Prolegomena: The Development of the Historical Sense in the Revisions of 'Proteus'

These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here

(U 3.288-9).

According to the editors of the recent How Joyce Wrote 'Finnegans Wake', 'there is no such thing as a consensus as to how genetic methodologies should be employed' within Joyce studies, or at least the study of the Wake.¹ That being the case, without claiming to be strictly genetic itself, this essay seeks to broaden the current dissensus regarding textual scholarship. It does so by both arguing for and trying to demonstrate a rather different use of textual and manuscript work, in one specific case, without proposing that it is necessarily an exclusively or generally relevant use. Dirk Van Hulle has recently drawn attention to two important emphases in David Hayman and Sam Slote's collection of essays Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce (1995).² The first is Geert Lernout's declaration that, with genetic scholarship, a kind of certainty has now become possible.³ The study of the notebooks allows us to be certain, for example, that the Joyce of the Wake was a close reader of certain texts by Freud. The second is David Hayman's insistence on the importance of a rigorous distinction between genetic scholarship and criticism.⁴ These are not the same activity. Both arguments seem to me to be important. On the one hand, Lernout is surely right: there are many ways in which Joyce's texts are and may remain indeterminate. But there are also many things in Joyce that we can be certain about. As I shall demonstrate below, for example, it is certain that Joyce deepened the sense of Irish history in 'Proteus' as he went on writing it. This is unquestionable. What we currently need is a clearer sense of the spheres in which relative certainty is possible in Joyce, and those where it is not; how far it is possible to expand our areas of certainty; and how the spheres of certainty relate to those of uncertainty. Lernout is surely right: here genetic criticism can make significant contributions.

But Hayman's argument is also plausible. It may indeed seem as though genetic scholarship has a set of certainties to offer, but that they are particular to it and apply only within its boundaries. In other words, genetic scholarship might appear to have no hermeneutic bearing and no implications in itself for the kind of certainties towards which an interpretation might notionally be thought of as progressing, save as it is co-opted within another frame of inquiry. It is not hard to show this with specific reference to rather older forms of textual and manuscript scholarship. If one looks at Phillip Herring's editions of the Buffalo Notes and Drafts and the British Library Notesheets now, for example, a gulf yawns between their contribution as positive knowledge, and the critical commentary that accompanies that contribution. Archivally, they remain significant; hermeneutically, they very obviously belong to the early- and mid-seventies. Herring's Ellmann-derived insistence that Joyce's politics was one 'of self-interest' seems altogether dated today, and the stereotypes on which his accounts of Joyce's critique of Ireland depend are in effect embarrassing.⁵ From Hayman's point of view, Herring's mistake is precisely to think that his archival work and his criticism belong together, that the first underwrites an instance of the second. In fact, the first is durable, the second not.

The trouble with the position I have drawn from Lernout and Hayman, is that it seems to limit textual scholarship to a purely positivistic function. There is, however, another view of it that takes a very different direction. As early as 1991, responding to the Gabler edition of Ulysses, Vicki Mahaffey argued that work like Gabler's gave us welcome access to the text as process rather than product, to 'the process of authorial composition' itself.⁶ This has become a more common emphasis as time has gone by. Daniel Ferrer, for example, has recently suggested that 'the archive of writing reveals the dynamics of invention'.⁷ Both...