Brouillons d’un Baiser: Premiers pas vers “Finnegans Wake,” by James Joyce (review)

A kiss is just a kiss? Not always, and certainly not in the case of this book, where the ramifications of a kiss eventually contribute to the genesis of the daunting complexity of Finnegans Wake. At the core of Brouillons d’un baiser (best translated as “sketches of a kiss”) is a set of five brief texts by Joyce, all with links, as argued by editor Daniel Ferrer, to the first kiss of Tristan and Isolde: a kiss that resonates through much western literature and music, especially that of Richard Wagner—as well as throughout Finnegans Wake. Ferrer’s introduction traces Joyce’s interest in the Tristan and Isolde legend: by March 1923, it formed the basis for several fragments that are part of the very earliest writing leading to the Wake.

The sketches are given in English, and in French translation by the distinguished French novelist Marie Darrieussecq, who also contributes a preface to the text. It describes the way she confronted the task of translation and also how a trip to Dublin, where she saw some of the original manuscripts and visited the Joyce Tower at Sandycove, helped with her work. While I am not the ideal person to assess the translations (for obvious reasons), to me, they seem to respond very creatively to the linguistic inventiveness, the fluctuating tonal registers, and especially the humor of these extraordinary pieces.

Two and a half of the sketches come from the manuscripts acquired in 2006 by the National Library of Ireland,¹ with the remainder from manuscripts held in the British Library² and known to Joyce scholars for a long time.³ The rest of the work contains an introduction and notes by the French Joycean Ferrer. His text provides an essential background for understanding the place of these pieces in Joyce’s ongoing Wake project; his notes provide details of their provenance, references to various relevant notebook units, and comments on the placing of particular passages. This book is a “reader’s edition”; the sketches are not festooned with diacritical marks to indicate insertions, deletions, alterations, or the like. Rather, they read smoothly, but Ferrer does indicate in his notes many interlinear additions and other such alterations.⁴

The only other work that has published a “reader’s edition” of sketches by Joyce, in any language, is Danis Rose’s Finn’s Hotel.⁵ The two books, however, are not directly comparable: Rose prints ten early sketches—about all there are—in the belief that these form a separate work from the Wake itself, originally planned by Joyce and to be called Finn’s Hotel. Ferrer has no such view: “Il est donc tout à fait abusif de présenter ces brouillons comme des œuvres.” (“It is therefore quite improper to treat these sketches as works”—56 n2). Instead, Ferrer is quite clear that the studies are indeed just preliminary to the Wake and have no independent existence of their own. His interest is confined to the Tristan legend and its offshoot in the characters of the Four Old Men and Mamalujo; he does not include the other sketches.⁶ In that case, is there a justification for publishing them separately from the work itself? The answer to this question is yes; the sketches do have a special quality of their own, distinct in nature from the finished text. For one thing, there is a far greater sense of personality, even of character, about these personae—Issy, Tristan, the Four Old Men—than in the final, published version of the Wake.

Second, there is a pronounced difference in the tone of the pieces as compared to the final text. The first sketch is written in a childish voice, enumerating the many virtues of Issy, who is presented as a very young girl, given to good works. She encounters Saint Dympna, herself a victim of incestuous desires, converts a dragon to “the...