The Evolution of the Opening Sentence

Joyce’s Initial Sketch of the Opening Lines of Finnegans Wake

In his wonderful blog on Finnegans Wake, From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay, Peter Chrisp describes the opening sentence of the book as:

The sentence it took Joyce twelve years to write.

Finnegans Wake celebrates the endless circle of life and history, and is itself a circle, as Joyce once told his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver:

The book really has no beginning or end. (Trade secret, registered at Stationers Hall.) It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence. (Letters I 8 November 1926)

Perhaps it is not surprising that it took Joyce twelve years to bring the two ends of his book together.

The last sentence of Finnegans Wake comprises the dying words of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the female protagonist of the book, and her initials ALP are prominently displayed on the final page. (Peter Chrisp, again, was the first to draw my attention to this.) When we return to the first page in order to complete that sentence, we are brought back to the book’s male protagonist, HCE. I believe Joyce originally wanted his Everywoman and Everyman to be linked together in a sort of literary sexual congress at this point where the end becomes the beginning. He actually tried to arrange things so that the very last words of Finnegans Wake encoded ALP while the very first words encoded HCE. His first-draft version of the opening paragraph, sketched in October 1926, simply read:

Howth Castle & Environs! (Hayman 46)

The following month, he emended this to:

brings us back to

Howth Castle & Environs.

Joyce’s Second Draft of the Opening Lines of Finnegans Wake

It is not clear whether brings us back to are now the opening words of the novel or whether Joyce saw them as belonging properly to the last page of the book: note how they are offset from the rest of the text. Note also how the eventual second paragraph (beginning with Sir Tristram) is still part of the first paragraph.

Joyce continued to amend these opening lines in a piecemeal fashion. In his third draft (late 1926) he added the word river, which he quickly emended to the memorable opening word riverrun:

Joyce’s Third Draft of the Opening Lines of Finnegans Wake

In April 1927, Eugene and Maria Jolas began to serialize Finnegans Wake—or Work in Progress, as it was then called—in their literary journal transition. This is how the opening page of the book first appeared in print:

transition 1, Page 9 (April 1927)

Observe how riverrun has been indented to ensure that Howth Castle & Environs is printed at the start of the first full line. Joyce, it seems, still regarded these as the real opening words of his novel. When Finnegans Wake was finally published in 1939, Howth Castle and Environs were the first words of the third line of the book, though this appears to have been the result of happenstance, as the indentation of riverrun is the normal indentation used throughout the book at the start of every paragraph.

When Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon brought out The Restored Finnegans Wake in 2010, however, they deliberately restored transition’s large indentation to ensure that Howth Castle & Environs was printed at the start of a line. (They also restored the ampersand, &, which had been replaced by and in the original edition.)

After the publication of the first issue of transition, Joyce set the passage aside and did not look at it again for another nine years. It was only in the last few years of writing that it acquired its final form. The phrases past Eve and Adam’s and by a commodious vicus of recirculation were added in July 1936 (Crispi & Slote 61-62):

Joyce’s 1936 Additions to transition 1.9

The memorable phrase from swerve of shore to bend of bay was a very late addition, inserted on the page proofs in 1938 (Crispi & Slote 63). It was also at this late stage that Joyce inserted a paragraph break after Environs. (Crispi).

RFW 003.01–03

By the time he was finished with it, Joyce had transformed the opening sentence of Finnegans Wake into a thing of beauty, an iconic piece of literature as finely wrought and as carefully crafted as the opening verse of the Bible. Indeed, the haphazard manner in which he had groped his way to it over the course of twelve years might lead one to surmise that it was divinely inspired.

The Amazing First Verse of the Bible

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

References

Luca Crispi, The James Joyce Archive from an Archival Perspective, Genetic Joyce Studies, Special Issue: 25th Anniversary of The James Joyce Archive (Summer 2002), University of Antwerp, Antwerp (2002)
Luca Crispi & Sam Slote (editors), How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin (2007)
Michael Groden (general editor) et al, The James Joyce Archive, Volumes 1-63, Garland Publishing, New York (1977-79)
Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul (editors), transition, Number 1 (April 1927), Shakespeare and Co, Paris (1927)
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)
Bernard Benstock, The Paul and Lucie Léon/James Joyce Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1985)
David Hayman (editor), A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, University of Texas Press, Austin (1963)
Danis Rose, John O’Hanlon, The Restored Finnegans Wake, Penguin Classics, London (2012)

Image Credits

Joyce’s Initial Sketch of the Opening Lines of Finnegans Wake: Michael Groden (general editor) et al, The James Joyce Archive, Volume 44, Garland Publishing, New York (1977-79), Fair Use
Joyce’s Second Draft of the Opening Lines of Finnegans Wake: Michael Groden (general editor) et al, The James Joyce Archive, Volume 44, Garland Publishing, New York (1977-79), Fair Use
Joyce’s Third Draft of the Opening Lines of Finnegans Wake: Michael Groden (general editor) et al, The James Joyce Archive, Volume 44, Garland Publishing, New York (1977-79), Fair Use
transition 1, Page 9 (April 1927 ): Eugene Jolas & Elliot Paul (editors), transition, Number 1, Shakespeare & Company, Paris (1927), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Public Domain
Joyce’s Additions to transition 1.9: Michael Groden (general editor) et al, The James Joyce Archive, Volume 44, Garland Publishing, New York (1977-79), Fair Use

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