nora Barnacle in Finn's Hotel. Holohan appears in Issy's erotic response in I.6 and in Jaun's address to the schoolgirls in III.2. The next phrase, "emergency man" also refers to Holohan, who "would be the marginally incompetent fellow, one only called upon when all else had failed." Thus he may be both the "feckless and randy letter carrier of III.1-2" and the narrator of "Cyclops" (Hayman 1990, 119-120). The references to Stephen Dedalus are explained as an example of the theme of forgery in the Wake; in I.7 Shaun accuses his brother of forgery and plagiarism:
In his note Joyce seems to accuse himself, but more important, given the preceding reference to the 'letterman,' he grounds his vision of the artist as handmaiden to his libidinous muse, or even as betrayer of his own creative impulse and misuser of his gifts. In short, even before the reference to the crime of the father (3.153) established the central thread of the male-oriented 'plot' of the Wake, these notes, followed by the Mum cluster and preceded by the hen reference in 'Scribbledehobble,' were available as underpinnings for the nodal system of the Letter (Hayman 1990, 123).These passages are typical of Hayman's attitude to the notebooks which does not differ too much from that of Daniel Ferrer and the other members of ITEM: the notebooks are read as a literary text which is at the same time a record of the creative process and that process itself. The poststructuralist notion of "écriture" and of "text," intertextually rich while lacking a contextual or intentional anchoring, is one that is only seemingly implied here. Both Hayman and Ferrer refer to the Lacanian-Derridian problematization of writing effected in Joyce's notebooks, yet both make claims about the notebooks that effectively contradict post-structuralist notions.
In his essay in the James Joyce Quarterly on the Freud notes in VI.B.19, Daniel Ferrer writes that
One of Joyce's holograph notebooks gives us at last some irrefutable evidence of a direct (and close) contact with Freud's text in the English translation. We can now be absolutely certain that Joyce read attentively 'Little Hans' and 'The Wolf Man (Ferrer 1985, 367; my italics).The reasons for the incompatibility of post-structuralist notions of the text and of notebook work are relatively simple: any serious study of the notebooks leads either to a consideration of their status in the chronology of Joyce's work on Finnegans Wake or to the search for sources. If we see the notebooks as preliminary stages for the work on the Wake we effectively contextualize them by imposing a temporal order on them. If we look for sources we definitely do not open up the notebook text to the larger intertextual network: on the contrary, we ground the text by limiting the infinity of its possible meanings, we find "irrefutable evidence" and end up being "absolutely certain."
Yet inevitably the maximalist conception of "text" continues to play its role in the work of these critics, especially in The "Wake" in Transit, the most ambitious study of Joyce's last novel. Hayman sees the notebooks as a complex force field in which not just Joyce's writing and reading, but also his subconscious desires and his reactions to the work of his contemporaries, find expression. Since he is not interested in sources for the notebooks, he has a tendency to look for clusters of meaning, for what he calls "epiphanoids." The methodological problem there is that such readings come much too soon: it will only become possible after the notebooks have been studied in much more detail than they have been at present. The present absolute chronologies (Spielberg, McHugh, Hayman) are increasingly accurate but still questionable, and their relative chronology is even more contested. As long as we do not know exactly when the different handwritings in Scribbledehobble were entered, it may well be a waste of time and energy to speculate on what Joyce was meditating on in the first year or so of writing Finnegans Wake.
The problem with reading notebook material in the way in which we read Finnegans Wake is paradoxically that we will create context and coherence where there is none. The danger is that we will read the actual genesis of Finnegans Wake backwards: that we will look for sources of themes and characters that are present in the finished text, whereas we should be describing the chaos of ideas out of which Finnegans Wake developed, in a process that may be much more haphazard and aleatory than we will be ready to acknowledge. The difference between these two approaches has been well described by Stephen Jay Gould in Wonderful Life: most scientists until recently assumed that life on this planet has developed in a teleological way with humans as its final and most perfect expression. Yet we know now that this is a serious misrepresentation of the true nature of evolution which is not a purposeful process at all. When we take human life (in casu our present understanding of the Wake) as the ultimate purpose of the evolution of the world, we are forced to misunderstand the nature of evolution (the hits and misses, the changes of direction, the whole haphazard business that the writing of the Wake undoubtedly was).
The second half of the page is much more difficult to place: "Ir cricket/ Lambert Gwynn/ horses/ Widger, Beasley." Apart from the two references to English sports (cricket and horses), two of the names appear in Joyce's biography and one in Joyce's works. In the Daily Express of January 29, 1903 a review was published by Joyce about Stephen Gwynn's Today and Tomorrow in Ireland. Gwynn waited twenty years to return the favour when he mentioned Ulysses in an article in the Manchester Guardian of March 15, 1923. Joyce mentioned the review to Harriet Weaver in a letter of March 30, 1923. Beasley (Piaras Béaslai) was a reporter on the Dublin Evening Telegraph who was close to Joyce during his stay in Dublin in 1909 (JJII: 289). Both Irish gentlemen may well have represented that portion of the Irish population that was supportive of his work, although Joyce complained to Miss Weaver that Gwynn had taken too long discovering him.
Ned Lambert is a character in Ulysses and his presence in the notebook may signal another intimate connection between that novel and Finnegans Wake, between the new work and Joyce's oeuvre such as we already have in Scribbledehobble, which is divided into sections with headings taken from Joyce's previous works. It is not too difficult to see why Joyce mentioned Lambert at this early stage of his thinking about the new book. The first time we meet the character in Ulysses is at Paddy Dignam's funeral, where he tells Simon Dedalus about Cork and the horse races. Because he has just returned from Cork, Lambert seems to represent the nostalgic link with that city Joyce cultivated most of his life. Cork represents his fallible father. But there is more. As a member of the jury that judges Bloom, Lambert appears in loco parentis, he represents the symbolic order, power, truth and language that will become ever more central in the paranoid plot of Finnegans Wake. In "Cyclops" he assumes the role of the nation as a static and stable entity and as such he replaces the peripatetic paternity of Simon Dedalus:
--What is it? says John Wyse.This impression is strengthened when we observe in "Wandering Rocks" that it is Ned Lambert who tells the Reverend Hugh C. Love about Silken Thomas and the history of Dublin. Lambert stands for the kind of historical continuity that will permeate Finnegans Wake: an archaeological and mythical permanence that "deals with" history by simply denying it.
--A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
--By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for I'm living in the same place for the past five years (U 12.1421-1426).
It would be possible to continue such an explication de texte and to identify small epiphanoids (is the fraternal rivalry in items three and four based on a childhood memory, a primal scene?), but it would not be wise. I just wanted to show where an interpretation of the notebooks may lead as soon as we accept their coherence and relevance to Joyce's project. My interpretation so far of the textual facts of notebook page VI.B.10: 1 is possible but simply not relevant. It accords these items an equal and exaggerated importance, both in the notebook and in the genesis of the Wake; it gives them the kind of intertextual web of reference and freedom of intentionality that poststructuralism claims for all literary texts. In fact, my interpretation has treated this page from one of the notebooks as a literary text, as some sort of hermetic poem. As I will show now, it is improbable that uncrossed items such as "Buttle" made it into the text and even more unlikely that any of these early entries have anything to do with what later would become Finnegans Wake.
David Hayman's readings of the early notebooks in The "Wake" in Transit and in the essays that have been published since 1990 have not degenerated into this type of irrelevance. Why this is the case has less to do with methodological or theoretical constraints than with the fact that his readings are informed by a sense of chronology which would exclude, e.g. claiming that the crucial scene of II.2 which was written in 1926 could already be foreshadowed in such an early notebook.
There is another way of looking at the Finnegans Wake notebooks in general and at this page in particular. In this view we would question the kind of coherence that Hayman and the ITEM critics assume: between different items in the notebooks on the one hand, and between the notebook and the text of Finnegans Wake on the other. Maybe we should accept the fact that at least some and possibly all entries in the notebooks only mean something if they can be related to the text from which they were taken by Joyce. In the case of the first page of VI.B.10, it has been possible to locate sources for a number of the entries: the first word is written with a capital letter because it refers to Lieutenant Albert Edward Buttle, who died in France on 2 October 1918. On the first column of the first page of the Irish Times of 9 October 1922, under the heading "ROLL OF HONOUR/ (1914-1918)/ IN MEMORIAM," we find the following text:
Buttle--In proud and loving memory of Albert Edward Buttle, Lieutenant, Royal Irish Rifles, who died in France, October 2nd, 1918, of wounds received in action the previous day, aged 23 years, youngest son of the late John Buttle, 16 Bealey St, Christchurch, N.Z. 'Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.'The second entry comes from the same source. On the 21st of October 1922, the newspaper had an item with the title "Stamps of the Future": "The 'Philatelic Magazine' received yesterday, was in a wrapper franked by a three-halfpenny stamp impressed in red by an automatic postal franking machine." The author of the article added that these machines had been in use in the United States, New Zealand, India and Egypt and that they cut the costs by as much as fifty percent. In conclusion he offered the suggestion that the new Free State government would do well to follow this example.
The third entry taken from the Irish Times is "Widger." On October 27 the personal announcements on the first page carried this message under the heading DEATHS: "Widger-October 26, 1922, at his residence Duagh, Waterford, Thomas Widger, aged 65 years." On page 5 in the same newspaper the following obituary was added: "The death occurred yesterday of Mr. Thomas Widger, Duagh, Waterford, who was well known in Irish racing and hunting circles."
Reference to the Irish Times allows us to supply a context for three out of eleven separate entries. The procedure lies somewhere between David Hayman's readings and those of the ITEM-group: it is far less elegant and coherent than that of Hayman and we do not quite achieve the absolute certainty of Daniel Ferrer. It is impossible to provide "irrefutable evidence" that Joyce found the name "Buttle" or the expression "franking machine" in the Irish Times, but their juxtaposition in the notebook makes it very likely. The identification of "Widger" is less certain. There is a strange symmetry in the lay-out of the pencil entries on the bottom half of the page: the words "cricket" and "horses" are centred on the page in a way that suggests that the indication "Ir" should also precede "horses." The two names follow and this seems to imply that they were taken from the same source which is not the Times. I have not been able to locate any of the other names in a meaningful cluster in the Times, although a George Lambert died on October 8 and although his death was announced in the same column in which the in memoriam for Lieutenant Buttle appeared. Furthermore, three pages later in the same issue, Stephen Gwynn wrote a review of an exhibition of Dublin painters.
No certainty then, just probabilities. For the reasons given above, it is not very probable that the word "Widger" at the bottom of the first page of VI.B.10 was taken from the Times. It is more probable that the four names were copied from a general article (on the decline of Irish sports?) written on the occasion of the recent deaths of Mr. Widger and Mr. Lambert (if it could be established that George Lambert had anything to do with cricket). The difference with the first entry on this page is that "Buttle" is isolated on the page and does not form part of a cluster, but when confronted with a single note taken from one source we cannot but speak in terms of probabilities.
We must still explain the difference in dates between the first entry and the second. Why is it that Joyce takes a single name from the first page of the issue of the 9th of October and then the second entry from an issue of nearly two weeks later? There does not seem to be any indication that there was a break in the note taking, as there must have been on this page between "look at it over there" and "Ir cricket." On the next page there are more items taken from the Irish Times of 20 October. The reason for this strange juxtaposition may have something to do with the fact that Joyce left Paris on 12 October to winter in the South of France. We know that he had at least a number of older issues of the Irish Times with him to Nice, because in a letter from Nice on the 22nd of October, he includes a clipping announcing the birth of a daughter of W.K. Magee which was taken from the Times issue of September 30. That copies of the Irish Times were sent on to Nice we can be certain of, because the story of the King Beaver which Joyce mentions in a letter to Miss Weaver dictated to Lucia was taken from the Times of October 20 and it appears on VI.B.10: 2.
Another dimension of notebook work that is difficult to demonstrate on this page alone is the concept of source itself. Where does the intertextual network end? On pages 66-71 and 75-77 on VI.B.3, there are a number of items that refer to Richard Wagner's close friendship with Mathilde Wesendonck in Zürich. I was able to locate a number of these items in an article by Albert Heintz in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung of 14 February 1896. In "Richard Wagner in Zürich. Ein Gedenkblatt zum 13. Februar," Heintz quotes from an interview with Mathilde about her friendship with the composer. On page 68 of the notebook we read "At home with the/ music (M.W.)." This is based on Mathilde Wesendonck's words quoted by Heintz on page 93 of his article. Wesendonck explains that Wagner played Beethoven on the piano for her: "Da ich Beethoven liebte, spielte er mir die Sonaten; war ein Konzert in Sicht, wo er eine Beethoven'sche Symphonie zu leiten hatte, so ware er unermüdlich und spielte vor und nach der Probe die betreffenden Sätze so lange, bis ich mich ganz heimisch darin fühlte." The next item on VI.B.3: 68 reads: "he introduced me/ to Schopenhauer's/ philosophy (MW)" (crossed out as a unit). On the same page of the article, Wesendonck is quoted again: "Im Jahre 1852 führte er mich in die Philosophie Arthur Schopenhauer's ein, war überhaupt darauf bedacht, mich auf jede bedeutende Erscheinung in Literatur und Wissenschaft aufmerksam zu machen." Another sentence on the same page explains the next item in the notebook ("at the twilight hour"): "Was er am Vormittage komponirte, das pflegte er am Nachmittage auf meinem Flügel vorzutragen und zu prüfen. Es war die Stunde zwischen 5 und 6 Uhr; er selbst nannte sich: `den Dämmermann.'" The last item on page 68, "visibly tired," and the first on the next page, "clouds dissipate" can be found on page 94 of Heintz's article: "Trat er ja einmal in's Zimmer, sichtlich ermüdet und abgespannt, so war es schön zu sehen, wie nach kurzer Rast and Erquickung sein Antlitz sich entwölkte, und ein Leuchten über seine Züge glitt, wenn er sich an den Flügel setzte."
That the essay is the source seems evident enough: the items come from only two pages of the article and they appear in the notebook in the order in which they can be found in the original. But the article in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung only explains a quarter of the Wagner references in VI.B.3 and the items from the article are preceded and followed by more Wagner material. It seems that Joyce used a book or an article which used Heintz's essay as a source, but a search of the excellent music library of the University of Georgia revealed that none of the obvious candidates (studies on Wagner in English published between 1896 and 1923) qualified.
Manfred Eger, director of the Richard Wagner Museum in Bayreuth, solved the problem for me: in a letter he wrote me on January 10, 1990, he mentioned a number of other candidates (Golther, Glasenapp, Kapp and Ashton Ellis) but suggested that I read Edouard Schuré's Femmes inspiratrices et poètes annonciateurs (Paris: Perrin, 1917). The Antwerp city library had this book and as soon as I opened it, I knew this was the one. All items were taken from that book, from "natural/ discretion/ [dagger] 1883 RW" on VI.B.3: 66 ("Le respect de la vie privée, la discrétion naturelle de deux familles, la crainte de toute l'église de Bayreuth devant les détails biographiques qui pourraient déranger l'attitude impeccable du maître presque déifié, tout cet ensemble de scrupules honorables et de soucis légitimes empêchait d'aller plus loin. Depuis la mort de Richard Wagner en 1883, [...]," Schuré, 4), to "art of sonorous silence" on VI.B.3: 77 ("Dès lors, la victoire est gagnée. Elle s'annonce, comme la fanfare d'un autre monde, par ces mots: `Maintenant je retourne à Tristan. A travers lui je te parlerai par l'art profond du silence sonore,'" Schuré, 41). That Schuré is the source is clear enough: all of the items in the notebook are accounted for and they come in the same order as in the book. But there is still a problem: in what form did Joyce read Schuré? The Wagner part of Schuré's book is only the first chapter, which was originally a review of the correspondence between Wagner and Wesendonck in the Revue des Deux Mondes of December 1, 1904.
We know that the publication of the correspondence created quite a stir among the Wagner cognoscenti, even among the ones based in Dublin. We know from a letter to Lord Howard de Walden quoted in Hone's biography that George Moore was reading a recent English translation of the letters between Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck in 1905 when he was finishing his most Wagnerian novel The Lake (Joseph Hone, The Life of George Moore, London: Victor Gollancz, 1936. 258-9). And in Vale, the last part of Hail and Farewell, Moore compares the "gratified" relationship between Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck which created Tristan und Isolde with Yeats's ungratified desire for Maud Gonne which ruined his poetry (George Moore, Hail and Farewell. Vale, London: Heinemann, 1914. 166-8). Vincent Deane solved the last problem by locating a translation of Schuré's book, published in 1918 in London with the rather uninspired title, Woman: The Inspirer (Edouard Schuré, Woman as Inspirer, tr. Fred Rothwell, London: The Power Book Co., 1918). All of the items can be traced in that edition in the form in which they appear in the notebooks: Joyce used the English translation of Schuré's book.
Tracing sources is only one element in the process of a radically historical study of the Wake notebooks. Another is studying the exact link between the source and Joyce's notes, in order to establish the reason(s) why Joyce was reading this particular text and what he planned to do with the material. Given the date of notebook VI.B.3, it seems safe to assume that Joyce was collecting material for his revision and extension of "Tristan and Isolde," the sketch he had drafted after finishing "Roderick O'Connor." The first draft of this sketch with its extension definitely includes plenty of material taken from VI.B.3, from the very first entry on the first page ("to circulate") to the very last page ("real glad"). But not all of the material that made it into the sketch has any connection with Tristan and Isolde and quite a few of the items taken from Schuré ended up in contexts that have little if anything to do with their original context.
Joyce's note-taking from Woman: the Inspirer is less erratic than at other occasions. Characteristically, given the precedents in Exiles and Ulysses, he seems to be especially interested in the role of Otto Wesendonck in the affair, and he notes the rather quaint phrases with which Schuré describes the role of the husband: "he formed the third/ in this noble intimacy/ (O.W.)" (VI.B.3: 69). This is based on the sentence: "He formed the third in this noble intimacy, wherein the master rose to lofty heights as he taught his gifted pupil" (Schuré tr, 12-13). Even more crucial is Joyce's use of the material in the first draft of "Tristan and Isolde" and the harvest here is quite limited. Only three items were used: on VI.B.3: 68, Joyce crossed "at the twilight hour" and on VI.B.3: 75 "lyrical blooms" and "our true home" in brown pencil and transferred them to "Tristan and Isolde." The first phrase is based on the translation of Mathilde Wesendonck's words noted down by Heintz: "What he composed in the morning he was in the habit of playing for me between five and six the same evening, or at the twilight hour" (Schuré tr, 12). The last phrase is taken from the fourth stanza of "In the Vinery," one of Mathilde's poems: "Well I know it! Sweet plantation,/ Tyrant fate we must obey;/ We have both another nation --/ Our true home is far away" (Schuré tr, 21). The "true home" that Joyce takes from the poem refers to marriage, of course. The second line was used in the earliest fair copy (there is no extant pencil draft) of "Tristan and Isolde" and it represents part of Schuré's description of the effect of Wesendonck's poetry on Wagner: "A strange, intoxicating kind of frenzy must have come over the composer at the sight of these delightful, lyrical blooms" (Schuré tr, 22). A sentence in the fair copy of the piece, "He promptly then elocutioned to her in decasyllabic iambic hexameter: Roll on, thou deep and darkblue ocean, roll!," describes the "handsome sixfoottwo rugger and soccer champion" answering the request for poetry of the "belle of Chapelizod." Between "to her" and "in decasyllabic" Joyce inserted "a favourite lyrical bloom" (JJA 56: 2). Just after the example of decasyllabic iambic hexameter, Joyce added the sentence: "The sea looked awfully pretty at that twilight hour." The context in the fair copy has the same sexually charged energy as the original in Schuré. The phrase "our true home," originally part of Wesendonck's poem, was inserted into the extension of "Tristan and Isolde" which was never included in Finnegans Wake (JJA 56: 6).
VI.B.3 offers a good occasion to show that Joyce's use of notebook material extended far beyond his immediate interests when he first encountered the material. The items taken from pages 66 to 77 were used over more than ten years, the earliest in March 1923 and the latest sometime in 1934. That Joyce was able to remember where the material came from is demonstrated by the fact that the largest group of items went into the Wagner and Wesendonck passage on FW 229-230. On the retyped version of the second section of II.1, Joyce added the sentence "until they would meet in Parisise after tourments of years" (JJA 51: 55). In a second revision on the same page Joyce struck out "they would meet" and replaced the words with "he would accoster as a wagoner would his wheesindonk at their trist" (JJA 51: 55). These Wagner elements do not come from VI.B.3, but at some point when Joyce was correcting the setting typescript and the proofs of this chapter, he went back to the notebook. The typescript and proofs are missing, but we have a number of pages on which Joyce noted down material for use in transition 22. Here we have notes taken from VI.B.3: "payment in music/ and personal company/ much admired/ by her husband/ [Shem] has recourse to/ poetry// in soul intimacy" (JJA 51: 153). All of these made it into "The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies." After the words "the suchess of sceaunonsceau" Joyce added: "a hadtobe heldin, thoroughly enjoyed by many so meny on block at Boyrut season and for their account ottorly admired by her husband in sole intimacy" (JJA 51: 192). Here Joyce combines two items which in Schuré apply to the relationship between Wagner and Otto Wesendonck and between Wagner and Mathilde respectively. The result is the disappearance of Wagner, the lover, and the reappearance of the Christian name of the husband, which Joyce had not written down in the notebook. The other items from VI.B.3 are combined with more Wagner lore into an elaborate Wagner passage:
He would si through severalls of sanctuaries so as to meet somewhere if produced on a demi panssion for his whole lofetime, payment in goo to slee music and poisonal comfany, following which, like Ipsey Secumbe, when he fingon to foil the fluter, she could have all the g.s.M. she moohooed after fore and rickwards to hersIF, including science of sonorous silence while he have recourse of course to poetry (JJA 51: 224, simplified; FW 230.17-24).Joyce manages to include all of the elements of the Otto, Mathilde, Wagner triangle: Otto was subsidizing the composer who was supposed to repay him with music and personal company, but instead started an affair with his wife. The demi-pension becomes passionate, the lifetime a time for love. Wagner has recourse to poetry while Mathilde is given the science of sonorous silence which was still an art of silence in Schuré. In Woman: the Inspirer Wagner has recourse to poetry only because it is the only way of not having to betray his friend Otto: "We must however do [Wagner] the justice to state that he was profoundly conscious of his obligations as Otto Wesendonck's friend. Caught between so imperious a duty and his ever-increasing love, he had recourse to poetry as his sole means of deliverance" (Schuré tr, 16). And the sonorous silence is in Tristan. According to a letter by Wagner to Mathilde which I have already quoted in the French translation of Schuré, Tristan was written for her: "I now return to Tristan. Through it I will speak to thee in the sublime art of sonorous silence" (Schuré tr, 35). What is interesting here is that Joyce refers to something that is in Schuré but not in VI.B.3: the manuscript of the overture to Die Walküre was dedicated to "g.s.M," gesegnet sei Mathilde. All of these items were added sometime in 1933.
In 1924, a year after noting down the material, Joyce used Schuré notes in the second watch of Shaun, the second chapter of book III. First, in the second draft of this chapter, Joyce added on the verso of page 15 of the notebook in which he wrote the early drafts of chapters 1 and 2, the following passage: "Tell me the name & address of any fellow that speaks you on the street and as sure as I'll come back I'll break his face for him" (JJA 57: 32). He then began to amplify this addition, one of the addenda was "rest assured," which he put before the sentence "I'll break his face." Although the context here is one of sexual jealousy, the meaning of the phrase in Schuré's quotation from a letter by Wagner has been displaced. Wagner wrote Wesendonck on 17 March 1853:
LADY,--God will henceforth protect you from my rude manners [...] If, in future, I impose upon myself more frequent acts of self-denial [...] rest assured that this is because I am determined, above all else, to obtain forgiveness (Schuré tr, 9-10).When he was revising the first typescript of the first two chapters of Book III in March 1926, Joyce added a number of lines to the sentence: "Some time soon shall we all be dead and happy together in the land of lost of time." He struck out the word "soon" and replaced it by: "very presently now when the clouds are dissipated after their forty years' shower." Here Joyce takes a reference to Wagner's temper (the English translation of Schuré's translation of Heintz has: "At times when he entered the room, visibly tired and dejected, after a short rest it was a relief to see the clouds that had gathered upon his brow suddenly dissipate and his countenance light up when he sat down at the piano") and applies it to the weather again. In both these cases the reference to Wagner and to the actual source of the notes seems to be irrelevant.
The rest of the Schuré items ended up in two completely different contexts: one in the footnote on p. 279, and the other in the letter on page 280. In both cases the reference to Wagner and Wesendonck is irrelevant except for the fact that Issy is the speaker on both occasions. These are also the last items from VI.B.3 to be used by Joyce, eleven years after he had noted them down.
For better or for worse, the Wake is a window on the world, it is a multilingual, polymorphous chaosmos in which Joyce was trying to put as much world as possible, and the notebooks were his filter. If we decide to ignore the notebooks--and maybe we have every right to do so--we can only continue to read as much of our world into the Wake: each reader will then inevitably create his or her own private Wake. It is only when we refer to the notebooks and the drafts that we can decide with some degree of probability which parts of the world went into the book and which parts probably did not. The difference between the two approaches is one that is familiar from recent practice in the performance of classical music. Either we attempt to play the Brandenburg Concertos or the Goldberg Variations or the Ninth Symphony in the way Bach or Beethoven would have wanted them performed, or we play them our own way. The two approaches are irreconcilable because we have set ourselves different tasks. In the latter case, we are in the aesthetic realm of the interesting. In the end it is for the most part a question of taste whether we prefer the Brandenburg Concertoes in disco or heavy-metal format or played on a synthesizer. In the former case, aesthetic considerations take a back seat: we will play the Goldbergs on a harpsichord because that is the instrument Bach wrote them for. In the first case we can be proven wrong, in the second case we can simply insist on our own superior good taste.
Neither David Hayman nor the ITEM scholars would disagree with me on this, I think, but where we do differ is in the evaluation of the material found in the notebooks and most centrally in the status of all the pre-texts, drafts and notebooks. I do not believe that the notebooks are private documents in more than the most pedestrian of meanings. The Finnegans Wake notebooks are not diaries or journals, although they do contain personal material such as the occasional dream or bit of conversation, or address, or telephone number. They are also not a writer's journal: they do not record the history of the writing of Finnegans Wake, although such a history would be impossible to write without access to the notebooks. On a more theoretical level, I do not believe in the concept of a private form of writing which is implied in the reference of the ITEM school to the linguistic philosophy of Derrida. A radical and historical philology does not deny the existence of Derrida's strangely mystical and paradoxically metaphysical "possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of semio-linguistic communication; in writing, which is to say in the possibility of its functioning being cut off, at a certain point, from its `original' desire-to-say-what-one-means [vouloir-dire] and from its participa-tion in a saturable and constraining context." A radical philology simply does not see its relevance. I don't think there is such a thing as a private language in this fundamental sense and if there were, we could not say anything about it. The French minister should not be let off the hook that easily: we must read his "Affaire fiscale Médecin" in the context of other statements and texts, and although there is no evidence that he was not using some kind of private code, there is even less reason to assume that he was. Isn't a prime-minister's diary a more or less public document? Why are the words "affaire" and "médecin" in the singular? Is the French prime minister as bad with the spelling of plurals and singulars as the former vice-president of the US? Why does the last word have a capital letter? From the evidence provided by Ferrer it seems to me that the prime minister has quite some explaining to do. If we take Ferrer's suggestion seriously, we end up on the ethics-free realm of Paul de Man's philology, where nobody can be held responsible for anything he or she ever wrote or said because it is language itself that is speaking and writing.
In contrast to this, I believe that what happens "before and outside of every semio-linguistic commmunication" belongs to what Kant has called the intellectual intuition in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, that whereof we cannot speak. A radical philology limits the inquiry to the original desire-to-say of any form of writing and to its participation in a saturable and constraining context. If it did not, it would forfeit all relevance. Take away intention and context, and the only thing left to say about a text is that it can mean anything at all.
The prize one has to pay for this insight is considerable. A radically philological approach to the Finnegans Wake notebooks is only possible after a significant amount of study. This is especially important in a context in which it is quite possible to do graduate studies in literature without ever hearing about problems of textual genesis. The enormous amount of material in the case of the Wake notebooks is the next hurdle, and it should be obvious that both these constraints make it almost impossible to do this kind of work as a Ph.D. thesis. And this is not the end: the pressure on young academics to publish quickly and regularly, makes work on the notebooks effectively impossible. Who can afford to invest a couple of years' work in a project that may only yield a twenty-page article? A formalist or feminist or deconstructionist reading of the Wake requires a lot less time and energy and yields much more marketable results.
On the one hand this may explain why so few young people are interested in the notebooks and on the other why non-academics play such a crucial role. It is therefore a welcome surprise that there are still students who are willing to work on the notebooks. The reason is one that has caused humankind to stop walking on all fours: not so much curiosity itself, but the feeling that we experience when we find an explanation for something that is puzzling us. The discrepancy between the amount of energy expended and the results obtained is forgotten. I have personally sensed this when I spent far too much of my time ploughing through several months' worth of Irish Times issues, reading every single line on every single page of every single newspaper. The waste of more than hundred hours was made up by finding out exactly who Frisky Shorty was (FW 039.18 et passim: he was a good friend of Boston Slim). And this type of discovery differs fundamentally from that of the literary critic who finds a thought or a formula to describe a poem or a novel, or who manages to apply a fashionable theory to a text. The results of such interpretations are more or less interesting. Findings that derive from a radical philological approach belong to a different category: they are true in a different sense for the simple reason that they can be proven wrong. That is why a small number of Wake critics are turning to the notebooks: we are doing a type of research that is falsifiable and therefore scientific in Karl Popper's sense of the word. And it also explains why a sophisticated postmodernist critic such as Daniel Ferrer may suddenly find himself being "absolutely certain."
We are only at the beginning of a serious study of the notebooks and an enormous amount of work still remains to be done. The radically philological and philologically radical approach may well constitute, as a younger representative of the French school once told me "a theoretical dead-end." But I prefer to hope it signals the end of a certain type of theory and the beginning of a practice that will require the concerted efforts of scores of Joyceans on both sides of the Atlantic for most of the next decade.