A Wakean Whodunit: Death and Authority in Finnegans Wake

Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate—

—Lewis Carroll¹

[A]ny true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.

—Umberto Eco²

The recent publication of the corrected edition of Finnegans Wake prepared by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon—the first to significantly deviate from seventy-year-old conventions in printing the book—has given new urgency to a number of questions posed by Joyce’s final work. One of the most palpable of these is the question that concerns our encounter with the text’s material and linguistic form—that is to say: How does the Wake present itself to its readers as a book and as a text, and how do the two relate to each other? It is a question that interrogates the expectations and strategies with which we confront Joyce’s idiosyncratic literary creation even before we begin to interpret it, and, by extension, it is also a question that asks whether it is possible, in this context, to conceptualize such a “before.”

The present article will develop what could be described as a line of inquiry leading up to these problems, as well as to their consequences for reading an altered edition of Finnegans Wake. However, I do not propose to review the Rose/O’Hanlon edition, nor is it my aim to theorize questions of textual editing, whether generally or in Joyce. Instead, I will propose a close reading of a single sentence, in the course of which I reflect on a number of ways in which we can describe how a text validates interpretation. What I hope to suggest is that these descriptions can and should be updated in view of the challenge posed by the publication of a new edition of the Wake. In order to make this suggestion in the manner that the sentence in question requires (namely in the manner of a detective’s investigation), my article must take a circuitous route. My starting point is a sentence from Book 3, Chapter 3 of Finnegans Wake, which I first quote in its original form.

“The author, in fact, was mardred” (FW 517.11). What happens when we read this sentence? It is all too easy, with the Wake, to get ahead of oneself. But in this case, even more than usual, great care is advisable. Death is here. A murder has taken place, hence the reader should proceed with suitable gravity. In reading this sentence (though “reading,” as will presently become apparent, is not quite the word), we should, at least for now, proceed in the manner of a murder investigation: deliberately and methodically.

How do we know that a murder has taken place? Here, already, the first fatal mistake might happen—we do not in fact know it. It does not say so on the page: what is on the page, the constellation of letters that form “mardred,” is not a word, at least not in any readily recognizable language. It is easy to forget this, for the reading, or rectification, or deduction, that produces “murdered” from “mardred” seems obvious and even natural, though it is, of course, neither. A great number of discussions of the Wake touch upon this quality of its language; in place of many other examples I could cite here, let me introduce just one from Jacques Derrida. To read this non-word, “mardred,” to render it readable, to venture a hypothesis as to what word or words could be offered as a translation of it, is a temptation altogether too strong to resist. “It is impossible not to want to do it, to want violently—and reading itself consists, from its very first movement, in sketching out translation.”³ But any venture into reading—translating—this mark must also fall short of the impossible demand made by the text which bids you read this mark as this mark and not as another, bids you read it, but not in translation: “I order you and...