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What Cant Be Coded Can Be Decorded Reading Writing Performing Finnegans Wake

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ORBIT - Online Repository of Birkbeck Institutional Theses Enabling Open Access to Birkbecks Research Degree output What cant be coded can be decorded Reading Writing Performing Finnegans Wake http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/198/ Version: Public Version Citation: Evans, Oliver Rory Thomas (2016) What cant be coded can be decorded Reading Writing Performing Finnegans Wake. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London. c 2016 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copyright law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit guide Contact: email “What can’t be coded can be decorded” Reading Writing Performing Finnegans Wake Oliver Rory Thomas Evans Phd Thesis School of Arts, Birkbeck College, University of London (2016) 2 3 This thesis examines the ways in which performances of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) navigate the boundary between reading and writing. I consider the extent to which performances enact alternative readings of Finnegans Wake, challenging notions of competence and understanding; and by viewing performance as a form of writing I ask whether Joyce’s composition process can be remembered by its recomposition into new performances. These perspectives raise questions about authority and archivisation, and I argue that performances of Finnegans Wake challenge hierarchical and institutional forms of interpretation. By appropriating Joyce’s text through different methodologies of reading and writing I argue that these performances come into contact with a community of ghosts and traces which haunt its composition. In chapter one I argue that performance played an important role in the composition and early critical reception of Finnegans Wake and conduct an overview of various performances which challenge the notion of a ‘Joycean competence’ or encounter the text through radical recompositions of its material. In chapter two I discuss Mary Manning’s The Voice of Shem (1955) and find that its theatrical reassembling of the text served as a competent reading of the Wake’s form as an alternative to contemporary studies of the book, and that its specific ‘redistribution’ of the text accessed affective and genetic elements that were yet to be explored in Joyce scholarship. In chapter three I consider several decompositions of the Wake by John Cage (1975-1983) and find that by paying attention to the materiality of the book rather than its ‘plot’ or ‘meaning’ his performances re- encountered the work concealed in Finnegans Wake’s composition. In chapter four, I document and analyse my own performance, About That Original Hen (2014), a ‘research-as-performance’ lecture which re-enacts a visit to the James Joyce Archive. By reconfiguring Finnegans Wake in relation to a marginal figure from its composition process and a contemporary act of protest within the university, this performance explores how a diachronic re-animation of archival materials can engage with the ghosts which haunt its composition and enact a political reading of the text’s production and subsequent archivisation. I conclude the thesis by arguing that these performances repeat the contingencies, misreadings and appropriations and collective acts of reading and writing that were integral to the composition of Finnegans Wake. 4 Contents !!!!!!!!!!! Abstract!!!!!!!!!!!3 Images!!!!!5 Acknowledgements!!!!!!!!!!6 Abbreviations/Note on referencing!!!!!!!7 Introduction: The Perfumance of Finnegans Wake!! ! ! ! 8 Chapter One: Performing Finnegans Wake!!!!!! 40 !!!!!! Practice • Performance • Research !!!!!!!71 !!!!!!!!!!! Chapter Two: Waking the Stage with The Voice of Shem!!!!76 ! Chapter Three: John Cage’s Decompositions of Finnegans Wake!! 129 ! !! Chapter Four: About That Original Hen Introduction !!!!!!!!!! 168 Analysis!!!!!!!!!!! 185 ! !!!!!! Conclusion!!!!!!!!!!239 Appendix: About That Original Hen!!!!!! 247 !! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Bibliography !!! 282 ! ! 5 Images p.48 !Sherif Andoura in Finnegans Wake: Chapter 1 (2012) (© Hervé Bellamy) p.50! Olwen Fouére in Riverrun (2013) (© Colm Hogan) p.80 Finnegans Wake, Winter Advert, 1955, (MS Thr 833), 399, Houghton Library p.149 Writing For the Second Time (Cage: 1980, 151) All other images are used to illustrate and document About That Original Hen and belong to the author unless otherwise indicated. 6 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting this project; Carol Watts and the Centre for Contemporary Poetic Research at Birkbeck; Jim Maynard and the staff at the Poetry Collection in Buffalo; the staff at the Houghton Library, Harvard; Ronan Crowley and the Buffalo Finnegans Wake reading group; all the Toll Thread poets for their hospitality; Olwen Fouére, Jen Coppinger, Alma Kelliher and Kellie Hughes for permitting to be interviewed about Riverrun. Thanks to the Derek Jarman Lab and Bartek Dzialdosz for his invaluable help and assistance; thanks to Ali Dunlop, James Watson and Mikko Makkaela for filming my performances. Many thanks to the following for having supported, encouraged or accompanied me over the years in making work with Finnegans Wake and other materials: Jeremy Hardingham, Mischa Twitchin, Neenagh Watson, Lisa Jeschke, Lucy Beynon, David Grundy, Kirstin Smith, Shaun May, Johnny Liron, Stephen Potter, Kelina Gotman, Ian Burrows, Nathaniel Dye, Vicky Flood, Evie Heinz, Paul Ingram, Dan Barrow, Marta Lozano, David Futers, Sarah Loveys, Stephen Mooney, Will Rowe, Jacob-Bard Rosenberg, Stephen Fowler, Camilla Nelson, Tommy Peeps, Nat Raha, Jazz Jagger, Jessica Pujol, Peter Manson, Jeff Hilson, Jaap Blonk, Richard Hames, Hannah Proctor, Sam Dolebear, David Ashford, Getinthebackofthevan!, the Little Angel Theatre, The Camden Head, The Betsy Trotwood, Clapham Omnibus, and the Judith E. Wilson studio. I would like to thank my mother and my family for their patience, love and support, and Fazal Rehman for his solid friendship and faith. Very special thanks are due to Robert Kiely for his friendship, solidarity and his participation in my work and thought; boundless gratitude goes to Koshka Duff for her bravery and enthusiasm and for allowing me to use her story (thanks to Debaleena Dasgupta for providing her court footage). Solidarity to 3Cosas and all the precarious workers in our universities and to all victims of police violence. Finally, I want to give an extra special thanks to Becky Varley-Winter for her love, company and encouragement; Laura Sailsbury for supervising my work for the first couple of years and Aoife Monks, whose supervision and advice has been utterly invaluable. 7 Abbreviations and References FW!!Finnegans Wake, 3rd edn. (London: Faber and Faber, 1975) JJ !!Richard Ellman, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford !!University Press, 1982) VoS!! Mary Manning, The Voice of Shem: Passages from Finnegans Wake !!(London: Faber and Faber, 1958) JJA!!James Joyce Archive, ed., Danis Rose et al About That Original Hen (2014) A!! Part A (Lecture) B!! Part B (Tabletop) F!! Part A (Film) https://vimeo.com/139245407 (password: shem) T!! Part B (Tabletop) https://vimeo.com/97571937 (password: shaun) Note: All references to FW take the form of page and line number as such (000.00). All initial citations are referenced in footnotes and all subsequent citations are referenced in the body of the text. 8 INTRODUCTION THE ‘PERFUMANCE’ OF FINNEGANS WAKE Finnegans Wake (1939)1 is a difficult book to read. It was also incredibly difficult to write and took James Joyce (1882 - 1941) seventeen years to compose. Suffering from an encroaching blindness, Joyce required the assistance of friends, family, patrons and amanuenses to slowly piece together this monstrous assemblage of neologistic language, encyclopedic references, exhaustingly long sentences and paragraphs, intricately structured motifs and themes, which, with its final sentence that returns to the beginning, demands countless re-readings and endless study. With this vast complexity one would assume that Finnegans Wake is impossible to adapt for performance. The performance required of its writers and readers stretches to the extremes of literary engagement and the notion of translating the book into another medium borders on absurdity. But from its earliest days as a Work in Progress (1922-1938) to the present, Finnegans Wake has been interpreted through a number of different performance mediums: as readings, theatrical productions, musical compositions, films and performance lectures. This thesis considers several of these performances and, through practice-led research, investigates how the text may be adapted for performance within the frame of a British university in the twenty-first century. These performances of Finnegans Wake are discussed in relation to Joyce scholarship and rather than being treated as discrete events in the reception history of the book are considered as methodological instances of ‘performance-as-research’. In turn, this thesis considers the extent to which such a text like Finnegans Wake provokes ‘research-as-performance’, and how its self-reflexive concern with competence, composition and community confirms a bridge between the otherwise unrelated disciplines of Joyce scholarship and performance studies. The thesis encounters its objects by asking several questions of the relationship between Finnegans Wake and performance. The first considers the relation between 1All citations of Finnegans Wake refer to the Faber and Faber, 1975 edition unless otherwise stated. All references
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