Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes by Patrick O'Neill (review)

In its sustained use of close reading, Patrick O'Neill's Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes is a decidedly old-school work. But rather than speak to the heuristic exhaustion and alleged out-datedness of such an approach, the book demonstrates the scholarly profit and delight of textual analysis at its best. In an increasingly context-focused field, we may have turned a blind eye to the text. Like slow food in a culture dominated by fast food, Impossible Joyce shows the long-forgotten pleasure and enlightenment of close or slow reading. It offers slow but excellent food for thought.

The book may remind us of Fritz Senn's Zurich Finnegans Wake reading groups where only very short text passages are scrutinized in long and fruitful discussions. This is philology at its best. Translated into modern English, "philology" means "love of the word," and hence it is no wonder that O'Neill's study pays loving attention to every single word it examines.

This word-centeredness determines the structure of the book. Its main part is subdivided into four sections and ten sub-sections, each concentrating on very short crucial text-passages or key words and names from Finnegans Wake. The analysis of the first fourteen lines of Joyce's work, for instance, takes almost one hundred and twenty pages. Like a study of poetry — where not only every word but every sound and stress is of utmost analytical importance — Impossible Joyce requires its reader to slow down and proceed in small units in order to fathom and appreciate the study's analytical depth. This analytical depth, however, also implies that the study addresses not the general reader but experts with an excellent knowledge of Finnegans Wake.

What distinguishes O'Neill's work from traditional close readings and makes it innovative is its strong emphasis on polyglot or multi-lingual analysis. As explained in the book's introductory section, this focus is informed by a transtextual reading "generated by comparative readings, across a range of languages" (3). The author notes that the book compares "individual choices made by individual translators in a necessarily very limited corpus of examples from Finnegans Wake. The object of the exercise is to examine in some detail some of the ways in which attempts across a range of a dozen or so European languages to translate Joyce's astonishing text can be said to result cumulatively in an extension of that text into a multilingual macrotext" (5). Finnegans Wake has been translated into many languages; Impossible Joyce inductively compares a corpus of no less than sixty-six translations (cf. 14–22) with Joyce's original text.

As Finnegans Wake is written in Wakese — a meta-language or multi- and cross-lingual hybrid "constructed on a linguistic foundation of English" that blends English lexical items with neologistic portmanteaux (5) — each translation must construct a similar ad hoc meta-language on the linguistic platform of the translator's own mother tongue: from Anglo-Wakese into Italo-Wakese or Franco-Wakese, for instance. And, owing to the polysemic fluidity of Wakese, every translator constructing another Wakean meta-language brings in new cross-lingual layers of meaning. As with any other literary translation, yet to a significantly greater degree, translating Finnegans Wake must be considered a rewriting or transferral of the original text into a new and independent transtext. By comparing transtextual rewritings with each other and with the Joycean original, Impossible Joyce generates an impressive polyglot Wakean corpus.

As O'Neill points out, his transtextual reading method may be compared with genetic criticism, owing to the fact that both approaches consider texts as macrotexts which move backwards and forwards in time (cf. 7). Whereas genetic criticism reconstructs textual variants and changes from the past, O'Neill's transtextual reading looks at the dynamic development of a text after its publication in terms of its future-directed translational rewriting. Although both reading methods acknowledge the diachronic dynamics, or Derridean deferral, of the textual signs that they consider, their heuristics are...