Finnegans Wake as a System of Knowledge Without Primitive Terms: A Proposal Against the Paradigm of Competence in the So-called Joyce Industry. Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena vorgelegt von Krzysztof Bartnicki, M.A. geboren am 7 V 1971 in Opole, Polen Dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 2021 Promotionsfach: Anglistik/Amerikanistik Disputation: 22 VI 2021 Mitglieder der Promotionskommission: Vorsitz: Prof. Dr. Meinolf Vielberg Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dirk Vanderbeke Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Felix Sprang, Siegen CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction 6 1. Chapter 1 – The Referents of the Text of Finnegans Wake 21 1.1. Finnegans Wake as the Set of Texts Recognisable as Finnegans Wake 24 1.2. Finnegans Wake as the 1939 Prototext 28 1.2.1. The Prototext and its Errata of 1945 29 1.2.2. The Prototext’s Post-Joyce Literary Variants 31 1.2.3. Joyce’s Co-Authors of the Prototext 33 1.3. Finnegans Wake as the Model Source Text 36 1.3.1. The Pagination of the Model Source Text 38 1.4. Finnegans Wake as the Macrotext 42 1.5. Finnegans Wake as the Polytext of Source Text-cum-Exegesis 46 1.5.1. The Polytext with the Exegesis-Before-the-Text 47 1.5.2. The Polytext with the Mock Source Text Component 50 1.5.3. The Mock Polytext 51 1.5.4. The Key-Oriented Polytext 51 1.6. Finnegans Wake as the Text in a Model of Reading 53 1.6.1. The Nonsense-Reading Model 57 1.6.2. The Religious Model 60 1.6.3. The Psychological Model 65 1.6.4. The Emotional Model 66 1.6.5. The Perceptional Model 69 1.6.6. The Reactive Model 70 1.6.7. The Social Model 71 1.7. Finnegans Wake as the Volume of Exegesis 72 2. Chapter 2 – Wakese and the Language Principle 78 2.1. The Argument from Appearances 82 2.2. The Argument from Competence 85 2.3. The Argument from Multilinguality 89 2.4. The Position of Universality 92 2.5. The Position of Encryption 97 2.5.1. Taboo Reasons for the Encryption 98 2.5.2. Non-Taboo Reasons for the Encryption 102 2.6. The Argument from Poetry 106 2.7. The Position of Nonliterariness 108 2.7.1. The Sound Text 110 2.7.2. The Visual Text 115 2.8. The Pars pro Toto Argument 118 2.9. The Language of the Source Text 126 3. Chapter 3 – The Academic Paradigm of Competence 134 3.1 Appeals Implying a Difference of Competence 138 3.1.1. Appeals to Intuition 138 3.1.2. Appeals to Certainty 139 3.1.3. Appeals to Plausibility 141 3.1.4. Appeals to James Joyce 141 3.1.5. Appeals to Canonicity 143 3.1.6. Appeals to Topicality 144 3.1.7. Appeals to Telos 145 3.1.8. Appeals to Historicity 145 3.1.9. Appeals to the Majority or Minority 147 3.1.10. Emotive Persuasion 147 3.1.11. Appeals to Knowledge 148 3.2 Terms Implying a Difference of Competence 151 3.3 Prerequisites for Reading 154 3.4 The Extraliterary Motivation(s) in the Joyce Industry 155 3.4.1. The Joyce Industry in Academic Capitalism 157 3.4.2. Ideological Aspects of the Joyce Industry 168 3.4.3. Call for a Revision of the Paradigm 176 Supplement 1: Expansion of Claims toward Non-Logicisable Propositions 180 Supplement 2: Degrees of Separation from the Central Text 183 Supplement 3: The Authorship in the Bibliography 186 Bibliography 191 Printed sources 191 Internet sources 273 Music, audiobooks, and performance 306 Films 307 Other sources 307 Abbreviations 307 Zusammenfassung der Dissertation Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung Acknowledgements Thank you to my supervisor, Prof. Dirk Vanderbeke, for providing guidance throughout this project. Owing to Prof. Vanderbeke’s most valuable comments, what started as my shy inquiry into the semasiology of Finnegans Wake as a text attributed to James Joyce turned into my bold conviction that Finnegans Wake had little to do with Joyce. What was an idea that Finnegans Wake is a hub of texts evolved into an attempt at a portrait of the text as its young epitext. What tried to arrive at a definition of truth made it to an ideological view on the interpretive community’s extraliterary agenda. I thank Prof. Felix Sprang for reminding me of my rather aggressive rhetoric and chutzpah. They are, I think, the crest points of a wave in whose trough one should find my fervent post-Finnegans Wake dejection and my nervous disappointment in time. I thank Prof. Jerzy Jarniewicz (Łódź) and Prof. Jolanta Wawrzycka (Radford) for their precious Joycean remarks. I thank Prof. Marek Chołoniewski (Kraków) for his comments on Joyce’s work as a sound text. I thank Dr. John Kearns for bearing with me (but no, John, the language is not English). I thank Dr. Inez Okulska (Frankfurt /Oder) for her support (but yes, Inez, language is at war). Dear Prof. Tadeusz Piotrowski (Wrocław), you guessed the gist of this gust from the get-go. I also owe a debt to Jan Artymowicz, Ewa Badura, Wawrzyniec Brzozowski, Mila Haugová, Małgorzata Hesko-Kołodzińska, Dr Maciej Jakubowiak (Kraków), Dr Grzegorz Jankowicz (Kraków), Marcin Karnowski, Jacek Krzekotowski, Wojciech Kucharczyk, Prof. Paweł Marcinkiewicz (Opole), Wojciech Mazurek, Radosław Nowakowski, Prof. Jerzy Paszek (Katowice), Dr Piotr Paziński (Warszawa), Prof. Adam Poprawa (Wrocław), Piotr Rak, Prof. Tadeusz Sławek (Katowice), Andrzej Sosnowski, Marcin Szmandra, Yehuda Vizan, Tomasz Wróżyna. I thank the Joyceans I met in Budapest in 2014, and the Czytaj! team (Częstochowa), and the RU squat (Łódź), and the –Y? Joyce Collective. I cordially thank Małgorzata Dawidek-Gryglicka (London) and Noel O’Grady (Dublin). My warmest thoughts travel to Wakeans Rishiraj Pal (Bengal) and Derek Pyle (Oregon). My best wishes go to fellow translators Hervé Michel (Morocco, France) and Andrey Rene (Moscow). I remember fondly the late Maciej Parowski. I feel genuinely grateful to the German taxpayer for having made it possible for me to even think about PhD. I am also grateful to my 14 years old laptop for staying more or less alive. May the city of Mysłowice accept my contempt for being nothing like Wrocław, though had I lived in Wrocław, I would have never had to think about Finnegans Wake at all––and would not be writing this. My most heartfelt thanks go to my son Aleksander Bartnicki, who draws my intuition toward the non-intuitive, and to my daughter Erina Bartnicka, for music to my eyes. I am so proud of you. I thank my wife Michalina Bartnicka for everything–– excluding/including the proofreading she refused to handle. To my family and friends in Opole, Wrocław, and Warszawa, in Germany, Ireland, Scotland, and Chile––I am leaving Joyce, I promise. Introduction Many decades after the first book with the title Finnegans Wake (FW) and James Joyce’s name on the cover was published in 1939, followed by a number of post-Joyce variants, “FW” today is a name affected by an epistemic impasse. The impasse consists in that the more claims about FW are made, the more the reference of FW is unfixed, but in order to fix it one needs to make even more claims. As a result of the growing number of claims, FW has become an irreducibly polyreferential name. There is no coherently justified hermeneutical competence to assert that FW as a text in literature (in a conventional sense of the term) is a more privileged referent than other referents. There is no coherently justified hermeneutical competence to call the optimal referent among the source texts (i.e. the 1939 prototext and its variants). There is no coherently justified hermeneutical competence to rank claims, e.g., indicate misinterpretations. In sum, there are no consistent criteria for establishing a hierarchy of interpretive competence about FW as, primarily, a literary text. The existing models of competence are extraliterary (not concerned primarily with FW as a literary text) and/or inconsistent. Among the inconsistent models are those that rely on various appeals, e.g., to common sense, knowledge, authorial intention, majority. Other inconsistent models use ergometrics (ranking claims by the work-time input), intellectual aesthetics (e.g., ranking claims by their style), formal markers (e.g., ranking claims by the proponent’s academic degree), but they do not explain how one: (i) adjudicates conflicts between exegetes on the same level in a hierarchy, (ii) categorises claims which (in addition to their initial vagueness) are not conflicted, (iii) categorises (apparently) equivalent claims made with different means, and (iv) categorises (apparently) different claims made with equivalent means. However, this vision that claims about FW (whose sum is, henceforth, “the volume of FW exegesis”) cannot be ranked defies the paradigmatic approach to competence adopted in the so-called Joyce industry, including the community of academics engaged in the professional (i.e. paid) study of FW. The industry prescribes that academic competence is, on average, superior. While one of its tenets is that FW is a text in English, the industry has made various efforts to reconcile it with the usual experience of incomprehension. They are outlined below (with points open for debate in the parentheses): 6 (i) The text of FW is incomprehensible to an unaided reader, but understanding can be ensured by the exegete. Also, one can read FW by reading about FW. (If so, the exegete should be called the author, and the exegete’s work should be the referent of “the text of FW”.) (ii) One can read FW by reading a sample of the text.