Remaining Relevant

James Joyce (Zürich 1938)

During the seventeen years that James Joyce spent writing Finnegans Wake, he was beset by one abiding fear: that of becoming irrelevant. The publication of Ulysses had thrust Joyce into the public eye. He was lionized by his readers and vilified by his detractors, while the critics placed him on a pedestal and worshiped him as though he were a second Shakespeare.

The composition of Finnegans Wake would take a heavy toll on Joyce’s fading eyesight, but the fear of going blind was nothing compared to this fear of becoming irrelevant.

Joyce knew from the outset that his next book would not be following Ulysses into print anytime soon. The completion of what became known as Work in Progress would require the labour of many years, and long before he reached the end, Joyce would come to look upon his creation as a Frankenstein’s monster:

He told me about new difficulties with his editor, objectively moreover, knowing full well himself that his book was a monster. Yet, that monster was his only pleasure ... (Mercanton & Parks 714)

Harriet Shaw Weaver

Joyce made use of several ploys to maintain public interest in his monster. Rather than write in splendid isolation—the Romantic artist in his Parisian garret—he co-opted the littératrice Harriet Shaw Weaver as his collaborator. This remarkably patient and generous woman was for seventeen years his muse, sounding board, editor, patron, banker, librarian, wet nurse, secretary, archivist, and tireless correspondent.

Joyce was also anxious to have early drafts of the chapters of Work in Progress appear at regular intervals in progressive or well-established literary journals. About fifty such bleeding chunks appeared in print between April 1924, when Ford Madox Ford published the Mamalujo vignette in T he T ransatlantic R eview, and April 1938, when Eugene and Maria Jolas published a fragment of the Butt and Taff episode from II.3 in transition. A few fragments were even issued in limited editions as actual books in their own right.

Curiously, though, Joyce consistently declined to be interviewed by professional journalists. Appearing in the pages of the popular press was a bridge too far for him: not even Finnegans Wake was worth that level of humiliation.

Haveth Childers Everywhere and Anna Livia Plurabelle

The Title of the Book

We do not know for certain when Joyce hit upon Finnegans Wake as the title of his new book. By his own admission it was around 1923, but even as late as 1927 he was reserving the right to play around with it.

The materials for a new book had been forming slowly in his mind. The structure of it was still obscure to him, so that when the sculptor August Suter asked what he was writing, he could answer truthfully, “it’s hard to say.” “Then what is the title of it?” asked Suter. This time Joyce was less candid: “I don’t know. It is like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don’t know what I will find.” Actually he did know the title at least, and had told it to Nora in strictest secrecy. (Ellmann 543)

The secret of the true title of Work in Progress was another game Joyce played to ensure that both he and the book remained relevant to the reading public during the long interval between the publication of Ulysses and the eventual appearance of Finnegans Wake. The first victim to be inveigled into playing this silly game was, once again, the hapless Harriet Shaw Weaver:

While in London for the P.E.N. Club meeting in April 1927, he had suggested that she try to guess the title of his book. It was another effort to bring her within Finnegans Wake’s binding circle. For the next several months their correspondence was full of rather misleading hints and good, but wrong, guesses. (Ellmann 597)

On 16 April 1927, Joyce sent a postcard to Weaver, in which he wished her a pleasant Easter and dropped a few obtuse hints:

I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a perfect square. You see what I am driving at, don’t you? I am awfully solemn about it, mind you, so you must not think it is a silly story about the mouse and the grapes. No, it’s a wheel, I tell the world. And it’s all square. (Letters I 16 April 1927)

In Ulysses Bloom had dreamt of squaring the circle. In Finnegans Wake Joyce succeeded in circling the square: the book is a circle in the sense that its opening and closing sentences are actually the two halves of the same sentence : it is a square in the sense that it comprises four parts.

A month later Joyce gave Weaver some more hints:

The title is very simple and as commonplace as can be. It is not Kitty O’Shea as some wit suggested, though it is in two words. I want to think over it more as I propose to make some experiments with it also ... My remarks about the engine were not meant as a hint at the title. I meant that I wanted to take up several other arts and crafts and teach everybody how to do everything properly so as to be in the fashion. (Letters I 12 May 1927)

Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann takes up the story:

Richard Ellmann

Her next suggestion, on May 19, 1927, was “One Squared.” Joyce liked this one too, but said, “The title I have projected is much more commonplace and accords with JJ and S and AGS & Co., and ought to be fairly plain from the reading of [HCE’s siglum on its back]. The sign in this form means HCE interred in the landscape.” [Letters I 31 May 1927] (He was hinting at Finnegan’s interment.) Her next try was “Dublin Ale” on June 13, Dublin being a play on “doubling,” then on June 28, “Ireland’s Eye,” “Phoenix Park,” and others in a reckless heap. He said Phoenix Park was close. She came closer yet with “Finn MacCool,” and, abetted by more hints, “Finn’s Town” or “Finn’s City” on September 17. This was close enough so that Joyce, who did not really want her to guess the title, but only to guess around it, did not encourage her further. Finnegan went unidentified. (Ellmann 597)

Those last few guesses are very close to Finn’s Hotel, which was probably Joyce’s original choice (RFW 399.35), before he finally settled on Finnegans Wake. The references to Jameson whiskey, Guinness and HCE’s siglum, however, lend more weight to the latter. It is possible that he was keeping his options open, but clearly some reference to the ballad Finnegan’s Wake was in the hat by 1927 at the latest.

By the spring of 1938 the title of the book was still a secret, and many of Joyce’s admirers had joined the game. On one occasion, Stuart Gilbert almost guessed the title of the book, albeit unwittingly. Joyce didn’t bat an eyelash:

Jacques Mercanton

“I didn’t even smile. I thanked the good fathers who trained me so well,” Joyce said later. “Some,” he said, “have put the title in an envelope, but they will be disappointed,” He seemed to take a pleasure, both childish and magical, in this game, prolonged for so many years, as though it were essential that his mysterious book be veiled with one mystery the more before making its appearance in the world. (Mercanton & Parks 711)

Joyce hoped that the book would be ready for publication on 4 July 1938, his father’s birthday, despite his publisher’s objections that summer publications were bad for sales. But this deadline passed with the book still unfinished:

When the publisher begged for the book’s title, still undivulged, Joyce said he would give it to him just before the book went to the binder, and no sooner. (Ellmann 707)

Then he talked about his arguments with his publisher, Faber and Faber, who insisted on knowing the real title of his book, which Joyce refused to divulge. “I have kept it to myself for sixteen years. I will supply it at the last minute, when I please. To be so exacting about a book like mine is absurd.” (Mercanton & Parks 707)

Finally, in the summer of 1938, the secret came out:

James Joyce and Eugene Jolas

That summer of 1938 Joyce had to give up to some of his Paris friends, though still not to Faber & Faber or the Viking Press, the one secret about his book which he wished to keep a little longer, its title. He had often issued a challenge to his intimates to guess what it might be, and offered a thousand francs to anyone who succeeded. Gilbert, Gorman, Beckett, Léon, and Jolas had all tried and failed, like Miss Weaver before them. One July night on the terrace of Fouquet’s Joyce repeated his offer over several bottles of Riesling. Mrs. Joyce began to sing an Irish song about Mr. Flannigan and Mr. Shannigan. Joyce, startled, asked her to stop. When he saw no harm had been done, he very distinctly, as a singer does it, made the lip motions which seemed to indicate F and W. Maria Jolas guessed, “Fairy’s Wake.” Joyce looked astonished and said, “Brava! But something is missing.” The Jolases thought about it for some days, and suddenly on the morning of August 2 Eugene Jolas saw that the title must be Finnegans Wake. At dinner that evening he threw the words in the air, and Joyce blanched. Slowly he set down the wineglass he held. “Ah Jolas, you’ve taken something out of me,” he said almost sadly, then became quite merry. When they parted that night, Jolas wrote later, “He embraced me, danced a few of his intricate steps, and asked: ‘How would you like to have the money?’” Jolas replied, “in sous,” and the following morning Joyce arrived with a bag filled with ten-franc pieces, which he instructed Jolas’s daughters to serve their father at lunch. But he swore the Jolases to secrecy until he had written “the final full stop, though there is none.” (Ellmann 708)

Curiously, no one thought of informing Harriet Shaw Weaver of Jolas’s discovery. It is possible that the woman who had done more for Joyce than anyone else to bring Finnegans Wake into the world, and who had made the first guesses back in 1927, only discovered the title of the book when Joyce sent her a copy on the day of its publication, 4 May 1938. As a further insult, it is also possible that the thousand francs Joyce gave to Jolas as his prize for finally guessing the title were actually supplied by Joyce’s generous benefactor—the same Harriet Shaw Weaver! Mais qui sait?

Finnegans Wake

Finnegan’s Wake is the title of a popular Irish-American ballad about a drunken Irish navvy who falls from a ladder and breaks his skull, only to wake up during a riot at his wake. In Joyce’s book the song features most heavily in the opening chapter, so we will be taking a closer look at it then.

Shortly after publication, Faber and Faber and Viking Press had to reassure their readers that the omission of the apostrophe in the title of Finnegans Wake was not a typo, but what the author wrote—or, rather, didn’t write (Herbert 14). At the very outset, Joyce is warning the reader that what the eye sees and what the ear hears are not necessarily the same thing. Both contribute something to the overall meaning. By omitting the apostrophe from the title, he is also opening it up to fresh interpretations—though, of course, it still sounds the same. Finnegans becomes the plural of Finnegan, an Irish Everyman, and Wake is now a verb. But is the verb in the indicative mood or the subjunctive?

The title can also be analysed into three parts: one French, one Latin, and one English:

French: Fin, end
Latin: negans, denying, negating
English: Wake, awaken!

A circular novel that begins again as it ends, Finnegans Wake also reminds one of the unboundedly long song Michael Finnegan.

Finnegan also reminds one of the legendary Irish figure Finn MacCool, a giant among Lilliputians, who features prominently in the book: Finn again’s awake.

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)
Stacey Herbert, Composition and Publishing History of the Major Works: An Overview, in John McCourt (editor), James Joyce in Context, Pages 3-16, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2009)
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)
Jacques Mercanton, Lloyd C Parks (translator), The Hours of James Joyce, Part I, The Kenyon Review, Volume 24, Number 4, Pages 700-730, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio (1962)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)

Image Credits

Harriet Shaw Weaver: Anonymous Photograph (1907), Public Domain
Richard Ellmann: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use
James Joyce and Eugene Jolas: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use

Finnegans Wake - A Prescriptive Guide

29 June 2022