Preface

As he ponders the enigma of the man in the macintosh, Leopold Bloom plays the role of an amateur sleuth, and Joyce often invites his readers to do the same. Adopting the posture of an investigating detective in “A Wakean Whodunit: Death and Authority in Finnegans Wake,” Gabriel Renggli probes the hermeneutic challenges posed both by Joyce’s non-words and by compositional changes within a single sentence. In the recently corrected edition of the Wake, the original statement “The author, in fact, was mardred” becomes “The aurthor, in fact, was mordred.” In both versions, Renggli notes, Joyce’s non-words, “more prolifically productive of meanings than standard words could ever be,” simultaneously invite and prohibit the reader’s act of translation. Encountering the collections of letters “mardred” or “mordred” initiates in the reader a movement “from linguistic disturbance to the sudden appearance of death.” Although the Wakean sentence seems to anticipate (or retrospectively echo) Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author,” Renggli argues that Joyce reveals his own continuing presence in the Wake at the moment he is ostensibly announcing his absence. Inhabiting the novel as a “laughing ghost,” Joyce paradoxically asserts authority in self-erasure by impelling us to “step into the text,” by “forcing interpretation into existence.” At the same time, by anticipating and addressing the reader who would usurp meaning-making, Joyce “sees through” such acts of appropriation: The reader may ventriloquize him, but Joyce “has the last word.” Renggli suggests that encountering the new version of the Wakean sentence provides further evidence of “a text that stirs and talks back to its critics.” Unable to elide our memories of the original version, readers of the corrected text will be reminded that “nothing ever dies for good” in the Wake. Moreover, if we read the new-edition sentence not as a description of murder but as a reference to the succession and shared identity of King Arthur and his son Mordred, the emphasis falls not on the author’s death but on his complex, co-functional relationship with a reader who is, at once, Joyce’s descendant and his imaginary antecedent.

In his arrangement of black-and-white illustrations, “Finnegans Wake in Comess,” artist Aston Verz provides an extraordinary collage of images summoned by specific words and phrases in the Wake’s opening pages. Combining the mimetic and the mythological, Verz’s drawings juxtapose natural landscapes (“riverrun”) and urban life (“cement and edifices piled”) to evoke the book’s entwining of eros and death, fall and rise, modernity and antiquity, individuality and collectivity. Verz’s images range from haunting, stylized depictions of war (“sod’s brood be me fear”) to darkly comic meditations on Joycean puns (“he would caligu-late”). In his lyrical preface to the project, Verz describes his compulsion for “drawing up the Wake madness” in an attempt “to extricate the bones of the story.” What emerges is a kind of graphic narrative rendered in meticulously drawn panels that sometimes resemble woodcuts. Reflecting upon the challenge of translating Joyce’s book of the dark into a visual idiom, Verz observes, “A lot of lines, pictures, gumming and black lead blotches were needed to hear the light.”

In another Wake piece, Roy Benjamin finds in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or an influential source for the novel’s resistance to “absolute choice” and its conceptual reliance on an oscillating movement between disjunction and synthesis. Benjamin notes that the Danish philosopher’s antagonists, A and B, are, like Shaun and Shem, “sorensplit”—oppositional figures who are themselves inwardly divided and who regard one another in an oxymoronic attitude of “sympathetic antipathy.” Although A and B embody, respectively, the binaries of carelessness and method, aesthetics and ethics, fragmentary immediacy and temporal continuity, these antinomies sometimes overlap in Kierkegaard’s dialogue, much as polarities inhere within one another in the Wake, where HCE is, at once, “assembled and asundered.”

Four other essays in this JSA volume view Finnegans Wake as the culmination of concerns evolving throughout Joyce’s career. In “‘Cog it out’: Joyce on the Brain,” Tim Conley argues for the reciprocal benefits that consciousness studies and Joyce...