Manuscript Genetics, Joyce's Know-How, Beckett's Nohow

7. Introduction: "Work in Regress"

7 Introduction “Work in Regress” “In the beginning was the pun. And so on” (Beckett 1957: 65).1 By the time this sentence was finally published as part of Beckett’s novel Murphy, James Joyce was still working on Finnegans Wake. His version of the opening words of the fourth Gospel had not yet been written: “In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance and thereinofter you’re in the unbewised again” (FW 378.29–30). This passage was added to the revised typescript of the “Roderick O’Conor” sketch when Joyce inserted it in chapter II.3 in the summer and fall of 1938. On a verso, Joyce added a long passage of about twenty lines, inspired by his notes on Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache. The relatively short period between this reading and the publication of Wake had no impact on the degree of linguistic distortion. For instance, the entry about the development of children’s speech being an abbreviation of history in general2 (notebook VI.B.41:236; based on the first volume of the Beiträge), ended up in Finnegans Wake as “speech obstruct hostery” (FW 378.32). The published version of the twenty-line addition opens with the words: “Or ledn us alones of your lungorge, parsonifier propounde of our edelweissed idol worts!” (FW 378.23–24), derived from Mauthner’s contention that science is a form of idolatry with personified words and fetish words (VI.B.41:236; Mauthner 1923: 1: 160). By replacing “fetish” with “idol,” Joyce effectively emphasizes Mauthner’s point about the idleness of language, but he also plays with Mauthner’s elaborateness and the thousands of idle words (three bulky volumes) the linguistic sceptic needs to make his point. The only way to become one with “Vernichtung” is by means of the so-called “Nichtwort.” “SILENCE” (FW 501.07) is not good enough, for “silence is still a word”: “Zum höchsten Einssein der Vernichtung gelangt man durch das Nichtwort. Schweigen ist noch ein Wort.” (Mauthner 1923: 1: 83) So Joyce coined his own “Nichtwort”: the 118 / Manuscript Genetics, Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’s Nohow “woid” (FW 378.29), noting in his copybook that “in the word/was no beginning ” (VI.B.41: 269). About a year earlier, Beckett famously formulated his developing poetics in terms of a “Literatur des Unworts” (in his letter to Axel Kaun of 9 July 1937). And on the way to this “literature of the unword,” he thought “some form of Nominalist irony might be a necessary stage” (1984: 53–54; 173). Self-Portrait against Contrastive Background Beckett repeatedly insisted on the differences between his writing method and Joyce’s, and it is useful to consider a few of these statements. S. E. Gontarski quotes Israel Shenker’s “A Portrait of Samuel Beckett, the Author of the Puzzling Waiting for Godot,” not without caution, because of the account’s “unidentified and unverified sources” and because “Beckett considers the material misleading” (Gontarski 1985: 6). According to Shenker, Beckett stated, with reference to Joyce: the difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material, perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn’t a syllable that’s superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I am not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. His tendency is toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don’t think that impotence has been exploited in the past. There seems to be a kind of aesthetic axiom that expression is an achievement—must be an achievement. My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable—as something by definition incompatible with art.3 In the endnotes to his indispensable biography, James Knowlson remarks that Beckett reconfirmed this statement, when on 27 October 1989, toward the end of his life, Beckett summarized his writing method by contrasting it to Joyce’s: I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding. (1996...