Part II The Literary Sources
The Manuscripts
Prof. Atherton elaborates about Finnegans while it was still being created and most adequately calls this Chapter "The Manuscripts".
Actually he is referring about what became known as "Work in Progress" or "Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress"
Having completed work on Ulysses, Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year. On 10 March 1923 he informed a patron, Harriet Weaver: "Yesterday I wrote two pages—the first I have since the final Yes of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them. Il lupo perde il pelo ma non il vizio, the Italians say. 'The wolf may lose his skin but not his vice' or 'the leopard cannot change his spots.'" Thus was born a text that became known, first, as Work in Progress and later Finnegans Wake.
By 1926 Joyce had completed the first two parts of the book. In that year, he met Eugene Jolas and Maria (McDonald) Jolas who offered to serialise the book in their magazine transition. For the next few years, Joyce worked rapidly on the new book, but in the 1930s, progress slowed considerably. This was due to a number of factors, including the death of his father in 1931, concern over the mental health of his daughter Lucia and his own health problems, including failing eyesight. Much of the work was done with the assistance of younger admirers, including Samuel Beckett. For some years, Joyce nursed the eccentric plan of turning over the book to his friend James Stephens to complete, on the grounds that Stephens was born in the same hospital as Joyce exactly one week later, and shared the first name of both Joyce and of Joyce's fictional alter-ego, an example of Joyce's superstitions.
Reaction to the work was mixed, including negative comment from early supporters of Joyce's work, such as Pound and the author's brother, Stanislaus Joyce. To counteract this hostile reception, a book of essays by supporters of the new work, including Beckett, William Carlos Williams and others was organised and published in 1929 under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. At his 57th birthday party at the Jolases' home, Joyce revealed the final title of the work and Finnegans Wake was published in book form on 4 May 1939. Later, further negative comments surfaced from doctor and author Hervey Cleckley, who questioned the significance others had placed on the work. In his book, The Mask of Sanity, Cleckley refers to Finnegans Wake as "a 628-page collection of erudite gibberish indistinguishable to most people from the familiar word salad produced by hebephrenic patients on the back wards of any state hospital."
Joyce's method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream associations was pushed to the limit in Finnegans Wake, which abandoned all conventions of plot and character construction and is written in a peculiar and obscure language, based mainly on complex multi-level puns. This approach is similar to, but far more extensive than that used by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky. This has led many readers and critics to apply Joyce's oft-quoted description in the Wake of Ulysses as his "usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles" to the Wake itself. However, readers have been able to reach a consensus about the central cast of characters and general plot.
Much of the wordplay in the book stems from the use of multilingual puns which draw on a wide range of languages. The role played by Beckett and other assistants included collating words from these languages on cards for Joyce to use and, as Joyce's eyesight worsened, of writing the text from the author's dictation.
The view of history propounded in this text is very strongly influenced by Giambattista Vico, and the metaphysics of Giordano Bruno of Nola are important to the interplay of the "characters." Vico propounded a cyclical view of history, in which civilisation rose from chaos, passed through theocratic, aristocratic, and democratic phases, and then lapsed back into chaos. The most obvious example of the influence of Vico's cyclical theory of history is to be found in the opening and closing words of the book. Finnegans Wake opens with the words "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." ("vicus" is a pun on Vico) and ends "A way a lone a last a loved a long the." In other words, the book ends with the beginning of a sentence and begins with the end of the same sentence, turning the book into one great cycle. Indeed, Joyce said that the ideal reader of the Wake would suffer from "ideal insomnia" and, on completing the book, would turn to page one and start again, and so on in an endless cycle of reading.
The British Museum Manuscripts
As it can be seen in The Finnegans Wake Experience from Roland McHugh, what Prof Atherton ellaborates about about the manuscripts Prof. Roland's give us more detailed information.
It is usual among Joyce Scholars
to consider Roland McHugh as one of the basic texts on understanding Finnegans
Wake. His The
sigla of Finnegans Wake deserves to be read. I prefer not to explain
why I left him out in favour of Prof. Jame Atherton, because is tipically a
situation where "If you understood why, it doesn't need to be explained,
if you didn't, it is useless to explain". I give him credit, though, such
as now.
Professor Atherton is extremely kind when he says, and I quote:
Such an amount of reading seems to be necessary before my old flying machine grumbles up into the air', wrote Joyce. (Letters, page 300). I have already quoted this once but repeat it here because it shows Joyce's own awareness of one of the salient oddities of his talent. More than any other writer I know of he needed a basis of some other writer's work on which to compose his own. He seems to have considered it as a sort of literary runway necessary to gain momentum before creative work could begin, and he always seems to have needed this stimulus. He was not, perhaps, unique in this, indeed Shakespeare may have had the same need. But Joyce had it in a higher degree and more consciously than anyone else of importance as a creator of original work.
I cannot refrain myself after spending such an amount of time Joyce demands, but not to think about Hans Christian Andersen's tale about the Emperor's New Clothes... I will elaborate more on Conclusion, but at least now it is necessary to bear in mind that the expression "If you copy from many you are creating", applies to Joyce. You just add Lewis Carroll Jabberwocky and sprinkle it with words from other languages, and there it is James Joyce Style...Obviously you shouldn't leave aside the occult, the weakness of those who would crown him as the king of the Ivory Tower, so perfectly said by Bertrand Russel:
"The first effect of emancipation
from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds
to every sort of antique nonsense" (In A History of Western Philosophy,London,
1946, page 523.
Was extensively used in Ulysses, as it is well known. I have done an in deep job about that at http://54.94.172.71:5000/