Textual Enactment: The Cognitive ‘riverrun’ and the ‘Fluid Text’ of Joyce’s ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’

The newspaper clippings in the James Joyce Collection at Buffalo are an invaluable instrument to reconstruct the early reception of the pre-book publications of Finnegans Wake fragments (‘Work in Progress’). They are more than just evidence for producing a publication history. From a cognitive point of view, they are also part and parcel of the ‘extended mind’ at work. If a work is already partially out in the open during its genesis, this exposure has an impact on the writing process. The textual epigenesis thus becomes a feedback loop between the ‘private’ imagination and ‘public’ reception, between what a text is meant to mean and what it is made to mean. This essay studies this feedback loop as a textual enactment of a cognitive process, described by cognitive philosophers as enactivism or the embodied mind. The case study is the production and publication history of Anna Livia Plurabelle. The emphasis of the essay, however, is not on the way the river names enact the flowing of water, but on the textual enactment of ‘enactive’ cognition, which involves all the versions of this text.