On the Verge of the Wake: Joyce's Reading in Notebook VI.B.10

"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." Thus begins the world's most impenetrable novel, James Joyce's 1939 Finnegans Wake. The novel, "about" nothing, composed of at least 60 languages, swerving and bending for 628 pages in an idiom that seems to derive from the Tribe of the Word-Hashers, hangs as a thundercloud over the head of every self-respecting reader. Even intellectual omnivores are mostly familiar only with the opening page. Finnegans Wake makes illiterates of all who open it.

How did Joyce start this man-built mad verbiage? To understand what he was up to, we must explore that dark and wordheavy raincloud that gave rise to the Wake and trace how it grew from an unlikely drop of water vapor. I want to examine the origin of the novel's origins, its very conception and its first shaky words—not the first words of the first page of the Wake, but the first words Joyce wrote after Ulysses.

Summer 1922. Ulysses was shining Greek-flag blue in the window of Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach's bookshop and lending library in the Rue de l'Odéon in Paris. The display book was soon replaced by a simple sign, "Ulysses by James Joyce is sold out," pasted on graph paper in the shop window. All 750 copies of the first edition were gone. After seven years of toils and troubles, trials and tribulations, the novel that has recently been voted "Novel of the Twentieth Century" had finally been published. Joyce calculated that the book, weighing 1550 grams and astronomically priced at 150 francs, was written at 21 addresses and had taken him 20,000 hours of work. Readers and critics alike agreed that this was the limit. The word could not be become any more book nor any more flesh. Never before had all sides of life been caught so completely in the nets of language. Never before did words appeal to all the senses at the same time. Ulysses had changed the face of fiction, and overnight so-called modern novels had become the pre-modern novels. What more could Joyce do?

Courtesy of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection, SUNY Buffalo, and the Estate of Sylvia Beach.

In August of that year, Joyce was in London. His eyes were suffering from a sudden attack of conjunctivitis, rendering him unable to go to the seaside resort of Bognor, a trip he had to postpone until the next year. While in London, he met for the first time his financial guardian angel and good fairy, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who would support him till the end of his days with the contemporary equivalent of about one and a half million euros, enough for the world-famous writer to live lavishly. When she asked Joyce about his new plans, he casually announced: "I think I will write a history of the world" (JJ 536-7). After this announcement, it took three months before he jotted down his first post-Ulysses note and another three months before, on March 11, 1923, he could inform Harriet Weaver that he had just written his first words of narrative after the final "yes" of Ulysses (LI 201).

The very first installment of his projected universal history is a small sketch in which a barkeeper is conflated with the last elected king of all Ireland, Roderick O'Conor. King Roderick was deposed when the English king Henry II ("Enwreak us wrecks," FW 545.23) and his band of Anglo-Norman robbers annexed the island in 1172 and gave the city of Dublin to the inhabitants of Bristol. In Joyce's skit, the king-pubkeeper stumbles about his premises after closing time and drinks the dregs from the glasses of the customers, after which he falls over. The language is still a long way from the sleepwakean we now know, but despite...