From Finnegans Wake: A Sentence in Progress

Abstract

Although it has often been described as a work of destruction, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake was designed to be a triumphant reconstruction. It was in reference to this characteristic of his last book that Joyce is reported to have remarked during a visit to Stonehenge, “I am fourteen years trying to get here.” The task of reproducing with words the aesthetic unity of the past was an arduous one. For seventeen years Joyce, having at his disposal all the means of knowing and all the methods of expressing, labored to resolve the “proteaform” mass of modern learning in a “faustian fustian” of words. Such a process, the mixing and blending, the ordering and composing, the choosing and discarding, was necessarily a lengthy one entailing numberless revisions which bear “hermetic” testimony to the nature of the creative act while recording the artistic mind in a state of flux. It is self-evident that Joyce's manuscripts for Finnegans Wake are of immense importance to the scholar and that the French critic Louis Gillet, intimate though he was with Joyce's creative process, expressed a very limited view when he stated: “On ne comprendra vraiment la pensée de Joyce que le jour où nous l'aurons dans son premier état, avant toutes les retouches dont il l'a compliquée ... .” As material for the study of Joyce's intentions, as a “key” to the Wake, the primitive (first-draft) manuscripts to which Gillet refers are of surprisingly little value; for they generally expose little more than the armature of the work, the fundamental action which the reader might otherwise discern for himself after a brief syntactical search. On the other hand, as an aid to exegesis, the complete manuscripts are invaluable. They provide a basis for study of Joyce's method, his progressive elaboration upon a theme. They furnish material for a close examination of the mental process behind this style and of the organization which enabled Joyce to control the chaos from which he drew his inspiration. To this end, I believe a word-byword study which questions each aspect of a single sentence in progress would be of greater value than a more generalized discussion of a longer passage. If feasible, a series of such exegetic analyses might aid in more thoroughly illuminating the total stylistic of the book.