Deane's conclusions tend towards, what is in these preternaturally hip days called, a hypertextual theory of Finnegans Wake. The text incorporates links to all sorts of pre-existing textual matter (ranging from songs, to newspaper articles, encyclopædia references, book reviews, books, movies, &c., &c.). In one sense this theorization of Finnegans Wake borrows from the argot of Joyce's epiphany. Joyce recorded phrases in order to work them into his book, and by the time of Finnegans Wake these source-nubbins had devolved from transcending moments of claritas into reported instances of apparent banalities. Lexically Finnegans Wake glosses a universe of minutiæ, and the text itself proceeds through concatenated deployments of these glosses. Overcathected, Finnegans Wake would parody textuality, bearing the traits of a text whilst remaining lost amidst referential accretion. Once unearthed, even partially, these links would map out onto a text that is no longer a text, no longer a single text, but a collection of links. This is the edition of Finnegans Wake toward which a philologist strives. An implication of this theory, and one to which Deane would perhaps not subscribe, is that without these cunning links, without reference, there simply would be no text there to read. This was a view first endorsed by that cyberpunk avant la lettre, Marshall McLuhan in his essay on Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press. McLuhan formulated his insights slightly before the initial stirrings of interest in genetic criticism but his article is not without relevance to certain genres of genetic study.
McLuhan claims that like Mallarmé, Joyce was interested in the possibilities of juxtaposition made available by the newspaper with its fairly rigid alignment of episodes from quotidian life into neat columns. With Ulysses and Finnegans Wake these parameters are shifted into a more malleable and labile form and format.
For Joyce the press was indeed a "microchasm" of the world of man, its columns unchanging monuments to the age-old passions and interests of all men, and its production and distribution a drama involving the hands and organs of the entire "body politic." With its date-line June 16, 1904, Ulysses is, newspaperwise, an abridgment of all space in a brief segment of time, as the Wake is a condensation of all time in the brief space of "Howth castle and environs" (McLuhan, 50).Indeed Deane shows that in transcribing Bywaters notes from The Daily Sketch, Joyce followed the order of the paper's format (Deane, 171 fn. 10). Columns impose one pattern of reading, Finnegans Wake another. Finnegans Wake, according to McLuhan, is a montage of variegated snippets of existence: "And montage has to be arranged forwards or backwards. Forwards it yields narrative. Backwards it is reconstruction of events" (McLuhan, 55). This is not without affinity to the argument Daniel Ferrer makes in the essay "La toque de Clementis": the genetic critic moves along a "double orientation of the text's genesis": simultaneously upstream and downstream (Ferrer, 93). In one sense, by rigorously tracing out the patterns of the incorporation of the reportage of the Bywaters case into Finnegans Wake, by going down the stream of the textual archive, Deane has confirmed McLuhan's suggestions concerning the status of Wakean referentiality. He of course does this through a backward reconstruction of events-the events of Joyce's cutting-and-pasting of newspaper articles-through the Finnegans Wake notebooks.
The notebooks thus constitute the fulcrum of up- and downstream textual navigation. Returning to my odious hypertext metaphor, notebook entries can provide the critic with the appropriate HTML tags: they can indicate the relevant source for a specific passage, they can be used to map out the link to the source. Unfortunately such tagging is more-often-than-not less than clear. Joyce failed to provide us with citational apparatus and so the genetic critic must resort to tiresome detective work, reading through scores of newspapers and other potential sources in order to locate a "borrowed" element. Occasionally a clue appears in a letter or a comment Joyce made, as with Joyce's remark to Arthur Power that he was interested in the Bywaters case (Deane, 169). But usually sources are discovered through sheer and utter gruntwork. Joyce's notes stand in marked contrast to Beckett's notebooks which are laden with precise indications of sources. Beckett's works may be otherwise difficult and obscure but in what concerns sources, he is remarkably considerate to the philologist in us all.
This is then the major premise of this genre of genetic criticism, as noted by Herr Professor Doctor Geert Lernout: Finnegans Wake is to be understood through the exegetical delimitations afforded by a philological reconstruction of the incorporation of source materials (see Geert Lernout's "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks and Radical Philology"). The text will yield sense against a background of reconstructed textual reference: "Proper source identification enables us to highlight specific strands of material and see how Joyce has woven in units from other, often quite unrelated, articles which happened to appear in the same issues of the newspapers he was using" (Deane, 172-3). There are many interpretive pitfalls to this approach, but the application of philological rigor (as advocated by Lernout and also the eminent Joe Schork) would seem to advocate and indeed demand the utmost critical restraint.
Philology bears the traits of a Wittgensteinian language game: a tool with certain conventions-some explicit, others implicit-which can be used to provide evaluative claims concerning interpretive moves and strategies: i.e. the claim that the "plebiscite passage derives from, at least in part, the Bywaters case" is a claim that has interpretive value because it is philologically verifiable; whereas the claim that the "plebiscite passage derives from, say, the Oscar Wilde trials" is philologically falsifiable.
What then of certain other claims that can be made about this passage which would also employ genetic considerations, claims that might not easily lend themselves to being circumscribed by a Manichean economy of verifiability and falsifiability. This is what I meant by my introductory allusion to the price of philology: it is a useful tool but its use should not necessarily be construed as being universally applicable. There are limits and boundaries to pressing philological hermeneutics into Finnegans Wake.
What then is the lesson of philology? That thereare sources out there in tham thar hills? Yes-to be... sure. But what is the cardinal presupposition underlying this certainty of the existence of sources to be discovered? That the source has been obscured, if not hidden. The philologist's recherche aims to succeed where Proust and Hegel-even the wily Hegel-failed. In this way the philologist runs against the risk of being nothing if not Mamalujonian. To read Finnegans Wake is to read the obscurity along with those rare moments of meaning applied by whatever language games we foolishly bring to bear upon the text.
To be sure a philological excavation can trace out the evolution of an obfuscation of reference: how a reference came to be incorporated into the text's archive in a tangential manner, how the link's data was corrupted in the text's evolution. To return to my hypertextual metaphor, philology can un-bin-hex or decode encoded referential appurtenance. But in this way, philology works, even fights against Joyce's approach to writing. Philology is the vivisective process Stephen bemoaned in Stephen Hero, a lethal science of reconstitution: "The modern process is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can conceive. ... It examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption" (SH: 186).
This is philology's task, and it is nevertheless a good one. But it reduces Finnegans Wake to the level of information: positive atoms of data to be restored to the light of day and codified into the hard drives of Microsoft Logos. Philology reduces Finnegans Wake and the statements that can be made about it to the accumulation of realized source data. To paraphrase Maréchal Bosquet concerning the charge of the light brigade, it's beautiful but it's not literature. Reading Finnegans Wake philologically construes the text as an encyclopædia-to be sure an encyclopædia more along the lines of Grollier's CD-ROM than the stately plump volumes of the Britannica-but an encyclopedia nonetheless. Deane even enacts this encyclopædiazation by providing a useful and touching, albeit lengthy and tedious, historical account of the sordid Bywaters trial. He includes citational links to contemporary works of legal theory which address the issues raised by Bywaters's trial (Deane, 178-9). Reading these accounts may not help us read Finnegans Wake, but the implication of their citation in Deane's essay is that reading them will broaden our horizons. To be sure Finnegans Wake plays a language game of encyclopædiazation, but this is not the only game it plays or the only way it plays. There are many languages in Finnegans Wake and many language games.
Deane entitles his essay "Bywaters and the Original Crime." One hopes that this title is slightly ironic. To be sure and to give Deane the appropriate credit, he nowhere explicitly claims that the Bywaters source should be construed as HCE's ur-crime, the status of which has befuddled both Joycean critics and Wakean characters (or whatever passes for Wakean characters, the "persins sin this Eyrawyggla saga" [FW 48.15-6]). Yet the implication of his article is that HCE's malfeasances should be understood or delimited by our understanding of its figuration through references to documented crimes that Joyce had relied on (such as Bywaters and other source crimes that remain to be discovered).
It should come as no surprise that in drafting Finnegans Wake Joyce relied upon external sources to provide all manner of details, although the specific sources he used may not be known. Certainly their discovery merits serious attention. But considering the fragmentary and partial nature of the allegations brought against HCE and that these sources contributed to that partial status, were one to definitively assign a valuation to specific fragments of accusation, one would be repeating Mamalujo's incompetence. It is not that specific accusations and sources don't exist, they certainly do, but rather that these sources and accusations do not adequate the matter-at-hand. And furthermore, the persistence of this failure of adequation is perhaps the motor of Finnegans Wake.
I must admit to being surprised when Lernout condemns Paul de Man's "return to philology." Lernout signals de Man's definition of philology-or redefinition-as "an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces" (de Man, 24; cited and condemned [briefly]: Lernout, 46-7 fn. 24). This is actually a decent description of what the circumscribed school of genetic criticism does: analyzing the textualization of referential links prior to contextualization in the final text of Finnegans Wake. Indeed de Man's categorical imperative for the praxis of philological reading could easily provide an ethos for Lernout's criticism: "concentrating on the way meaning is conveyed rather than on the meaning itself" (de Man, 23). For both Lernout and de Man, the value of philology is its pragmatic insistence upon delimiting the sorts of claims that one can make about a text. The fact that there are numerous allusions to Bywaters in the plebiscite passage does not necessarily mean that the plebiscite passage is about Bywaters, the meaning of the passage is not the Bywaters trial. However, an exegesis of this passage might have to somehow accommodate the existence of these traces of Bywaters.
To conclude: a philological approach to the textual evolution of Finnegans Wake can be useful, but this usefulness should not necessarily be confused with exegesis or even with reading. Lernout might respond to my criticisms by pointing out that it would be irresponsible to make certain broad claims about Finnegans Wake and its genesis before all the facts are known and have been compiled. And certainly this is true from within the perspective of a language game of philology. But this is not necessarily all that is the case with the maddening language games of Finnegans Wake.
I do not advocate reading whatever one fancies into Finnegans Wake, to be sure genetic criticism affords a requisite stabilization of the Wake's maddening language games. I for my part do not want to read yet another paper which celebrates Wakean jouissance and says little else; I would like to think that Finnegans Wake is not a one-handed book. But one might not want to completely sacrifice Wakean obfuscation to the game of philological clarity. Perhaps one should read Finnegans Wake along both axes of what Schork calls expansive and circumscribed genetic criticism. Philology can show us how to read Finnegans Wake, but philology does not in itself provide a reading of Finnegans Wake. The lesson of philology-the lesson of striving to account for all these sources-is that these sources will never be completely reckoned and known and that therefore all interpretations of Finnegans Wake remain provisional. This humility should be instructive to us all, no matter what theoretical approach is to be taken.
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Vincent Deane, "Bywaters and the Original Crime," EJS 4 (1994): 165-204.
Paul de Man, "The Return to Philology," The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 21-26.
Daniel Ferrer. "La toque de Clementis," Genesis 6 (1994): 93-106.
Geert Lernout, "The Finnegans Wake Notebooks and Radical Philology," Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce, eds. David Hayman and Sam Slote (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995).
Marshall McLuhan, "Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press," Sewanee Review 62 (1954): 38-55.
R.J. Schork, "By Jingo: Genetic Criticism of Finnegans Wake," Joyce Studies Annual 5 (1994): 104-27.
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