Scratching it and patching at with a prompt from a primer
James Joyce’s most famous work Ulysses was published in Paris by Shakespeare & Company on 2 February 1922, the author’s fortieth birthday. Joyce spent the following eight months publicizing the book, defending it from his critics and proofing the text in preparation for the second impression, which was published in London by the Egoist Press on 12 October. In August of that year the editor of the Egoist, Harriet Shaw Weaver, had asked Joyce what his next book would be about:
─ I think I will write a history of the world, was Joyce’s curt reply (Ellmann 537).
Such are the origins of Finnegans Wake.
It was around October 1922 that Joyce began to disengage himself from Ulysses and turn his attention to his next work. Despite his remark to Weaver, he did not yet know what that work would be (Ellmann 543). There were, however, two things he could do while he was waiting for inspiration to strike: recycle any notes intended for Ulysses or other works but which he had not yet got around to using : begin to accumulate new notes.
Joyce did not like to waste any of his ideas, however trivial. He once joked that he had made Ulysses out of next to nothing and was making his next work out of nothing (Mercanton 40). In October or November 1922, Joyce began to compile a large notebook—now known from its opening word as Scribbledehobble—by transcribing and editing notes from earlier notebooks. These included some things he had hoped to include in Ulysses, and possibly some new material for a revised edition of that novel. Among the former, the most significant are probably the two anecdotes that eventually came to figure prominently in Finnegans Wake under the following titles:
- The Story of How Kersse the Tailor Made a Suit of Clothes for the Norwegian Captain
- The Story of How Buckley Shot the Russian General
Scribbledehobble also contains much material that is unrelated to Ulysses but which would eventually end up in Finnegans Wake. Mention may be made of notes related to Joseph Bédier’s Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut (Paris 1900), which Joyce had read in 1914 while working on his stageplay Exiles.
The earliest examples we have of Joyce’s new notes for Finnegans Wake, however, are not in Scribbledehobble: they are to be found in a small stenographer’s notebook which he began to compile in October 1922. (According to Joyce himself, he actually finished Ulysses on 29 October 1921 and began Finnegans Wake in October 1922, when he was in Nice.) These preliminary notes include ideas prompted by his rereading of Ulysses: in fact, this notebook includes lists of errata for Ulysses. Significantly, there are also notes on stories Joyce read in the newspapers. A huge amount of detail that found its way into Finnegans Wake began life as scraps of information garnered by Joyce from newspapers, magazines, books, conversations (both his own and ones he overheard), passing remarks, idle jottings, etc. Nothing was considered too banal for his new work, or unworthy of consideration.
In the sixteen or so years that he spent writing Finnegans Wake, Joyce filled at least sixty-six notebooks similar to the two early ones we have just been discussing. In addition to Scribbledehobble, there are forty-eight notebooks in Joyce’s own hand and eighteen notebooks of transcriptions prepared for him by his French assistant Madame France Raphaël. Each notebook typically comprises a miscellany of notes, lists, phrases, commentaries and personalia. These notebooks are now in the Lockwood Memorial Library at the State University of New York in Buffalo. Danis Rose estimates that a further ten notebooks are missing (Rose & O’Hanlon 519).
In addition to the Buffalo notebooks, there is also a huge collection of papers in the British Museum comprising drafts, typescripts, proofs and printed versions of every chapter of Finnegans Wake. Over the course of many years Joyce sent these papers piecemeal to his staunch patron Harriet Shaw Weaver in London. She subsequently donated them to the British Library, where they were bound together into eighteen volumes. A small number of similar papers that never reached Weaver ended up in the National Library of Ireland, the University of Texas in Austin, the Zürich James Joyce Foundation, Yale University, the State University of New York in Buffalo, and private ownership.
Most of this material is now available in the James Joyce Archive, the sixty-three volumes of which comprise facsimiles of Joyce’s surviving works.
The Buffalo notebooks comprise sixteen volumes of the archive:
- James Joyce Archive, Volumes 28-43, Finnegans Wake: Notebooks (prefaced and arranged by David Hayman and Danis Rose).
The British Museum manuscripts comprise twenty volumes:
- James Joyce Archive, Volumes 44-63, Finnegans Wake: Drafts, Typescripts and Proofs (prefaced by David Hayman, and arranged by Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon).
Scribbledehobble comprises Volume 28 of the archive, the forty-eight surviving notebooks make up Volumes 29-40, while Volumes 41-43 contain the eighteen notebooks prepared by Madame Raphaël (Herring 85-98).
The compilation of these notes was an essential part of Joyce’s creative process. He once described himself as a scissors and paste man (Letters 3 January 1931), a writer who constructed his literary texts atom by atom, drawing upon and developing pre-existent scraps of material. These notes are the chaos he turned into cosmos. Unlike the Christian god, Joyce was a demiurge: he could not create out of nothing. In theory, every word of Finnegans Wake can be traced back to an entry in one of the notebooks. Some Wakean scholars even go so far as to insist that no gloss should be accepted until it can be shown to derive from an entry in the notebooks.
Many entries in this chaotic corpus of material are genuinely helpful to the reader of Finnegans Wake, though it has to be said that many others are baffling, irrelevant or simply illegible. At the best of times Joyce’s handwriting is as difficult of decipherment as a pharmacist’s prescription. And to make matters worse, it was Joyce’s usual practice to score through in colored pencil any note he made use of in his writings. Consequently, the most useful notes in the notebooks—those that actually made it into Finnegans Wake—are generally the most difficult to read.
The study of these notebooks has recently become a major field of academic research. It is inevitable that this research will render untenable many lines of Wakean exegesis—including, no doubt, some of my own. As our friend Moore would say: Que voulez-vous?
References
- Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)
- Michael Groden (general editor), Hans Walter Gabler, David Hayman, A Walton Litz, Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, James Joyce Archive, Garland Publications, New York (1977-1979)
- Phillip F Herring, Review of The James Joyce Archive, James Joyce Quarterly, University of Tulsa, Volume 19, Number 1 (Fall, 1981), pp 85-98
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939)
- James Joyce, Letters, Volume III, Richard Ellmann (editor), Faber & Faber Limited, London (1966): 3 January 1931 to George Antheil
- Jacques Mercanton, Les Heures de James Joyce, L’Age D’Homme, Lausanne (1967)
- Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)
Image Credits
- FW Notebook: National Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/19, Fair Use