Warning Concerning Copyright Restrictions The Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted materials. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research. If electronic transmission of reserve material is used for purposes in excess of what constitutes "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS· OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS For over roo years Oxford World's Classics have brought • readers closer to the world's great literature. Now with over 700 titles--from the 4,000-year-old myths ofMesopotamia to the twentieth century's greatest novels-::--the series makes available . JAMES JOYCE lesser-known as well as celebrated writing:. The p_ockei-sized hardbacks ofthe early years contained ·! -Finnegans: Wake introductions by Virginia Woolf; T. S. Eliot, Graham.Greene, - . ' . and other literary figures which enriched the experience ofreading. ·.·~ Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and . reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry,. Edited by· religion, philosophy, and politics. -Each edition includes percepti~e ·•·· ·, \ ' I. commentary and essential background information to meet the ROBBERT:JAN HENKES ·. changing needs_ ofreaders. ERIK BINDERVOET and FINN FORDHAM I '/ ·I . '-- OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS INTRODUCTION IN 1922, with Ulysses finally launched and rapidly becoming both a succes de scandale and succes d'estime, a buoyant James Joyce could concentrate his thoughts on his next work. All his fictions had so far been written in different styles, each one a departure: the short stories · of Dubliners, then the bildungsroman A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young· Man and then a vast comic novel that reinvented realism: Ulysses. So what was there left to do? What genre could be reinvented? By 1924, he had developed the radical innovation: this was not---or not simply-in terms of its genre, but rather in the fundamental field of language itsel£ For the next fourteen years, he would take the material of language and twist it into strange and comical shapes to achieve ends beyond those of everyday usage. There. would be continuities with the earlier work: Ireland and its relation to European politics and to Catholicism; ·Dubliners and their voices, their humour and half-conscious yearnings, and plenty of narrative. But the language would brt,:ak rules of spelling and syntax: words would be glued and fused together to make new hybrid forms. Prose would break out into \· the rhythms of song. It would be musical and onomatopoeic, able to evoke the sound of thunder or _of someone falling downstairs: bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner~ ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur­ r nuk! (3.15-17)1 The words could pun on names-so that Shakespeare (maker· of worlds at the Globe theatre) is renamed 'Shapesphere' (295.4); and the Celtic Twilight, the Irish literary movement of the late nineteenth century, is satirically reworked as the 'cu/tic twalette' (344.12). The language~ like Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, would be thick with what ·Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass described as portman­ teau words, looking like nonsense and yet meaningful---often densely packed with sense. The motivation for this alternative langua,ge has mystified readers; some explaining it as aJanguage of the night, of 1 References to Finnegans Wake are traditionally, as here, given with page and line L number and we have followed this throughout our edition. · Vlll I -,itroductz"on . Introduction IX dreams and the subconscious The b k . responses. It has been describ~d as: oo as a whole provokes strong St Kevin, and Mamalujo (that is, the Gospellers Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John layered onto the 'Four Masters', compilers of the the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained, evolvin . .· seventeenth-century Irish Annals). This world history was predom­ all human myths and t es· or . ~ h~mamty, an ark to contain of a book; a little Neg~~ d~nc g~mc, ~1~mg with its own life; a cold pudding inantly male and Irish, drawing on legendary and historical figures, h. e, music, a war on lang h but the treatment was fantastical, ahistorical, and comic. In the first mac me; the most profoundly antifascist b k uage; a yp~rmnesic wars; a wonderful game.2 oo produced between the two sketch, Roderick, the last king of all Ireland, is fused with the figure of an innkeeper who, after his customers have reluctantly departed, ~~r the Joycean Fritz Senn, Finne a . drinks everything they have left; then slumps onto his throne, mum..: It ts also what it does with . 'g, nds Wake ts what we do with •it. But us. we pro uce a w k b h bling an American 1,11usic-hall song. This sketch of a proverbial loser but we also steer by the Wak th a e Y t e way we steer Th. e at we produce ' would en!i up on p. 380, not far beyond the centre of the book, as if IS mtroduction is aimed in . everything grows ~ut and towards:it. Roderick_features again later, Finnegans Wake for the first time and part ~t t?ose w~o might open morphed into a new form: 'Dodderictbgonoch Wrack' (498.23). At then, given its rep:µtation for bein . perceive It as ~ kmd of chaos and the new work's inception.audits posit,onal centre, this sketch serves the shel£ It therefore provide t mco~prehens1ble, put jt back on to answer that difficult questlqn; what is Finnegans Wake basically book. Those who find th . ~ alnc orage m some basic aspects of the e m1tta appeara f d" . about? Samuel Beckett wrote ~hat its ''w:riting is not about something, appealing and fun should also fi d . ~ce o tsorder immediately it is that something itself' .3 Ney~rtheles~; one half of Joyce's marathon features that it seems to sha ~h It use ul to have a grasp on those re wit novels s h b • - music-hall version of world hi~tory qui be said to concern the.comic p Iot, and a cast of primary and ' UC as a as1c theme and doddering fall of a man from. fame ~nd fortune to rack and ruin-:­ these r:nakes it easier to explore t~eecondary characters. Knowledge of from 'Rex' to 'wreck'. Many ~~~si~ns C:r thi~ fall ~re ;etoid-there are where the boundaries are less fixe open waters ofJoyce's word-play, falis int~\~leep, into sin, into' a~iver, qff a ladder, iii to conf~sion,. of 'wonderful game' are endl I d' . d a~d all the ltttle details of the . ess y 1vertmg and fi the British Empire; and there are falls due to rumour, to assassination su .vers1ve of these basic asp t ' moreover, requently b . ec s. and bankruptcy-but th~ faH that ~e~ms ·to be emb~died o~ every · ,· p~ge of Finnegans Wake, in its very la~guage, is a fall out of reality 'th fi · . ·. , . and into language. Out of the.theme of the fall, Joyce extended his . e all . .. is retaled early in bed and later on life' (3.15-18) sketches and developed another key aspect of the book to balance it Before Joyce started proper he e . '. and which concerns resurrection. · versal_ history'. Having writ;en th:v1saged his_ new work as a 'uni- . ,:·' structured around the events of H co°!plex history of a single day, towards.this other extrem h" omer s Odyssey, Joyce was moving 'The humphriad ofthatfoll and rise' (53.9) . e-a 1story of the Id · t h e mght and structured around ..d f . wor ' as seen through The sketch that Joyce wrote n~~t, afte~ a trip to southern England. in an idea ascribed to the e1· ht anh I ea o history as a cyclical pattern - · g eent -centur It r h" ' · 1923, detailed another fall, this ti~e .of~ character with a ridiculous He began to take notes c.or th" ·. k y a tan p tlosopher Vico. • u ts newwor late· · d name, Humphrey Chimpde~, Earwicker. Joyce took the surname· 1923, he had drafted five sketche .. h b m 1922 an 'by October from a guide-book to Bognor, which he had just visited, and iie took . ·). - ... ·-· --· . -. as: Roderick O'Conor Tristan s& ;ac Ida _out two_pages Iong,.known the initials from H. C. E. Childers, a Liberal member of the British . 7;, . ' 2 . • • • ' an . so e; St Patrick and the Druid, parliament in the 1880s, known, in satirical magazines, as 'Here These descriptmns ~ome from the foll . , Campbell and Rob.inson 13· Hele c· owmg sourc~s, all m the Select Bibliography· Comes Everybody Childers'. From an Irish focus and the fall of Demin . N b ' ' ne ixous, quoted m H 6· · L g, 471, a okov, 71;Joyce quoted inB I assan, II , Jean Cassou in a medieval Irish king, Joyce has shifted to something more modern etters ofJames Joyce, Vol l p d3T De 'd auer e, 159;Joyce, quoted in Ellmann ;82· 129; Levin, . · · ! · ' m a, 147; Philippe Sollers', quoted in Le~our' 177 , 3 Samuel Beckett et al., Our·Exagmination Round His Factificationfor lncamination of 'Work in Progress' (Shakespeare and Company, 1929), 14. Hereafter cited as Beckett et al. and Anglo-Saxon. With the birth pangs of the Irish Republic mak­ Introduction XI ing themselves felt at this time, Joyce's. world history is clearly being .