GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES – Issue 12 (Spring 2012) Before King Roderick Became Publican in Chapelizod The origins of the origins of Finnegans Wake Robbert-Jan Henkes Let me take you down to before the beginning of what would become, in the end, Finnegans Wake, that dark and wordheavy raincloud, and how it grew from an unlikely drop of water vapour. To the very conception and the first shaky words of that living nightmare. What Rose and O’Hanlon call ‘the Ulysses-Finnegans Wake interface,’ and which Joyce refers to in the final Wake as ‘the beginning of all thisorder’ (FW 540.19) 1922. Ulysses was shining Greekflagblue in the window of Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop with lending library in the Rue de l’Odéon in Paris. I say was shining, because now a sign “Ulysses by James Joyce is sold out” is shining, pasted on Greekflagblueandwhite graph paper in her window. [In: James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach, ed. Banta & Silverman, Plantin 1987, p.106] All 750 copies of the first edition are gone. After seven years of toils and troubles, trials and tribulations, it was finally published, the novel that would be voted Novel of the Twentieth Century. Joyce calculated that the book, weighing 1550 grams and astrono- mically priced at 150 francs, was written at 21 addresses and that it had taken him 20.000 hours of work. Readers and critics agree that this is the limit, or even shockingly sur- 1 passing any limit, whether it is of speeding, indecency, incomprehensibility or sheer volume. The word cannot become any more book nor any more flesh. Never before had all sides of life been caught more completely in the fishing nets of language. Never before did every word appeal to all five or six senses at the same time. Ulysses had changed the smiling happy simple storybook face of the novel for good. Overnight, the modern novel had become the premodern novel. What could Joyce do, having written the novel of the century, and having reached on his lonely own the outer limits of lonely planet literature? Was there anything left to do? Maybe he would call it a day? Maybe write a pulpy novelette to scare the critics and to earn some easy money? Maybe he would write a children’s book that will sell more than 750 copies? In August 1922, Joyce was in London. His eyes were suffering from a sudden attack of conjunctivitis, making him unable to visit the seaside resort of Bognor, a trip he had to postpone to the next year. In London, for the first time he met his financial guardian angel, the good fairy Harriet Shaw Weaver, who would support him till the end of his mortal days with the equivalent of more than a couple of million modern Euros, enough to live lavishly, like a world famous writer should. When she asked him about his new plans, he casually announced: “I think I will write a history of the world.” It is always good to take Joyce at his word. In this case too, because what else is Finne- gans Wake but a highly condensed history of the world, which took sixteen years of simmering to boil down? The question is: how do you go about writing a history of the world? Where do you start? Nietzsche most likely wrote the shortest one ever: “Once, in a faroff corner of a universe bestrewn with solar systems, there was a planet, which became moulded over by a thinking fungus and died and that was the end.” But this deep philosophical sort of thing obviously was not what Joyce had in mind. After his announcement, it took three months before he jotted down his first post-Ulysses note and another three before, on 11 March 1923, he could tell Harriet Weaver that he had just written his first words after the final ‘yes’ of Ulysses. The very first instalment of his projected universal history is a small skit in which a barkeeper is conflated with the last elected king of all Ireland, Roderick O’Conor, who was deposed when the English king Henry II (‘Enwreak us wrecks’ – FW 545.23) and his band of Anglo-Norman robbers annexed the island in 1172, and gave the city of Dublin to the inhabitants of Bristol. The king-pubkeeper stumbles about his premises after closing time and drinks the dregs from the glasses of his customers, after which he falls over. Joyce appropriately starts his sketch with ‘So anyhow’ – as if the whole of Ulysses was no more than an interlude, an interruption, ‘a small prelude to Work in Progress,’ as he 2 would confide to Jacques Mercanton years later. The language is still a long way from the sleepwakean as we now know it, but there is an undoubtedly nightly, vague, shadowy, dreamheavy and doom-laden exuding from it, despite its comic quality, or maybe because of it. In a letter accompanying the sketch, Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver that the ‘passage is towards the end of the book,’ which implies that he was already far enough in his pondering of the imponderable that he could even more or less foresee whereabouts this sketch would wind up in the finished work. The very first draft of the skit, without the additions and changes Joyce made on the fly, currente calamo, as he was writing, split nano-seconds later, so just his first inklings, runs as follows: So anyhow to wind up after the whole beanfest was all over poor old King Roderick O’Conor the last King of all Ireland who was anything you like between fiftyfour and fiftyfive years of age at the time after the socalled last supper he gave or at least he wasn’t actually the last King of all Ireland for the time being because he was still such as he was the King of all Ireland after the last King of all Ireland Art MacMurrough Kavanagh who was King of all Ireland before he was anyhow what did he too King Roderick O’Conor the respected King of all Ireland at the time after they were all of them when he was all by himself but he just went heeltapping round his own right royal round rollicking table and faith he sucked up sure enough like a Trojan in some particular cases with the assistance of his venerated tongue one after the other in strict order of rotation whatever happened to be left in the different bottoms of the various drinking utensils left there behind them by the departed honourable guests such as it was either Guiness’s or Phoenix Brewery Stout or John Jameson and Sons or for that matter O’Connell’s Dublin ale as a fallback of several different quantities amounting in all to I should say considerably more than the better part of a gill or naggin of imperial dry and liquid measure. [JJA 54:446(a)-(b), BM 47480-267, FDV 203-204 (simplified)] So this is the form his history would take – an anarchic, anachronistic, anarchronistic mixup in which the protagonists are archetypes and prototypes with a plethora of historical antecedents, fusing into one another. If Leopold Bloom was Ulysses, he could have walked with his bow through Dublin and taken a trolley, and if Joyce had wanted to write another Ulysses, he could have called it Roderick O’Conor. In Ulysses, all space was condensed into the timespan of one day. In Finnegans Wake, all time would be condensed into the tiny spacespan of Howth Castle and Environs. Time and Space would change places, as if the trees and buildings were moving and we were standing still. 3 In quick succession Joyce wrote some more small sketches, one about Saint Kevin in a (hip)bathtub, one with Tristan and Isolde as a butch football player and his darling, one about the four evangelists as doddering old men, an aborted sketch about Saint Dymphna burning a copy of the Irish Times in the chimney to clean it, and a sketch about Saint Patrick being converted by the arch-druid Berkeley. The sixth sketch took up the innkeeper again, who by now found his final name, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, from which Work in Progress really started. The Textual Diaries But how did Joyce hit upon the idea of King Roderick as a pubkeeper? What was he thinking these six months between his offhand announcement to Harriet Shaw Weaver and the writing of his first sketch? What made him finally take up his pen and begin his universal history? Is it possible to find out what led him to the first sketch? Can we look inside Joyce’s head? Yes we can, as a matter of fact. To a certain extent at any rate. Through the miracle of transcription of the notebooks that he kept, what Danis Rose calls his ‘textual diaries’, which have been published by Brepols, twelve of the projected fiftyfive up to now. The preamble to the Roderick O’Conor sketch, the lull between two storms, spans the entire first post-Ulysses Notebook, mistakenly numbered B.10, and just as mistakenly known as Buttle, after the first word on what was for a long time thought to be the first page, but is in fact the second, because the leaf became detached and was turned when it was photographed for the mighty heap great big James Joyce Archive in the late 1970s. After a halfhearted attempt to correct typos of the first edition of Ulysses, Joyce started to take notes for his new work while on holiday in Nice, at the beginning of November 1922; the last notes in this notebook date from the middle of February 1923.