Finnegans Wake

James Joyce

Description

As he was finishing Finnegans Wake, Joyce proclaimed, "I have discovered I can do anything with language I want." Indeed, with his last book, which took him seventeen years to write, Joyce takes literary modernism to new territories by harvesting from as many as eighty different languages to create a wordscape that is both precise and impressionistic, a work that is intellectual, avant-garde, but also sad, funny, earthy and brimming with humanity.This edition includes an introduction by Dr Sam Slote of Trinity College Dublin.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 02 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714550213
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Finnegans Wake
James Joyce
Based on the 1939 Edition
ALMA CLASSICS
an imprint of
ALMA BOOKS LTD
3 Castle Yard
Richmond
Surrey TW10 6TF
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
Finnegans Wake first published in 1939
This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2020
Introduction © Sam Slote, 2020
Extra Material © Alma Books Ltd
Cover design by Will Dady
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN : 978-1-84749-800-7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
Introduction by Sam Slote
Finnegans Wake
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part IV
Chapter 1
Extra Material
James Joyce’s Life
James Joyce’s Works
Finnegans Wake An Introduction of Sorts

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegneations. Tieckle. They lived und laughed ant loved end left.
(18.17–21)
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is many things, but it is not always easy to agree about which things it may or may not be. Lacking a readily discernible narrative, it is written in a series of multi-layered, pan-linguistic word constructions (the word pun does Joyce a disservice). In terms of basic critical orientation, the Wake is certainly not written in English – that is, “in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language in any sinse of the world” (83.10–12). Perhaps it would be safer to say that it is written from English, as it includes many different languages, “like engels opened to neuropeans” (519.01) – thereby returning English to the Babelian maelstrom from whence it came. After careful analysis, Laurent Milesi estimates eighty languages in the Wake . * This multi-linguistic dispensation seems like it would be enough to put the Wake beyond the reach of pretty much everybody. Yet, if Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s most obscure book, it could also well be his most democratic. That is, its very difficulty acts as a kind of leveller: we are all amateurs, all in the dark, all abcedminded when reading this particular claybook.
Unsurprisingly, reactions have been varied. Concluding his review of Finnegans Wake for the Observer , Oliver St John Gogarty – more than likely still stung from being tagged as Ulysses ’s Buck Mulligan – wrote: “Perhaps it is wrong to look for a meaning where there is every meaning. It may be unmodern to expect sense. […] This is the most colossal leg-pull in literature since McPherson’s Ossian. Mr Joyce has had his revenge.” * Taking an altogether different, groovier line is the character Asher in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Divine Invasion : “I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until a century after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work.” * These two characterizations are not actually that discordant: both Gogarty and Dick see the Wake as being somehow vast and ambiguous and mesmerizing, laden with “every meaning”, whether this pan-galactic meaning be nugatory or prophetic.
Despite its immediate difficulties and opacities and possible profundities, Finnegans Wake is not inaccessible, and can be read and enjoyed. The trick is that one has to learn to read all over again and acquiesce to some confusion and uncertainty along with any sense that may be gleaned. The secret is simply to tolerate a little incomprehension. Many people find the Wake funny, even if they can’t quite understand it. Reading it aloud does certainly help – not because the spoken text reveals the one true accurate meaning, but rather because the tension between the spoken and the read, the “sound sense sympol” (612.29), can allow for new perspectives. Take the above passage, which comes about midway through the first chapter and would seem to articulate some of the thoughts of a first-time reader as they are starting their way through this most strange book. It is one of many passages throughout the Wake that seem to taunt the reader with the book’s unreadability, but it is also one of many passages that seem to, somehow, encapsulate in brief the book’s basic form and motifs. The passage begins with an imperative – stoop or stop – as it asks the absent-minded reader a very reasonable question: can you read this book? But there are some overtones to the words in this passage, which is part of the book’s modus operandi of apparent illegibility. The word “abcedminded” suggests the alphabet (and, indeed, “ abecede ” was the Anglo-Saxon word for “alphabet”) and this would connect with the word “allaphbed”, which also suggests the word “alphabet”. So a tautology is now suggested: if we are alphabetically minded, we would see such curious signs in this book’s… alphabet. This is a very good caution against an all too common mode of misreading the Wake : because there is always so much that the reader can’t understand (at least at first), there is a danger of focusing only on the few things that one immediately recognizes, and then making the assumption that the Wake can only be about those things. There are certainly all sorts of references and allusions within the Wake – to Shakespeare, to Irish history, to fish, to food, to fables, to Freud, to France, to Huckleberry Finn , to physics, to alchemy, and so on – and while any of these can be important, no one of them is necessarily paramount. The Wake ’s aboutness is multiple and diffuse, and so if one is “abcedminded”, all one will see is the alphabet. Or, as it says elsewhere in the Wake , “Wipe your glosses with what you know” (304.N3).
Another suggestive overtone lurks within the word “allaphbed”: Allah . And this would play off the parenthetical phrase “since We and Thou had it out already”, since in the Koran “We” refers to God and “Thou” to His messenger Mohammed. The Koran is, of course, a text written in a different alphabet. And with different languages: lurking within the word “rede”, besides the English word “read”, is the German word “ Rede ”, meaning a speech or address, thereby confusing the visual with the auditory in the confusion of two languages. But, even with these differences, whether seen or heard, “It is the same told of all”: amidst difference and differentiation, there is also some kind of commonality. And this commonality is expressed as “Miscegenations on miscegenations”, mixtures upon mixtures, layers upon layers. And this comes down to: “They lived und laughed ant loved end left”, which is a perfect summary of human life, perhaps only bested by this simple line from the Wake ’s close, the plot of all human existence, “First we feel. Then we fall” (627.11). The Wake , then, tells a human story – a story of humans both in the particular and in the general; it is an “ IMAGINABLE ITINERARY THROUGH THE PARTICULAR UNIVERSAL ” (260.R3–8).
There are two enduring interpretative commonplaces apropos the Wake , but these are certainly not without their detractors. The first is that the Wake is a dream, and the second is that it is a universal history. Both rubrics derive from comments that Joyce made, and also have some textual support. However, Joyce’s claims are more equivocal than might be assumed. For the dream, the major source is Joyce’s claim in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, his patron from 1926, that “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot”. * Joyce does not explicitly mention dreaming here, merely that a “great part of human existence” cannot be rendered in a language ordained by logic. Another comment from a letter to Weaver is even more equivocal: “My brother says that having done the longest day in literature I am now conjuring up the darkest night.” * Here, Joyce is simply conveying Stanislaus’s judgement rather than actually endorsing such a pronouncement. * The dream hypothesis only seems helpful, and actually creates further interpretative problems: is the Wake written in a style that reflects what Freud called “dreamwork”, or, somewhat more literally, is it supposed to be the representation of the dream, or dreams, experienced by a specific and perhaps even identifiable individual or group of individuals? * As Derek Attridge astutely notes, “The trouble about appealing to such a description to explain what the book is about is that it poses exactly the same problems as those which, on a wider canvas, it is being used to solve.” * As with dreams themselves, the dream hypothesis only seems to deliver a deeper profundity.
In terms of the Wake being a universal history, after Ulysses was published, Harriet Shaw Weaver asked Joyce what he would write next, and he answered, “I think I will write a history of the world.” * And Joyce combined the idea of the Wake as a dream and the idea of it as a universal history when he proclaimed that he had “conceived of his book as the dream of old Finn, lying in death beside the River Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world – past and future – flow through his mind like the flotsam on the river of life”. * This combination of the oneiric and the universal