The comportment of notebooks to a project of writing is obviously not exclusively of concern to Joyce. Because of the heterogeneity of materials subsumed therein, Maurice Blanchot has called Kafka's diaries "the very movement of the experience of writing" (Blanchot 1982, 57 fn.1). Beyond any categorizable diversity of material, these notebooks register the efforts taken to write, the work that is indissociable from writing. This appellation might not be inapplicable to the Wake notebooks in that they are likewise heterogeneous and likewise preparatory. One finds in them notes taken from a diverse field of other books; notes taken from newspaper entries (Geert Lernout and Vincent Deane have done interesting work here); lists of words foreign and otherwise (Laurent Milesi has done some remarkable work on this topic); drafts of Wakean neologisms; names of friends and places, malapropisms; notes on writing (such as the notes on narratology and the 1,001 Nights in Scribbledehobble) and early drafts of passages. Such a list is endless, or virtually so.
If Joyce was, as he claimed, a mere "cut-and-paste man" and if the notebooks reveal the vastness of the terrain Joyce appropriated from, then the Wake is in a sense plagiarizes from its own textual archival wake. The genetic critic--in tracing out constellations of appropriation--would be asking the same question Shaun asks of Shem: "how few or how many of the most venerated public impostures, how very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in the first place by this morbid process from his pelagiarist pen?" (FW: 182.01-3). The notebooks and drafts, pre-texts if you will, deviously lead up to an achieved book which, à la fois and in turn, recalls these pre-texts, bears their imprint as a precarious trace of its own enunciation. Thus it would be stunningly naïve to call the achieved text hermetic since its very textuality is opened out to a logographic plurality of traces. Rather than either work or progress, the genetic question concerns the vicissitudes of articulation: how a text comes to be articulated amidst the excess of its textuality. The question I will thus limit myself to is: how are the traces pre-texts articulable in the achieved work and does this articulation affect the possibility of textual achievement?
Notes form an archive, but not of a motivated progress or an archeological progression, but rather of a helter-skelter accretion, a movement of writing. The progress suggested at one stage of genetic development is belied the progress achieved at the subsequent stage. Ferrer phrases this groping movement nicely: "Each variant, however minimal it may be, rewrites a history that leads up to it--inscribes itself as history and in a history that it constitutes at the same time" (Ferrer, 97). Notebook entries appear as discrete or quantal entities in that they appear to be generating a work, of which the achieved book is but one possibility. Then in order to read the notebooks and the drafts along with the achieved book--to read both up and downstream--one has to be prepared to read a conflict between imperatives: a conflict between achievement and the achieved. This mysterious text that is somehow a function of both the achieved book and its archive is thus perhaps contingent upon this conflict. In the essay "Le journal intime et le récit" Blanchot writes:
One has the feeling... that the fragments constitute anonymous and obscure traces of the book which seeks to realize itself, but only to the extent that they do not have any visible kinship with the existence from which they seem to have sprung, nor with the work [oeuvre] to which they form the approach (Blanchot 1959, 258).Blanchot thus is arguing that the notes are never fulfilled and the book is never an achievement. The book is always pending. The case of Joseph Joubert is exemplary for Blanchot here: a work of writing that only leads to more writing, an oeuvre always in progress. Joubert only wrote notes for his literary project, his only writing is preparatory. Indeed one could almost say that Joubert dispensed with the work as an achieved artifact in favor of a perpetual perpetuation of writing. In this way Joubert is for Blanchot the first version of Mallarmé, a first intimation of a livre à venir.
This is all well and good, but how does this relate to Joycean genetic criticism? I would like to examine now the evolution of a brief passage. This sort of reading might recall David Hayman's "A Sentence in Progress." But instead of emphasizing the evolution of a passage as an evolving articulation, I hope to show that the articulation proceeds, by swerves and bends, as a disattenuation of a palimpsest. Evolution is a sloppy accretion.
My example shall start in the B. 1 notebook (fall 1923-fall 1924) where there is an early draft of the opening of the Haveth Childers Everywhere passage: "Your H is not a / warlike man / I am brought up / under an old act / of EDW III" (VI.B. 1: 114). On the preceding page is a swath that later appeared in the Braintrusters declaration immediately preceding the "Haveth Childers Everywhere" episode ("jar of porter & put/ your H down before/ it while you x/ were rampaging/ the roads?" [VI.B. 1: 113]; this becomes "Was it him that suborned a son of his to go to go and buy the usual jar of porter and set it down before the wife while him and his lagan loves were rampaging the roads" [JJA 58: 76; additions not noted]). These are the only lengthy drafts in the immediate vicinity, the other material winds up in II.4 and III.4.
The first draft of the Braintrusters dialogue and "Haveth Childers Everywhere"--which Danis Rose dates at November-December 1924--does not explicitly contain either of these entries. This draft is actually the third draft of the first portion of the chapter which bleeds into the first sentence of HCE. This is typical of the convoluted writing of this chapter, as some portions were redrafted while others were being written for the first time. The opening at this stage stands as "--Sir, to you? I am known throughout the world as a cleanliving man..." (FDV: 245; JJA 57: 55). This passage might have been suggested by the notebook entries, with the not-warlike man named as a cleanliving man.
The B.1 opening and the Braintrusters swath figure in the redrafted pages of the last few pages of this draft stage. This redraft was probably composed during the same period and is, more or less, the first complete draft: "--Sir, to you! I am brought under an old act of Edward the First, but I am known throughout the world wherever good English is spoken as a cleanliving man" (FDV: 245; JJA 57: 76-7). To go upstream through the archive is also, apparently, to go downstream through the Edwardian lineage.
In the third draft, the Edwardian reference is excised: "Sir to you. I am brought up under an old camel act of Edward the First Sitric Silkenbeard and of his dynasty now out of print but I am known throughout the world wherever good English is spoken" (JJA 58: 95; deletions are underlined and substitutions are in italic). The passage has now been invaded by Danish and by a Dane: gammel is the Danish word for old and Sitric Silkenbeard led the Danes to an ignominious defeat at the battle of Clontarf in 1014. The subsequent draft, the fair copy, rearranges the dynasty slightly: "--Sir to you. I am bubub brought up under a camel act of a dynasty long since out of print, the first of Sitric Silkenbeard wherever a good English is spoken" (JJA 58: 127). And so what we have discovered in this brief movement through the early drafts is a chain of substitution between two Edwards and a Dane. Before moving forward I would like to briefly comment upon the variegated royal histories which have been suggested in the draft evolution thus far.
The argument of the Haveth Childers Everywhere passage is the mediated presentation of HCE through the host of Shaun's supine body. This notion of mediation might not have occurred to Joyce in the earliest stages of the draftings. However even in the B.1 sequence, Joyce was already concerned with a first person account, and moreover a first person account mediated by the intervention of a historical figure since HCE's revitalization is attributed to an act of Edward III. Subsequently this revitalization came to be attributed to Edward's grandfather, Edward I. Both were powerful monarchs and both unsuccessfully tried to conquer Scotland, although Edward grand-père did manage to completely subdue Wales. Edward petit-fils attempted to remake England into the powerful country it was under his grandfather after the ineffectual reign of his father Edward II. Additionally the Hundred-Years War started under his reign. Thus one could take these Edwards to be figures of English imperialism against the Celts, and more specifically of a failed English imperialism. However despite the failure of territorial conquest, there is a suggestion of imperialistic success in the redraft as HCE admits to be known "wherever a good English is spoken." HCE is to be known wherever the King's English holds court. His articulation can be known only in the tongue of the unsuccessful invader.
This imperialistic success despite failure perhaps proffers a conceptual link between the Edwards and Sitric Silkenbeard. Despite the defeat of the Danes at Clontarf, the battle is traditionally ascribed to be the mark of the end of the Irish dynasty with the death of Brian Boru and his descendants. As the distinguished yet excitable historian Seumas MacManus said: "Had [Brian] or his family lived the chance is that... they would have founded an hereditary monarchy which would have put an end to disunion... and provided one of the strongest bulwarks against the Norman invasion which was soon to fall upon the country" (MacManus, 282). In a very specific and limited sense one could consider Sitric to be an antecedent to the Edwards as an aggressive monarch whose failures in territorial conquest were historically supplemented by an eventual submission of the Celts. Furthermore the use of the word camel--which while ostensibly good English, actually suggests the Danish word gammel--buttresses the linguistic success of the Danes; just as HCE's reliance upon English suggests a victory of English imperialism. And so the movement upstream through the archive remains coeval with a movement downstream through the Edwards back to Sitric.
References to the Vikings occur throughout several notebooks. For example the early pages of B. 16 (contemporaneous with the first round of draftings for III.3) contain references to Brian Boru and Sitric Silkenbeard (VI.B 16: 4-11). Many scattered references can also be found in B. 7--which was in use for quite some time, possibly through 1925. This notebook--even by Joyce's eccentric standards--is remarkably heterogeneous. A substantial portion of notes concern Viking matters, perhaps reflecting no small feat of research undertaken by Joyce. There are references to Clontarf (VI.B. 7: 57), and to Sitric, (VI.B. 7: 170) amongst many, many others. Also included is a list of English words of Norse descent, (VI.B. 7: 159) which is vaguely reminiscent of the lengthy lists in Mallarmé's bizarre work on English philology, Les mots anglais. Mallarmé was fascinated with English precisely because it is formidably open to the encroachments of other languages. Joyce is perhaps similarly preoccupied with linguistic infiltration during his research into territorial conquests. Indeed the "Haveth Childers Everywhere" episode is not without a few linguistic miscegenations. For example again, the word camel, is an inflection between the tongues of two different invaders. There is perhaps a chain of substitution between the invaders since one could translate an Edward or three into a Sitric and camel into old via a commodious vicus of Danish recirculation. The tongue of one aggressor is thus confusable with another. Of course, the linguistic substitution is possible in the final text without recourse to the archive and the historical substitution of monarchs is possible only by examining the archive.
Moving back to the evolution and allusive diffusion of the opening of this passage, the name of English itself comes to be miscegenated (which it already is as it originally named a Teutonic peoples, the Angles). In the second fair copy--which is mixed with pages from the preceding typescript (Rose dates this at April 1926)--Joyce changed "wherever a good English is spoken" to "wherever my good English is spoken" (JJA 58: 234). In the subsequent stage, the second typescript (May 1926), the only change in the passage under question is the holograph replacement of "English" with "Allenglisch" (JJA 58: 267). By suggesting the German word for Old English, Altenglisch, Joyce suggests--like Mallarmé--an already impure and peregrinistic nature of so-called good English. This suggestion is buttressed a few stages in next stage upon the genetic ladder--in the oversized typescript revision of December 1928-January 1929--with the addition of the word "Angleslachsen" (JJA 58: 394), Anglo-Saxon, the language preparatory to English. This word also suggests the Angles who were not entirely identical to the Saxons, although there was no small degree of miscegenation even then. Through translinguistic punning Wakean English is opened out to the babelian exteriority in which it is already imbricated. That which now names English in the text--"Allenglisches Angleslachsen"--is thus a partial rebus of the convoluted evolution of a peoples and of their language.
The oversized typescript is interesting not just for its additions but also for its format. Because his eyesight fluctuated from poor to non-existent at this time, Joyce was unable to work directly on the proofs for transition 15 and so a large format typescript was prepared. He describes this to Harriet Shaw Weaver in a letter dated December 2, 1928:
I had them retype in legal size, twice or three times this [letter], with triple spacing, section three of Shaun [i.e. III.3], and this, when it has been read to me by three or four people, I shall try to memorise as to pages etc... and so hope to be able to find the places where I can insert from the twenty notebooks which I have filled up since I wrote this section. The notebooks, written when I was suffering from my eyes or lately, are quite legible to me as they were scribbled with thick black pencil, but the other ones, about thirteen, I am relying on my improved sight to help me over (LI: 276).These notebooks would probably include B.'s 17 and 18, the latter contains Norse notes reminiscent of B. 7. Also used at this draft stage would be the following notebooks which were written in a generous hand: the second half of B.'s 4 and 24 and all of B. 29. In the letter, Joyce suggests that this draft level--one in which Joyce had to rely upon the assistance of others--was composed by gathering together elements from diverse sources, from both earlier drafts and also a range of notebooks, some dedicated explicitly to this passage and others not. In his weakened state Joyce assumed the role of a general marshaling material into the terrain of the latest draft.
This draft now reads: "--Amtsadam, Sir, to you! Here we are again. I am bubub brought up under a camel act of dynasties long out of print, the first of Sitrik Silken- Shitric Shilkanbeard, but I am known throughout the world wherever my good Allenglisches Angleslachsen is spoken by Sall and Will from Augustiananus to Ergastulus" (JJA 58: 394). Here one sees the entry of scatological associations through the lisping-effect added to the enunciation Sitric's name. The lisp is peculiar because it adds a speech impediment to HCE which is normally ascribed--so to speak--to Sylvia Silence. HCE's infamous stutter is already in place here with the "bubub brought up." The scatological persists in the change from Augustian to August-anus. This also means, through Latin--another formidable precursor to English and another dominating and domineering language--that HCE is well-known from the imperium (augustanus) to the prison-house (ergastulum). The addition of Latin thus complicates the already-confused dynastic and imperialistic genealogies suggested here. There are traces of yet another linguistic invader within the text.
The next two stages contain minimal alterations to the opening passage. Moving then to the multi-amanuensis typescript (August 1929) we find this sententious fragment in its final form:
--Amtsadam, Sir to you! Eternest cittas heil! Here we are again. I am bubub brought up under a camel act of dynasties long out of print, the first of Shitric Shilkanbeard (or is it Owllaugh MacAuscullpth the Thord?), but, in pontofacts massimust, I am known throughout the world wherever my good Allenglisches Angleslachsen is spoken by Sall and Will from Augustanus to Ergastulus (JJA 59: 86).The monarch to whom the camel act is ascribed is rendered undecidable between our friend Shitric and now Owllaugh MacAscullpth. This new character suggests Ausculph Mac Torcall, the king of Dublin in whose time Dublin became subject to English rule. (McHugh) The phonetic rendering of his name: all laugh, suggests a deposed and tragicomic leader, not unlike the hapless, befuddled and yet vitally important Roderick O'Connor. The name also, not surprisingly, suggests Olaf, a relatively generic Viking name. But in the context of the Hibernian metropolis it could allude to Olaf the White, the first Norse king of Dublin. And so Owllaugh MacAscullpth--in suggesting both Ausculph Mac Torcall and Olaf the White--continues the ambivalent articulation of the invader by imbricating the name of the invader with the invaded. The Norse influence continues with Thor. Interestingly the word Thord recalls the discarded Edward III from the very first draft of the passage. Perhaps this is an inadvertent slip in the evolution of this passage, but it does show the text feeding off its own wake, rearticulating, if only tangentially, a discarded trace.
Although the camel act vacillates between at least two names, Shitric and Owllaugh, each name acts as an index of a displacement of power. Sitric loses the battle but in so doing eliminates Brian, his enemy's centralizing force, and Mac Torcall stands as the leader whose powers become merely ceremonial as they are transferred over to England through the machinations of an English king and an English pope. This papal involvement is buttressed by the exclamation pontofacts massimust which suggests Pontifex Maximus, which like the camel act is invoked as a token of the validity of the speaking subject. These "old acts of dynasties long past" thus remark the evisceration of an Irish nation which never really became a nation as such, except in myth and imagination.
At the earliest stages of HCE's monologue he is brought up through an act of Edward III, a king who had restored his grandfather's power after the hapless rule of the interim Edward II. This enabling legislation is old, it has effectively disappeared, yet it remains in the traces left in the marks of the invaders Sitric and Owllaugh MacAscullpth the Thord. Thus the restitution of HCE's voice in this passage remains encumbered by the traces of various invaders. Indeed one could say--because of the camel act--that HCE's voice is prosopopoeically enunciated under the auspices of invaders. As additional references develop (as Danish and Latin begins to be added) a singular dynasty is removed from the text. HCE--even as he begins to speak, and even as Joyce augmented his speech over the years--remains defunct and remains known only as the traces left behind in his wake, the excesses which remain as more material is added to this brief segment. And so HCE's voice is heard through piously forged palimpsests of dynasties--some effaced such as the Edwards--contending over the body and tongue of Ireland.
In a sense then the draft evolution of this passage mirrors its subject matter: invading material subsumed into a work in progress. Remember that the notebooks and the drafts form a pre-text, so to speak, for the achieved text, just as HCE forms a pre-text for Mamalujo's investigations in this passage, if not for all of Finnegans Wake. Just as the putative invaders of Ireland are subsumed, and the Irish nation subalterned, notebook entries and various historical data invade the drafts as the drafts evolve and diffuse. In this progress the work feeds upon its invaders, its pre-texts preparatory to an enunciation. But this enunciation--if you would recall HCE's somewhat counter-productive defense speech in "Haveth Childers Everywhere"--is not so much the enunciation of a sovereign as it is the mark of that which has already disappeared. The genetic critic is thus in Mamalujovian predicament: attempting to re-member and re-constitute that which has already disappeared through then often confusing and seemingly gratuitous effluvia of the enunciation. This excess would prohibit achievement as such because there is-in the gradual accumulation of in-scribings upon the palimpsest--a manifold of traces which are not completely subsumable to the legibility of any single textual stage, even the so-called achieved text. The Wakean articulation is thus made through something: the articulation is already an excess of articulatory possibilities. The articulation is thus haunted by its pre-texts, it stands as an excess of textuality over any single text.
Maurice Blanchot, Le livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959, 1986. My translation.
--.The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982.
Daniel Ferrer, "La toque de Clementis," Genesis 6 (1994): 93-106. My translation.
David Hayman, "From Finnegans Wake: A Sentence in Progress," PMLA, LXIII (1958): 136-54.
Seumas MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race, Old Greenwich: Devin-Adair, 1921.