James Joyce FAQ (Version 2.0)
jorn@mcs.com 19 September 1994
- Joyce on Irish tenner! Now with added ascii art...
- Joyce on the Net (mailing lists)
- Joycean e-texts available
- Finn's Hotel (a recent brouhaha)
- Ulysses: Kidd vs Gabler (an older brouhaha)
- Joyce's schema for Ulysses
- Biographical/bibliographic timeline
- Where shall I begin reading Joyce?
- FW and FWAKE-L
- The Polti proposition (a future brouhaha :^)
= Joyce on Irish tenner! ================================================
In September, the new Irish currency was unveiled-- the ten pound note
has a picture of Joyce (smiling!). On the back are the opening words
of Finnegans Wake. Preview (looks best on a Mac, in Monaco or Courier):
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= Joyce on the Net ======================================================
There are two Joyce-related mailing lists on Internet, one for Joyce-in-
general, called J-JOYCE and one for Finnegans Wake, called FWAKE-L. Each
has about 200 subscribers, posting anywhere from zero to 50 messages total
per month.
To subscribe to J-JOYCE send the message "subscribe" to:
j-joyce-request@lists.utah.edu
To subscribe to FWAKE-L send this exact message:
subscribe FWAKE-L [your name spelled out normally]
to listserv@irlearn.bitnet
or listserv@irlearn.ucd.ie
The "subscribe" message must be in the *body* of the email, not just in
the subjectline. You will get a 'bill' for the nanoseconds used-- ignore
it. To unsubscribe, send "signoff FWAKE-L" (or "signoff j-joyce") to the
*listserv* (or j-joyce-request) address.
To send a message to the entire subscription list, address it either to:
j-joyce@lists.utah.edu
or
fwake-l@irlearn.ucd.ie (or .bitnet)
(Be warned: replying to a message received from the group will normally
cause your response to go to everyone, and not just the original sender!)
The j-joyce list especially appreciates postings on the theme "Things that
still mystify me in Ulysses". (It's been dead silent lately, though...)
FWAKE-L is meandering slowly thru Chapter Four, soliciting interpretations
of one sentence at a time. (see below) And recently, a parallel effort
was begun on Chapter One.
= Joycean e-texts ========================================================
Etexts of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are available for anonymous ftp from:
blaze.trentu.ca in /pub/jjoyce
ASCII and WordPerfect 5.1 versions are both available.
= Finn's Hotel: the battle ==============================================
In September 1992, Danis Rose of Dublin announced the 'discovery' of an
unknown collection of short stories written by Joyce in 1923, between
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Rose claimed Joyce's intended title had been
"Finn's Hotel". These were to be published by Viking/Penguin in March
1993, but that date has been postponed indefinitely.
In the Times Literary Supplement in February 1993, Stephen James Joyce
(Joyce's grandson) declared that the Joyce Estate did not accept Rose's
claims, and would not allow this work to be published. Rose had also
announced his 'corrected' edition of FW for 1995, but Stephen has vowed
to block that, too.
= Finn's Hotel: the stories ============================================
You can read the Finn's Hotel stories in any of three published
formats: The first issue of The James Joyce Review (1957) included
most of them in transcriptions by M.J.C. Hodgart. Easier to find
might be David Hayman's 1963 "First Draft Version of FW" (FDV) or
the massive 63-volume James Joyce Archive, Garland's facsimile
edition of all Joyce's manuscripts and notebooks (JJA). The latter
offers every level of draft; Rose presumably intended to use the
typescripts that were approximately third drafts; these were also what
Hodgart used.
1. Roderick O'Conor (FDV203-4, JJA55 p463-65) (in published FW pp380-82)
2. Tristan and Isolde (FDV208-12, JJA56 p20-24) (FW pp383-99, mixed with MMLJ)
3. Saint Kevin (FDV273-4, JJA63 p38e-f) (FW pp604-606)
4. Berkeley and Patrick (FDV279, JJA63 p148-165) (FW pp611-12)
5. H.C.E. (FDV62-3, JJA45 p14-17) (FW pp30-34)
6. Mamalujo (FDV213-19, JJA56 p71-80) (FW pp383-99, mixed with T&I)
7. The Revered Letter (FDV81-3, JJA46 p281-87) (FW pp615-19)
= Finn's Hotel: the case against ========================================
Rose had presented an argument in the Spring 1989 issue of "A Finnegans
Wake Circular" that "Finn's Hotel" was the 'real' original title of FW,
based mostly on a couple of ambiguous hints in Joyce's unpublished letters.
This case is not strengthened by claiming the original vignettes were for
an entirely different book. (The astonishing thing is that the early
history of FW is still so poorly understood, that a claim like this is
hard to argue for *or* against!)
= Ulysses: Kidd vs Gabler ==============================================
The 1986 'corrected' edition of Ulysses by Hans Gabler is acknowledged
to have corrected about 2000 typos and other errors in previous editions,
but John Kidd has charged that another 2000 unjustified changes were also
introduced. (The bulk of this case is presented in The Papers of the
Bibliographic Society of America, December 1988.)
Kidd's own edition of Ulysses has been repeatedly delayed.
= Joyce's schema for Ulysses =================================================
Joyce circulated the following schema for Ulysses, at first only privately but
then finally allowing Gilbert to publish it. It probably only scratches the
surface of the "oversystematizing" Joyce confessed to.
scene hr clrs organ art technic symbol
01 TELEMACHUS Tower 08 GDWH* --- theology narrative-young heir
02 NESTOR School 09 BNCH --- history catechism-personal horse
03 PROTEUS Strand 10 BLGN --- philology monolog-male tide
04 CALYPSO House 08 OR kidney mythol/econ narrative-mature nymph
05 LOTUS-EATR Bath 09 BN skin chem/botany narcissism eucharist
06 HADES Graveyard 11 BKWH heart religion incubism caretaker
07 EOLUS Newspaper 12 RD lungs rhetoric enthymemic editor
08 LESTRYGONI Lunch 13 BD esoph architect peristalsis constables
09 SCYLLA&CHR Library 14 -- brain literature dialectic Stratford/London
10 WANDERINGR Streets 15 RB blood mechanics labyrinth citizens
11 SIRENS Concertrm.16 CL ear music fuga per canonem barmaids
12 CYCLOPS Tavern 17 GN muscle surgery/pol gigantism fenian
13 NAUSIKAA Rocks 20 GYBL eye/ns painting de/tumescence virgin
14 OXENofSUN Hospital 22 WH womb medicine embryonic develpm. mothers
15 CIRCE Brothel 23 VI leg/skl dance hallucination whore
16 EUMEUS Shelter 00 nerves navigation narrative-old sailors
17 ITHACA House 01 STMK skeltn science catechism-impers. comets
18 PENELOPE Bed zz STMK fat ---- monolog-female earth
*Colors: GolD WHite BrowN CHestnut BLue GreeN ORange BlacK ReD
BlooD RainBow CoraL GreY VIolet STarry MilKy (no yellow!?)
= James Joyce timeline ===============================================
Feb 2 1882 Born in Dublin, oldest of 13 surviving children
1888-91 Jesuit boarding school, family fortunes begin decline
1893-98 Belvedere College, Jesuit day school, prefect of Sodality
1897? School retreat that inspires hellfire sermon in PoA
1898 Awakening sexuality forces rejection of moral hypocrisies
1898-1902 University College, idolizes Ibsen, formulates esthetics
Dec 1902- Apr 1903 Paris: med school dropout, journalism, adventures
Aug 13 1903 Mother's death precipitates emotional crisis
June 16 1904 First date with Nora Barnacle (becomes Ulysses' Bloomsday)
Sept 9-15 1904 Living with Gogarty in Tower (cf. opening of Ulysses)
Oct 8 1904 Joyce and Nora 'elope' to Pola, Austria; Joyce teaches English
1905 Move to Trieste; Giorgio born July 27; Dubliners ms to publishers
Aug 1906-Jan 1907 Bank clerk in Rome; conceives Ulysses as short story
1907 Lucia born July 26; Chamber Music published (poems); The Dead written
1908? 1000-page autobio "Stephen Hero" abandoned, recasting as PoA begun
Aug 1909 Visit to Dublin, Cosgrave claims liaison w/Nora in 1904
Dec 20 1909 Joyce&partners open first Dublin cinema "Volta", quickly fails
July-Sept 1912 Joyce's last visit to Ireland
1914 E Pound fixes serial publ of PoA; Dub's publ'ed; Exiles written; U begun
1916 PoA published to high critical acclaim and notoriety
1917 Eye troubles, Harriet Weaver begins lifelong patronage of Joyce family
1918 Serial pub/censorship of U begun; farcical lawsuit over actor's pants
1920 Move to Paris, spendthift lifestyle maintains financial crisis
Feb 2 1922 Publication of Ulysses, international celebrity, eye troubles
Oct 1922 Began FW ("a history of the world") via Scribbledehobble notebook
1923-29 Productive phase of FW composition; scorned by JJ's admirers
1927 Serial publ of FW begun in "transition"
Nov 1929 Serial pub halted; Joyce enlists Jas Stephens to finish FW, if nec.
1929-32 Daughter Lucia's encroaching madness strains Joyce to near-silence
1931 JJ marries NB July 4; Stuart Gilbert publishes U 'schema' in "JJ's U"
1932 Birth of grandson 6 weeks after death of father, 2 weeks after 50th bday
1934 US pub of Ulysses by Random House after winning obscenity trial
1939 FW published May 9 after ten years of low productivity; Joyces flee Paris
Jan 13 1941 Heartbroken at FW's poor reception, JJ dies in Zurich at age 58
1944 Campbell and Robinson's "Skeleton Key to FW"
1951 Death of Nora Barnacle Joyce
1957 M.J.C. Hodgart publishes early FW vignettes in James Joyce Review
1959 Richard Ellmann's monumental bio "James Joyce"
1961 First publication of FW notebook "Scribbledehobble" by T. Connolly
1963 David Hayman's "First Draft Version of FW"
1972 First publication of Ulysses notesheets by Philip Herring
1978 Facsimiles of notebooks and drafts published by Garland as "JJ Archive"
1980 Roland McHugh's "Annotations to FW"
1982 Joyce centennial celebrations in Dublin; death of Lucia Dec 12
1984 Hans Walter Gabler's critical edition of U
1991 FWAKE-L email list accumulates 100kb annotations to a single FW paragraph
1992 Danis Rose announces 'discovery' of "Finn's Hotel", squelched by grandson
199? John Kidd's re-corrected edition of U
= Where shall I begin reading Joyce? ==================================
Why read Joyce? First, I'd say, for his stylistic innovations. The
last story of Dubliners ("The Dead"), the first pages (especially) of
Portrait, Ulysses- chapters 1, 3, 4, 7, and 11-18, and FW on any
page-- if you know nothing else of Joyce you should at least *browse*
these-- there's nothing to match them in world literature. Realize
that FW has no fixed *plot*, and is written largely in multilingual
puns, with allusions to every aspect of history and literature... but
it can still be fun to read, even just for the sounds of the
sentences. For maximal 'forward plot-momentum' try pages 35 and 36
first.
Second, read Joyce for his analysis of the Human Drama, as filtered
(usually) thru the perspective of his own autobiography, in the person
of a transparent alter-ego named *Stephen Dedalus*. I'd suggest the
following sequence: Portrait (which follows SD's first 20 years),
Ulysses (along with a couple of auxilliary texts), Ellmann's massive
biography, Stephen Hero (a revealing long fragment of the lost early
draft of Portrait), and Dubliners (early short stories).
Perhaps the most important thing in choosing a first critical guide to
Ulysses is that its page-number-references match the edition of the
text you're using! (Gabler's 'corrected' text is equally as
error-ridden as the 1961 Random House, etc.) "The [New] Bloomsday
Book" by Blamires seems to be the most popular companion for one's
first reading of Ulysses, paraphrasing the text page-by- page.
Gilbert's "JJ's Ulysses" was the first attempt at an overview (done
with JJ's assistance) and there are many others (eg, Tindall's
Reader's Guide, Sultan's Argument of U). Gifford (with Seidman) and
Thornton have produced books of annotations to Ulysses that are very
useful-- Gifford's 2nd edition is the most complete, but includes many
doubtful interpretations.
Third, though, one can read Joyce *critically*, joining in the
decades-old academic *game* of searching out new meanings. Here,
Finnegans Wake and Joyce's notebooks and letters, along with the
reminiscences of his friends, become vastly important, as clues to his
ways of thinking and his plans in composing (especially) Portrait,
Ulysses, and FW.
At this level, one is finally forced to come to terms with the vast,
vast, exponentially-growing body of research by our critical
predecessors-- so vast as to be quite off-putting for newcomers!
Where's the fun, after all, if the best riddles have already been
solved? Fortunately, as vast as the accumulated research is, it's
hardly scratched the surface of Joyce's accomplishments....
When reading Joyce criticism, too, take everything with a grain of
salt-- Joyce is *much* deeper, in *every* work, than anyone can claim
to have thoroughly plumbed. And he was *intentionally* laying traps
for the unwary reader-- every great Joycean has surely been publicly
caught out by several of these! And, surely, thousands of fascinating
riddles remain to be explored.
Be aware that no Joycean *details* are ever introduced arbitrarily--
everything has been selected to contribute to the overall esthetic
effect-- the *decor ideal*-- and one must continually strive to see
each work as a carefully laid- out *whole*. This requires of each
reader a disciplined effort, connecting the many tiny offhand hints to
deduce important truths that are never plainly stated.
A few critical works on Ulysses I've found especially helpful:
Raleigh, "The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom". Reconstructs their
biographies from thousands of scattered hints in the text.
Paul van Caspel, "Bloomers on the Liffey". Examines some of the many traps
Joyce laid.
Ellmann, "Ulysses on the Liffey". Searching for a grand philosophic pattern
in Ulysses
Hugh Kenner, various titles.
And on FW:
Joseph Campbell (yep, the myths-guy) and HM Robinson, "Skeleton Key to FW".
A flaky but enthusiastic first try at a paraphrase.
Rose and O'Hanlon, "Understanding FW". The second try, much more reliable
but hard to find.
Roland McHugh "Annotations to FW". Indispensible but still a tiny drop in
the bucket.
McHugh, "The FW Experience". Short and original, great for beginners.
Hayman, "First-Draft Version of FW". Book One especially reads *much* more
smoothly in its first draft.
The FWAKE-L mailinglist, "FWAKE Digest for Chapter 4, paragraph 1".
FTP-able, gives a sense of how much can be dug out for a single paragraph
(100+ pages!).
Atherton's "Books at the Wake" and Glasheen's "Census" are two of many very
useful reference-works.
= FW and FWAKE-L ======================================================
"Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce, published in 1939 after 16 years of
inspired work, is the greatest, most difficult, and most enjoyable novel
ever written. After the warming-up exercise of "Ulysses" (1914-1922),
Joyce set out to write "a history of the world", circular in form, built
around the recurring human drama of a hero's fall into disgrace and his
reconstitution-by-synthesis from the warring poles of his fractured
personality: virtuous conformity and artistic experiment.
While Ulysses is more studied than any other novel in history, FW offers
such a *sheer rock face* of puns and allusions, that it is just coming
into its own as a respectable topic for scholarly research.
The Finnegans Wake mailing list was created June 16 1988 by Michael O'Kelly
under the auspices of IRLEARN, out of University College, Dublin. In late
August 1991, we undertook a group-reading project, starting arbitrarily at
Chapter 4 (FW75). We moved forward at first at the rate of about two
paragraphs per month, with a handful of subscribers regularly contributing
2 or 3 pages of *brilliant* notes each, and many more putting in a helpful
word here and there.
The agreement seems to be that all is permitted: there's been very little
nay-saying. The most unlikely impulses often turn out to bear delightful
fruit. Even anachronisms are worth mentioning if just to clear the air of
them.
The economics of Internet make this an ideal medium for digging however-
deep-is-necessary to unpack Joyce's crossmess parzel. If we had kept
straight on at that rate, in 50 years or so we'd have half a million pages
of insight, and be ready to begin a "second pass". But group efforts have
slowed and declined somewhat during 1992 and 93, and we've initiated a
second, parallel investigation with Chapter 1, FW page 3.
Jorn Barger undertook to collate submissions into an anonymous-but-
more-readable digest, sorting the notes line by line. Paragraph one is
available for ftp from ftp.mcs.com in mcsnet.users/jorn, under the
title "fwdigest1.jj". (One formatting oddity in the Digests: I'm setting
off Joyce's own words with equals signs (=hi=there=) instead of spaces:
=As=the=lion=in=our=teargarden================================75.01=
so that on a normal word-processor, string-searches can be limited to
finding *Joyce's* use of the word: ie, "=lion=", and will not find others'
notes that mention lions, or dandelions, so you can jump to a particular
point more readily.
= The Polti proposition ===============================================
Also available for ftp from ftp.mcs.com (in mcsnet.users/jorn) is a
file labelled "storymath.jj" that sketches an argument about Joyce's
intentions in writing FW, viewing it as a *thesaurus of story plots*
similar to Georges Polti's "36 Dramatic Situations". Another file
called �joyce.ai� looks at this material from a programmer�s perspective.
Arguments for and against this hypothesis must be grounded in a deep study
of the surviving notebooks, in which Joyce accumulated the individual text
elements that became Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. One of the obstacles to
understanding the early evolution of FW has been the riddle posed by a
large early notebook known as "Scribbledehobble". The file "stratig.jj"
presents a preliminary solution to this riddle.
Another Joyce file available from this site is "hypertext.jj" that presents
samples of the early FW notes and drafts, and discusses the problems of
building a hypertext version of this material. The file "decentwrite.dw"
discusses the nature of "reconstructive genetic word processing" in more
general terms.
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Jorn Barger j't Anon-ftp to ftp.mcs.com in mcsnet.users/jorn for:
<:^)^:< K=-=:: -=-> Finnegans Wake, artificial intelligence, Ascii-TV,
.::.:.::.. "=i.: [-' fractal-thicket indexing, semantic-topology theory,
jorn@mcs.com /;:":.\ DecentWrite, miniTech, nant/nart, flame theory &c!
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