Being Resourceful

 

Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin

Now that we are finally ready to crack open a copy of Finnegans Wake and start reading, this might be an appropriate time to take a brief look at some helpful resources for the reader. Some of these resources are online, some offline.

Online Resources

Let us begin with some online resources.

FWEET is Raphael Slepon’s Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury. This is probably the best online source for searching and elucidating the text of Finnegans Wake, but it is much more than that. It also contains links to dozens of works that Joyce is known to have used as sources for Finnegans Wake, a bibliography of works used by Slepon to build the site, and links to relevant websites. The Finnegans Wake pagination and lineation are taken from the Faber and Faber new edition (1950) and the Viking Press 8th printing (1958), both of which retain the pagination of the original edition of 1939 but incorporate Joyce’s own corrections.

There was a project on the FWEET site to identify and catalogue all 9,000 or so emendations made by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, the editors of The Restored Finnegans Wake, which is my preferred edition of the text. Sadly, this project was abandoned after the tenth chapter, II.2, and has not yet been resumed.

The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection is a digital collection of Joycean studies maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. All sixteen of these works are now out of print, but they are not out of copyright. Adaline Glasheen’s Third Census of Finnegans Wake, Louis O Mink’s A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer, and David Hayman’s A First-Draft Version of Finneganns Wake are particularly useful for the inexperienced reader, while Roland McHugh’s The Sigla of Finnegans Wake and Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake are aimed at more experienced readers. All sixteen works, however, are worth reading. (I might also add McHugh’s The Finnegans Wake Experience on the Internet Archive.)

FinnegansWiki is an online project to annotate the text of Finnegans Wake. I have contributed to this site myself, but I do not know if there are any active contributors working on it now. It’s worth consulting when elucidating Finnegans Wake, but the further you get into the book the more likely it is to find yourself staring at a page of unannotated text.

From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay is Peter Chrisp’s wonderful blog on Finnegans Wake and all things Joyce. There are now a plethora of private blogs devoted to all things Joycean—I’ve added to their number myself—but Peter’s is one of the better ones out there. It is always worth a look.

Jorn Barger

Robot Wisdom is an archived version of Jorn Barger’s blog, the Internet’s first ever weblog. Barger is one of the most insightful and valuable contributors to Joycean scholarship ever, but navigating one’s way through this treasure trove of riches is no longer as easy as it was when Barger was actively blogging on his own site. Some of Barger’s Joycean blogs have been rescued and given new life by another blogger who calls himself Tim Finnegan—is this Barger himself?

Ricorso is Bruce Stewart’s huge online encyclopaedia of Irish literature. The James Joyce section is quite extensive and worth browsing.

Genetic Joyce Studies is an electronic journal for the study of the genesis and evolution of Joyce’s works. It may be too academic for the casual reader of Finnegans Wake, but many of its articles shed invaluable light on the darker aspects of the book.

Finnegans, Wake! is the homepage of the Finnegans Wake Reading Group of Austin (Texas) and a valuable blog “devoted to Finnegans Wake containing interpretations, reflections, relevant links, and other information concerning James Joyce’s greatest but least-read masterpiece.”

John Gordon’s Finnegans Wake Blog John Gordon, Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Connecticut, is best known as the author of Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary. I don’t agree with Gordon’s largescale interpretation of the novel—a subject I will be returning to in due course—but many of his insights are pure gold. His Finnegans Wake blog was created to supplement Roland McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake.

Through Finnegans Wake is artist Gian Paolo Guerini’s curious site. It contains some interesting files and links, including one in which the entire text of Finnegans Wake has been arranged in alphabetic order!

Print Media

These offline resources are books that are not freely available or easily accessible online.

The Restored Finnegans Wake: This version of Finnegans Wake was edited by brothers Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon, and was first published by Houyhnhnm Press in 2010. This is the edition that I now use, though it is good advice to keep the classic text handy as a reference.

Annotations to Finnegans Wake: Roland McHugh’s classic work, now in its fourth edition, was compiled with the express intention that it might be used side-by-side with Joyce’s text. McHugh imagined the reader holding both books open and scanning across from Finnegans Wake to the corresponding page in the Annotations. I do not recommend this approach to Joyce’s monster. I think it is much more rewarding to keep these two procedures—reading Finnegans Wake and elucidating Finnegans Wake—separate. Read a passage through from beginning to end without interruption—preferably aloud and as part of a public reading group—and do not worry whether you understand it or not. Later, at your leisure, go through the same passage line by line, word by word, and squeeze as much meaning out of it as you can. This too can be a shared experience.

The Internet and its search engines have rendered McHugh’s Annotations almost obsolete. Although I replaced my copy of the first edition with a copy of the second edition as soon as it came out, and subsequently replaced that with a copy of the third edition, I have so far resisted the temptation to upgrade to the fourth edition, which was published six years ago. Furthermore, the pagination and lineation follow those of the classic text, not The Restored Finnegans Wake, which I use. Nevertheless, it is ignored at one's peril.

James Joyce: Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce first came out in 1959, but a revised version was published in Joyce’s centenary year 1982. At times, Ellmann’s text is more hagiography than biography: biographers should not write biographies of people they admire. The true Joyce—who was not nearly as admirable or as likeable a character as Ellmann’s Joyce—is often lost in the blizzard of minutiae and biographical details. But, like McHugh’s Annotations, this is a classic of Joycean scholarship that simply cannot be ignored.

I could quite easily extend this booklist to librarial dimensions, but it is probably wiser to add new titles to our Wakean bookshelf on a piecemeal basis.

Recordings of Finnegans Wake

The original 1939 text of Finnegans Wake is now in the public domain, and there are several free recordings available online. There are also some commercially available recordings. These are of mixed quality.

Patrick Horgan

Patrick Horgan: Made in 1985 by the English actor Patrick Horgan, this was the first unabridged recording of Finnegans Wake. It is still one of the best. Unfortunately, the audio quality of the online version is quite poor. I wish someone with expertise in this field would remaster the audio files. In the meantime, if you import the files into Audacity and apply Noise Removal and Click Removal, the quality can be improved significantly.

Waywords and Meansigns is an online project to set the whole of Finnegans Wake to music. They have already recorded two complete settings of the text and are currently adding settings of shorter passages on a piecemeal basis. The music often overpowers the text, and there are many misreadings and mispronunciations, but the enthusiasm is obvious and infectious.

Simon Loekle

Simon Loekle’s Finnegans Wake Audio Archive: Simon Loekle had only completed about six of the seventeen chapters in Finnegans Wake at the time of his all-too-early death. These readings are of high quality.

James Joyce

James Joyce Reads Anna Livia Plurabelle: In 1929 Joyce himself recorded the closing pages of I.8, Anna Livia Plurabelle. It is the only recording of Finnegans Wake by the author, and is still the best introduction to the novel. A cleaner recording can also be heard on the YouTube channel transformingArt.

The Most Ever Company: The YouTube channel Tmec Rep has an ongoing project to record the Wake. Currently (June 2022), they have posted videos for the first nine chapters. You can follow the text onscreen while you listen.

Gian Paolo Guerini

Through Finnegans Wake: Gian Paolo Guerini has compiled a number of recordings drawn from various of the sources listed above.

Patrick Healy

Patrick Healy’s Reading of Finnegans Wake: This is a complete recording of Joyce’s original text. It was made by Irish writer Patrick Healy over a period of four days in 1992 and has a running time of about 25 hours. Healy reads at breakneck speed and introduces many egregious errors. It is still in copyright and The Lilliput Press’s current price-tag is prohibitive—thankfully. The website UbuWeb, however, has posted all 132 tracks online. I don’t know whether this is legal and above board—I leave the browser to decide. The kindest comment I can make on Healy’s performance is that it was done as an experiment, but, in my opinion, it is an experiment that should never be repeated.

Barry McGovern and Marcella Riordan: It has been said that the advent of the audiobook has revolutionized the reading of Finnegans Wake. Irish actors Barry McGovern and Marcella Riordan’s performance for Naxos Audiobooks is the first commercially available unabridged recording of Finnegans Wake. It is now available as an Audible download, making it easier than ever for anyone to make their way through this mighty tome. The recording lasts more than 29 hours and is exceptional. It is surely worth one credit.

At the time of writing (June 2022), there are still no recordings of Finnegans Wake on Librivox. Hopefully, this inexplicable state of affairs will change in the near future.

And that’s as good a place as any to beach the bark of our tale.

References

• Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1982)

• James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber Limited, London (1939, 1949)

• James Joyce, Stuart Gilbert (editor) & Richard Ellmann (editor), The Letters of James Joyce, Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Viking Press, New York

• James Joyce, James Joyce: The Complete Works, Pynch (editor), Online (2013)

• Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Fourth Edition, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland (2016)

• Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)

Image Credits

• Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin: © Governors and Guardians of Marsh’s Library, Creative Commons License

• Jorn Barger: Jorn Barger (photographer), Public Domain

• The Restored Finnegans Wake: © Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon, Martino Mardersteig (designer), Fair Use

• Annotations to Finnegans Wake: © 2016 John Hopkins University Press, Fair Use

• James Joyce: Alex Ehrenzweig (photographer), Public Domain

• Patrick Horgan: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use

• Waywords and Meansigns: © Robert Berry, Fair Use

• Simon Loekle: Unknown Copyright, Fair Use

• James Joyce: Berenice Abbott (photographer), © Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc, Fair Use

• Tmec Rep: © The Most Ever Company, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fair Use

• Gian Paolo Guerini: © 2010 Gian Paolo Guerini (artist), Self-Portrait, Fair Use

• Patrick Healy: © Mathijs Gomperts-Bien, Fair Use

Useful Resources

• Jorn Barger: Robotwisdom

• Joyce Tools

• FWEET

• The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection

• FinnegansWiki

• The James Joyce Digital Archive

• From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay

• John Gordon’s Finnegans Wake Blog