GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES – Issue 19 (Spring 2019)
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GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES – Issue 19 (Spring 2019) The Lost Notebook VI.D.2: a Preliminary Digital Genetic Edition Robbert-Jan Henkes and Viviana-Mirela Braslasu Introduction The year 1925, or 1132 ab Normannis, the Viking era starting in 793, saw Joyce employing no less than nine full-size, seaworthy notebooks for his work in progress, called Work in Progress, to raid and plunder the international coasts for books and periodicals to fill his word hoard. Of this frightening flotilla – out of an overall formidable fleet of fifty-nine notebooks in sixteen years – of eight frantically filled shipholds of notes for his opus magnissimus, five have survived, whereas three were wrecked and must be presumed lost in the waves. The extant authorial notebooks from 1925 were baptized VI.B.7, VI.B.9, VI.B.8, VI.B.19 and VI.B.13. The ones that went under go by the terrifying names of VI.D.3, VI.D.2 and VI.D.1. But not all contents of the unlucky pirate ships were lost: before the ships disappeared, the treasure, inasfar as it wasn’t already put to use for writing purposes, was diligently copied into the so- called C- (or scribal) notebooks by the amanuensis Mme France Raphael. The items that Joyce had taken from his voracious forays and had crossed out and already used in expanding his episodes, were not copied and must now be guessed at, whereas the items that Joyce – in the 1930s – asked Mme Raphael to copy, have survived, albeit in a highly idiosyncratic form, as she had many problems deciphering Joyce’s handwriting. And no wonder, as he took his notes not on a stable surface (a desk for instance) but on the wild billows, while he was reading in a chair, or was being read to, with his notebook propped on a knee or an armrest, using a soft pencil and being half-blind to boot. Mme Raphael accidentally copied the notebook twice, in VI.C.3.178- 242 and in VI.C.15.177-252, perhaps because Joyce handed it on two separate occasions to her. Here are the notebooks from the year 1132 a.N., with the dates and the pages in the James Joyce Archive where they can be looked up (courtesy Luca Crispi): VI.D.3: Missing Notebook (See VI.C.4, Early December 1924–February (See JJA 41.279–294 and pp. [220]–[280] and VI.C.5, pp. [001]– 1925 41.299–321) [091]) VI.B.7 March–mid April 1925 JJA 30.170–292 VI.D.2: Missing Notebook (See VI.C.3, Mid April–May 1925 (See JJA 41.194–211 & pp. [178]–[242] & VI.C.15, pp. [177]– 42.409–427) [252]) VI.D.1: Missing Notebook (See VI.C.2, May–June 1925 (See JJA 41.107–126) pp. [123]–[197]) VI.B.9 June–early July 1925 JJA 31.001–078 VI.B.8 Late July–September 1925 JJA 30.293–415 VI.B.19 June–early July and September–late JJA 33.207–323 November 1925 VI.A, handwriting "B" Probably Fall 1925 JJA 28.001–286 VI.B.13 December 1925–early March 1926 JJA 32.001–119 1 The lost Notebook VI.D.1 was explored in the 2012 issue of the Genetic Joyce Studies, as ‘Inside D1’ by Mikio Fuse and Robbert-Jan Henkes. A wealth of new sources came to the surface, which was a boon and a bounty, but they served only to highlight the difficulty of finding out what exactly Joyce took from these newfound sources, as precisely those items were left out of the transcription. Conjectural reconstructions of the used notes are the most and best we can do, guesses in other words, and to make these guesses more educated, many data have to be assembled and collated, in fact the entire corpus of Joyce’s drafts and other notebooks, and the complete texts of all source materials to start with. The article ‘Inside D1’ in 2012 didn’t come with a full genetic edition of the lost notebook items in the C-transcription. This we will do in one of the next issues of the Genetic Joyce Studies. Here we will present such a genetic edition for the lost notebook VI.D.2, that Joyce stacked with words and phrases on his vocabulary raids in the six weeks from mid April to the end of May 1925. Please bear in mind that the following genetic representation is preliminary as well as para- doxical: in fact it offers no notes that were actually used in the year 1925: these notes were all crossed out and hence not copied in the scribal notebook by Mme Raphael. Only the salvaged 1930s notes remain, the ones that were useless – or at least remained unused – from the time they were entered until the time Joyce handed over his notebook for copying. The most interesting notes have been eaten and disgested as it were. In the genetic information of the survived and copied entries, we will sometimes hint towards possible reconstructions, but they will be very preliminary, sketchy and uncertain, as long as we have no complete database of draft levels and a complete record of all notebooks. We only mention them to highlight the problems of reconstructing lost items. The main attraction of this digital edition will lie in the uncovering of new source material and the locations of used items in the drafts and final text of Finnegans Wake. We also hope that bright, empathic, thorough and patient minds will pick up on the suggestions to further fill the gaps of the conjectural reconstructions by pinpointing items from the source books and periodicals and connecting them to entries in Joyce’s drafts. But before presenting the genetic editon, we will first introduce the new sources. Vico, Freud, but mainly Scandinavery Notebook VI.D.2 was compiled by Joyce while he was expanding the starting episode about Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker for inclusion in Robert McAlmon’s anthology Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, which appeared in June 1925. We find a list of key words Joyce copied from the first draft of that episode on VI.C.3.221(a), ‘rootles / lady pack / cocker spaniel / ethnarch / topee / surcingle / etheling / holograph’ – possibly for echoing purposes. A very similar thematic word list Joyce had already made in a previous, equally missing notebook, VI.D.3, apparently at the outset of the revision and expansion of the HCE episode, in the first months of 1925. But Joyce was also reading voraciously and making notes to feed the textual dragon that was to become Finnegans Wake. The VI.D.2 books that have been identified so far in its belly are: 2 Joyce’s D.2 bookshelf (Collection Books at the Wake Robbert-Jan Henkes) a) Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers II, Hogarth Press, 1924, translation Joan Riviere. It has long been thought that Joyce never read any Freud, out of sheer distaste. The distaste may have been there, but his writer’s duty compelled him to pick up the second volume of the Collected Papers in the Hogarth Press edition of 1924. The items at VI.C.3.178(d)-(i) come from Joan Riviere’s (authorised) translation of Freud’s 1908 article “Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality” (pp. 51-58); the notes at VI.C.3.178(l)-179(h) derive from the 1907 article “The Sexual Enlightenment of Children” (pp. 36-44); eand those at VI.C.3.235-6 from the 1907 article “Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices” (pp. 25-35). But this wasn’t the only Freud that Joyce read. In the next notebook, the equally lost VI.D.1, Joyce, amid a row of To-Day and To-morrow volumes (see Inside D1), studied Freud’s 1909 paper “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” from the Collected Papers, Vol. III (1925), to which transcribed notes such as ‘man appendice to penis’ at VI.C.2.142(j) and ‘diagram not plastic enough’ at VI.C.2.143(f) can be traced back. The discovery of this source was announced at the Utrecht Joyce Symposium of 2014 and published in 2016 in A Long the Krommerun, Selected Papers from the Utrecht James Joyce Symposium, edited by Onno Kosters, Tim Conley and Peter Voogd, in the article “The Three Fates of the Finnegans Wake Notebook Research” (Robbert-Jan Henkes, pp. 164-172). More Freud, according to Daniel Ferrer, who also suspected his appearance in VI.D.1, is to be found in VI.B.19 and (found by Viviana Braslasu) VI.B.9. This last source was also discovered by Wim Van Mierlo and discussed in “The freudful couchmare revisited: contextualizing Joyce and the new psychology,” in: Joyce Studies Annual 8, Summer 1997, pp. 115-55. 3 b) Charles Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1884). This was one of the books that Joyce kept returning to. He took notes in VI.B.7, VI.D.2, VI.B.9, VI.B.8 and very much later again in VI.B.29. A complete index of the Haliday notes (minus the ones from VI.B.29, as these can be found in the Brepols edition), with short introductions, was published in the Genetic Joyce Studies 16 as “The meanderthalltale of the Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin in Joyce’s notetaking”. The VI.D.2 index in that article is (to all intents and purposes) the same as the one which is published here, in its rightful chronological context, from VI.C.3.179 onwards.