Finnegans Wake corrected

I can’t believe I am only hearing of this now, but a new “corrected” version of Finnegans Wake is set to be published next week. The Irish Times has the story. Hmmmm. Isn’t the syntactical oddness of the language actually the point? Is this akin bossy editors who take it upon themselves to either modernize Shakespeare, or make his punctuation intelligible to a modern audience (adding things like exclamation points, which Shakespeare rarely wrote). A nervousness about the chaos of the work, and a need to “correct” that which is actually genius, in all its chaos? I know that Joyce labored over Finnegans Wake for 17 years. There is a story told by a friend of his who watched Joyce, maybe 16 years into the thing, laboring over a draft of Finnegans Wake which had come back from the publishers. Joyce huddled over the mass of pages, working on it, and his friend, baffled, asked him what on earth he could possibly be correcting. Joyce replied, “I’m adding commas.”

The “correction” listed in The Irish Times is basically one word that is removed: “and”. And while I applaud geekery in any form, I am not sure that here you can top Joyce, and top how deeply JOYCE thought about all of these things. I will probably have to buy the corrected Finnegans Wake, because I will not be able to help myself, but sometimes I think that the sheer difficulty of a certain work, its scope, power, and accomplishment, can end up baffling critics unnecessarily – they are looking for SENSE, perhaps, where there is none. The “there” is already THERE, but because we are only mortal, and prone to things like envy and confusion, we want to try to wrestle the work into a form that WE can understand. This is certainly true of some of the editions of Shakespeare which, if you compare it to the text in the First Folio, you realize just how much “correcting” was done. In the First Folio (considered closer to what Shakespeare actually wrote, although that is still up for debate), when Hamlet dies, he ends with, “The rest is silence” – and then, in the Folio, it says that Hamlet says, “O – o – o – o” and then “He dyes.” Fascinating. You don’t find those “O-groans” in any modern version of Hamlet, and it is (of course) still not clear if Shakespeare wrote those “O”s, or if it was someone else, or if it was a memory of what a certain actor did when performing the role of Hamlet – Perhaps he said the last line, and then died beautifully – with big declamatory “O-groans” all the way down. Who knows. But to edit them out seems a bit sketchy (editors are, in general, embarrassed by the “O-groans” that show up in Shakespeare – perhaps it is a pesky reminder to these scholars that the work they so adore is actually a piece of entertainment – a SCRIPT – meant to be PLAYED – by actors – who, everyone knows, are barely better than prostitutes – so out with the “O groans” because they are flat out embarrassing – to ME, personally! – thinks the scholar). Additionally, here’s another element to all of this: The mere fact that Hamlet’s last words are “The rest is silence” – and THEN – this most indecisive of characters in all of Western literature – refuses to follow his own observation – and does not remain silent – but groans as he dies. It’s just so Hamlet, if you look at it in that way. He makes a declarative statement of certainty for almost the first time: “The rest is silence” – and then, uh-oh, Hamlet isn’t done, he is NOT silent – even in death, he is waffling back and forth. Anyway, that’s MY interpretation of it – and I’m not coming down on one side or the other – because the “O-groans” are controversial, and I get that – but I still think it’s interesting to at least acknowledge their presence, to not edit them out entirely because they are embarrassing to YOU, the scholar in his dusty office, who thinks theatre is probably a bit distasteful, and actors even worse … Like: who cares what YOU think? I think it’s kind of funny and totally in character that Hamlet, in his second to last breath, declares, “The rest is silence” – and then dies – in the loudest least-silent way possible. I don’t know. I like contemplating the possibilities in that.

Joyce’s wife, Nora, who claimed to never have read any of her husband’s work (hahaha), said to interviewers after Joyce’s death, “”What’s all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book.”

I have always tended to agree with that, and I also believe that Finnegans Wake is actually MORE accessible than Ulysses. It is certainly less intricate in structure, although the language can be daunting. Joyce certainly believed that everyone, uneducated or not, could read Finnegans Wake, and coming as he does from Ireland, with its long history of oral storytelling, Finnegans Wake seems to me to be meant to be read out loud. That’s how I read it (thanks, Dad, for the tip), and once you read it out loud, the language is not difficult at all. Not in the slightest. It’s way easier to “get” than Ulysses, which demands your commitment in a way that no other book really does. Finnegans Wake, I suppose, demands your submission as well, but once you do submit, the entire text cracks open. It’s like being in a dream. The logic of dreams is rock-solid, everyone understands their own dreams, and the text of Finnegans Wake is an extended subconsciously-driven monologue of someone falling in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams.

Samuel Beckett said, perceptively, about the language in Finnegans Wake:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

So I am curious to see what is going on here with the corrections to Finnegans Wake, and what the editors and scholars felt needed correcting. I do know that the book was finally published, with Joyce racing after his own manuscript, still tweaking it. He was never done. Shall we call him OCD? There is a level of that here. Writing, and editing, was, in a way, a beautiful torment to him, as the overlay of meaning, the collapsing structure expanding and contracting, was ALIVE to James Joyce. I am sure it went to the printer with Joyce’s ink still drying on the pages.

Here are some thoughts of mine on Finnegans Wake – and, as always, I miss the one I really want to talk to about all of this.