Textual Authority and Diagnostic Joyce: Re-Reading the Way We Read the

Wake

Jeremy Colangelo

Joyce Studies Annual, 2016, pp. 66-83 (Article)

Published by Fordham University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/650229

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 Textual Authority and Diagnostic Joyce
Re-Reading the Way We Read the Wake

JEREMY COLANGELO

The publisher asks the readers indulgence for typographical errors

unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances.
S. B.

The lines that open this essay are from the first edition of Joyces Ulysses,
on an un-numbered page just before the main text begins. Any scholar of
Ulysses knows how much of an understatement that sentence is, how great
an indulgence the edition had asked Joyces readers, and how much that
indulgence has been given, in the form of the now-standard Gabler edi-
tion. The line is an apology in both the modern sense of the term, in
which one asks for forgiveness, and in the ancient Greek sense of apologia,
in which one mounts a defense or offers an explanation (think here of
that most un-apologetic of texts, the Apology of Socrates). In neither case
is the apology successful, and its failure extends in part from its
signatureS. B., or Sylvia Beach, Joyces publisher, who would, pre-
sumably, bear responsibility for the typographical errors (if only the
problems in the 1922 edition were so simple as that!) committed by Dara-
ntiere, the printer she hired. But this signature has two problems: First,
one can hardly blame Beach for hiring a French (and French-speaking)
printer, given that an English printer would have refused the job for fear
of an obscenity charge, and second, Beach may not have written the apol-
ogy to begin with. A look at the manuscript reveals that the more accurate
signature could well be J. J.for the final version of the text was clearly
composed in Joyces handwriting (JJA 27.305).

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t ex tu al au th or it y a nd di ag no st ic jo yc e 67

I hedge my bets and say could well be because, like the rest of Ulysses,
the notes composition history is in no way straightforward. The original
hand-written version that must at some point have been given to the
printers has (as far as I have been able to tell) been lost, but by looking at
the notes different versions we can make several inferences about it. Vol-
ume 27 of the James Joyce Archive contains three versions of the note, on
pages 303, 305, and 309, and these versions have likely been reproduced
in reverse chronological order. The version on 309 is printed in a larger
typeface than what was eventually used (so that it takes up four lines
instead of two), and contains several variations in wording: The pub-
lisher of this book asks for the indulgence of readers [sic] for typographical
errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances. The odd phrasing
of the indulgence of readers conforms to French grammar, being a
hyper-literal translation of lindulgence du lecteur. Many of Joyces type-
setting instructions to Darantiere are in French (like those on JJA 27.296,
for example), and so it is quite likely that the oddities in this first version
are the result of a poor translation of a written request that has since been
lost.
Later versions of the note contain edits in Joyces handwriting. On page
305, we see the final version of the note written in English, fixing the
grammar and also omitting the phrase of this book. Joyce also includes
a request (in French) to shrink the font so that the note takes only two
lines. On page 303, we see Joyce wavering on his decision to omit of this
bookediting the note so to return the phrase but then crossing that
edit out. While none of this material shows for certain that the original
decision to include this apology did not come from Beach, it does show
that Joyce exerted the same meticulous attention over it that he did the
rest of Ulysses and its front matter, and also that he exercised control over
its precise wording. If this note is indeed Beach speaking, it is clearly on
Joyces stage, and it is impossible to extricate Joyce fully from the notes
composition. Yet the signature at the bottom gives no indication of this
doubled authorship, meaning that what we encounter are two voices ema-
nating from a single mouth.
The problems in this apology have deep implications for the reading of
Finnegans Wake, and these implications are most palpable in light of the
Wakes relationship with its avant-texte and the rather dicey problems of
authorial intent inherent in the work of critique genetique, or genetic criti-
cism. Following the death of the author declared by Roland Barthes,

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68 j er em y c ol an ge lo

the authors corpse has had an unusual place in Joyce criticism: His manu-
scripts are some of the most studied in all of English literature, and Rich-
ard Ellmanns biography is the only text not written by Joyce to have a
dedicated abbreviation in the James Joyce Quarterly. As Tim Conley
argues, Joyces engagement with an aesthetic of error has demanded
that scholars refuse to foreclose biography and textual history as a valid
route of criticism.1 But insofar as the Wake is concerned, the continued
place of Joyce, the person, in Joyce studies is unusual given, as Vicki
Mahaffey describes, its immensely subtle critique . . . of the limitations
of monological authority.2 For the Wake is not like other texts, and Joyce
is not like other authors, and it would be wise here to keep in mind Fritz
Senns remark that whatever Finnegans Wake is, it is most, and, there-
fore, no present day theory . . . would be acceptable if it did not take the
extreme, the superlative, case of the Wake into account.3 Returning to
the apology, I would like to point here to its request for the readers
indulgencenot the readers patience, nor the readers sympathy, but
the readers indulgenceas the frame for my discussion of the role author-
ity plays in reading Finnegans Wake, particularly the short section on the
Wake and Derridian hospitality later in this essay. The word choice here
may be the first time that Joyce invoked the necessity of understanding
his works composition history (specifically, the changes affected by the
printer) for understanding the text being read,4 and he did so at least in
part through the voice of his publisher. In doing so, he at once makes
central the need to indulge the vagrancies of the novels composition,
and so implicitly reify its authors authority, while at the same time dis-
placing the call to perform this indulgence (in both the colloquial sense
and also, possibly, in the sense of a papal indulgence) onto another. This
multi-layered apology, where Joyce apologises in two senses at once, in
two voices at once (and perhaps while using the words of another person)
has serious implications for the way we consider textual authority as it
functions in Finnegans Wake. One must also, in the Ulysses apology, look
askance at the phrase exceptional circumstances: Joyce had just finished
a novel that inflects the everyday life of an unassuming Dubliner with the
import of an epic heroa novel in which every circumstance is excep-
tional. But what, here, should be treated as an exceptional exception?
As Senn has observed, it is Finnegans Wake, really, that makes us aware
of just how inadequate normal consecutive reading can become.5 It is in
the wake of this inadequacy that we can begin to see how readings of
Finnegans Wake are compelled to imitate the auto-metonymic structure

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t ex tu al au th or it y a nd di ag no st ic jo yc e 69

of the Wake itself, where each line contains a trace of the 628-page text,
itself the germ of its history of composition, embedded in the books
colossal set of extra-textual relationships.6 Thus, reading the Wake implies
also the work of writing the Wake, and no reading is allowed to take
control for more than a fleeting moment. It is in this way that Finnegans
Wake always exceeds its readers. However, what I am concerned with in
this essay is the manner in which the Wake exceeds not the reader, but the
reading process, and what that exceeding says about that process itself. My
contention is that Finnegans Wake is like a Rorschach testthough not
in the way that metaphor is usually used. Most often, when someone
compares the Wake to an inkblot, the metaphor refers to the way the
texts ambiguities allow a reader to find seemingly anything between its
pages. But the test, in clinical practice, is not merely an interpretation
generator. Rather, the interpretations are meant to provide a window into
the patients underlying mental processes.7 It is this hitherto unrecognized
aspect of this old metaphor that I wish to bring forward. I would like to
suggest that the manner in which one interprets the Wake provides an
indication of ones underlying textual ideologythe constructed author-
ity through which a reader mediates his/her interpretation, and which
serves to narrow the scope of attention to permit one of the several voices
to breach through beyond the rest. Thus, my focus here will necessarily
be less on the Wake itself than on ways in which the Wake has been read
by others, and I will also have no choice but to retread what to some
might appear old theoretical ground. This retreading is necessary because
my goal is not a novel interpretation of the text qua text, but a change in
perspective from treating Finnegans Wake as an object of study to regard-
ing it as the prism through which one can study the reading of others.

II

To back up my claims, and in particular my contention that the Wake is

an auto-metonym, I would like to do a brief reading of a particular word:
mememormee (FW 628.14).8 Beginning with the word itself, we imme-
diately encounter bifurcationwhen pronounced it sounds very close to
remember me (notably, two words instead of one), but when broken
up it looks like me me mor[e] mee. Both of these are imperatives, but
contradictory ones. Remember me implies that the me is soon to be
absent, and so needs remembering, while more me instead calls for its
continued presence, and in greater supply. Both, however, are celebrations

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70 j er em y c ol an ge lo

of the me figure, but pulled in opposite directions. The me can be

remembered, but only after vanishing. Whereas continued existence
demands expanded presencemore extended to infinity, a reading that
ties in with the hint of the French meme, which indicates sameness. By
turning to Walter Skeats Etymological Dictionary (a source Joyce com-
monly used)9 we gain further readings: The extra E in mee is revealed
to be the Anglo Saxon spelling of the word me,10 and M. E. is Skeats
abbreviation for Middle English11meaning that the appearance of
M-E before M-E-E produces a very Wakean reversal of the English
languages developmental teleology, placing Middle English prior to Old.
Looking also at the entry for memory, we see its Latin root as memor
and memoria,12 which explains the absent E in mor. The same entry
shows that memory shares an etymological root with the word mar-
tyr. The martyr connection brings up many associations: the martyr
St. Stephen (from whom Stephen Dedalus got his name), the martyrdom
of Parnell that runs all through the Wake, the fact that this word appears
on the last paragraph of the book (and so is being martyred for the
riverrun of the new beginning), and so forth. That this word is being
spoken not by HCE, who is usually associated with martyrdom, but by
ALP is important too: Roland McHugh points out that mem is Hebrew
for water,13 which not only brings in ALPs association with the river
Liffey, but also opens up a new way to break the word downme mem
[water] or mee (my water or my life), a reading that recalls Tim Fin-
negans post-martyrdom resurrection in the original ballad. That the river
is its water (or at least in part, as it is also its riverbed) brings up the
question of whom the me refers to. Just as the water in a river inexora-
bly flows out of it, to be replaced with new water at its source (a source
that, in the tidal Liffey, is itself unstable), so too is ALPs Heraclitian
identity constantly changing, distributed across the Wake through the
many guises and anagrams in which she appears (even the word ana-
gram has a trace of Anna-gram or an image of Anna [Livia Plura-
belle]). But if there is no stable me then what do we give more of, and
what do we remember? One possible answer, I think, is that the very
undecidability of this question is part of the point: that the absence of a
singular me behind mememormee is itself a metonym for the mirage
of a singular authority behind the Wake itself. Thus the word, monad-
like, enacts under examination the themes and concepts of the larger
book, while also gesturing towards one of the central difficulties of that
books interpretation.

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t ex tu al au th or it y a nd di ag no st ic jo yc e 71

This reading of mememormee indicates but one of several ways in

which reading Finnegans Wake seems to proceed as if one is reading several
books at the same time, and is an indication of the degree to which the
way one interprets the Wake hinges on ones understanding of what tex-
tual interpretation should involvethat is, the manner in which we must
construct our own author. It has become something of a critical cliche to
at some point in a study of Joyce invoke the opening line of Ellmanns
biographywe are still learning to be James Joyces contemporaries, to
understand our interpreter (JJII 3)but in this case it is important to
ask what exactly a contemporary of James Joyce would look like. That
this line leads into a colossal biography of Joyce suggests that such a reader
would need a fairly strong (or, perhaps, total and complete) knowledge of
Joyces life. Notions of an ideal reader of the Wake (notions that begin
with a line from the Wake itself, calling for an ideal reader suffering from
an ideal insomnia [FW 120.134]) tend also to be connected to genetic
readings of the Wake, particularly Jean-Michel Rabates concept of an
ideal genetic reader who is a textual agent that actively confronts a new
type of materiality and temporality: Texts have to be read in the context of
an expanding archive that also creates its own pedagogy.14 These notions
combine two seemingly conflicting ideasthat the text must be read in
light of the authors biography, and that the act of reading rather than
the act of writing should have primacy when determining the meaning(s)
of a particular text. Rabate, in the same book, invokes and discusses
Umberto Ecos idea of a Model Reader, who is (as in Rabates concep-
tion) produce[d] by the text being read, which is, in turn, conceived
precisely in order to bring that reader into being.15 In his turn, Rabate
criticizes Ecos version for, among other things, its overreliance on the
notion of some readings being better than others, and for his assump-
tion of a stable, presumably non-genetic text. I would also criticize Ecos
model for being highly teleological in suggesting that the text produces
its reader, but never the other way around. Such a view is not at all in
tune with the intangibility of the Wakes language, where when we talk
about what something in the Wake means we are invariably confronted
with the coexistence of a contrary meaning.16 I suspect that, should such
a model reader ever emerge for Finnegans Wake, she or he would only
be able to sustain that status for an instant, dissolving like sand in the
riverrun of its first page. What this debate brings to the fore is the
degree to which ones approach to the Wake is dependent on ones own

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72 j er em y c ol an ge lo

hermeneutic philosophy, and the degree to which that philosophy is based

on methods of exclusion.
The problem that one faces here is that of limitationof the need, and
perhaps desire, to narrow an interpretation down to a single notion in
order to proceed with an interpretive act. That the Wake disrupts this
process should be well known to anyone who has studied it,17 but the
importance of this disruption can only be properly understood in terms
of the role that limitation plays in the interpretive process as such. In his
essay What Is an Author? Michel Foucault figures the author function
as a limiting factor, which circumscribes the array of possible readings
and enforces an upper limit on the texts ambiguity: if, says Foucault,
we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual
surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in
exactly the opposite fashion.18 We can see this effect take on a new form
in readings of Finnegans Wake precisely because of the way that Joyce
foregrounds the finished texts history and compositionthat is to say,
its extensive apologia. It is then in this way that we can begin to under-
stand the reader/text dynamic as a kind of power relationship, in which
the act of reading is mediated through an imagined Other, commonly
called The Author, who restricts the potentially infinite possibilities of the
text down to just one. It follows then that ones understanding of who an
author iswhat we might call ones readerly ideologywill foreclose
certain readings while opening up others. But one can, from this point,
go on to argue that one result of the constantly overlapped authorities
that the Wake foregroundsbe they genetic, lexical, historical, biographi-
cal, and so onmakes it nearly impossible to sustain any one such ideol-
ogy, to construct an author through which we may read the Wake, so that
it is as if there are a multitude of author figures standing behind the text
instead of just one.
In effect, a reading of Finnegans Wake will construct a new version of
Joyce to write the text it claims to interpreta new author figure, a new
agent of interpretive stasis, to which textual meaning can be attributed.
Judith Butler characterizes this process: a strange way to think about
power, [is] as the arrest of movement . . . through nominalization. The
name carries within itself the movement of a history that it arrests.19 In
the same way, to read the Wake monologically means to grant one particu-
lar idea of Joyce the authority to command the meaning of the text and
to thus arrest the river flow of supplementarity, and so be interpolated by
an authority of its own creation in the process of displacing the reading

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t ex tu al au th or it y a nd di ag no st ic jo yc e 73

one creates onto it. This power struggle arises precisely because these
authorities require mediation through the act of reading in order to attain
actuality, in much the same way that a Hegelian subject must relate itself
to another being in order to become itself.20 These authorities do not
technically exist, but are invented by the reader so as to displace responsi-
bility for interpretation onto them. However, one becomes a reader only
through the act of reading, meaning that one must create these authorities
in order to be actualized through them. Therefore, Finnegans Wake simply
could not be anything but difficult, as the disruption of this usually
unconscious process of actualization-through-subjection is primarily the
result of this difficulty. One must become enthrall[ed] to the eye of the
other21 before one can realize that the Other is actually ones selfand
thus are the double ends joined.

III

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler observes that when an I attempts

to represent itself, it invariably finds that it is already implicated in a
social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration . . . [its]
account . . . must [therefore] include the conditions of its own
emergence . . .22 Butler goes on to write that we start to give an account
only because we are interpolated as beings who are rendered accountable
by a system of justice and punishment23 and that it may be that to have
an origin means precisely to have several possible versions of the
origin . . .24 It is in these connected notionsgiving an account (that is,
apologia), interpellation before a powerful interlocutor, the multitudinous
origins that come from the attempt to define what the origin isthat we
can begin to see how the act of reading Finnegans Wake can be tied up
with a kind of postmodern ethics as applied to the notion of textual power
dynamics. But it is that system of justice and punishment that Butler
mentions which seems to be the sticking point: Who or what takes this
position? The obliteration of the author, and the resulting prominence of
the reader, was precisely Barthess position in The Death of the
Author.25 That the ghost of the author has continued to haunt Joyce
scholarship may, in fact, indicate that Barthess theory has been held up
to the Fritz Senn test and found wanting.
This problem brings us in part to what Rabate argued in 1991, when he
wrote that when the text keeps referring to its own problematic origins,
the reader turned critic has either to invoke another writer or critic as an

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74 j er em y c ol an ge lo

instance of authority or to produce his own theory of authority.26 The

rub in this conclusion is its singularity. Rabate says that we must either
invoke an external consciousness or produce a self-defined theory of
authority. Even though this process is implicitly self-directed, the result
is still singular. The mission remains to produce one meaning at a time,
which implies in some way suppressing the Wakes multiplicity. If we put
this kind of reading in concert with a genetic study of Joyce, where, as
Michael Groden describes, critics are engaged in a kind of dance, part-
nered with a sometimes compliant, sometimes resistant author who is
unquestionably in the lead,27 even more problems arise. To offer up a
genetic reading means to privilege the position of some kind of author,
even if it just some notional, constructed author as conceived by Foucault.
For, indeed, when reading the Wake one can often have several versions
of James Joyce at play.
We can see how this versioning of Joyce the author has seeped into
the criticism by looking at the function that the year 1939 plays in the
exegesis of the text. Because that is the year in which Finnegans Wake was
published; it is understood that any apparent reference to something that
occurred after that year is an impossible allusion. At the same time, there
is a tendency to implicitly accept a potential allusion to a pre-1939 text, as
if prior to that year Joyce were functionally omniscient. We see this kind
of reading at play in invocations of Joyces impressive feats of memory,28
his vast reading,29 his extensive knowledge of languages,30 or of the sheer
size and (despite their impressive accomplishments) lingering incomplete-
ness of the volumes of annotation produced by Roland McHugh for the
Wake and Gifford and Seidman for Ulysses. Even the common move of
calling the object of our study the Wake invests it with a level of import
usually reserved for the central texts of major religions (The Bible, The
Koran, The Vedas) or other writings we designate as Very Important Texts
(The Constitution, The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, The Magna
Carta). I suspect that this process may be necessary if one is to produce
any kind of interpretation of Finnegans Wake. What is needed, and what
this tendency provides, is an author figure capable of living up to the
textnot merely its composition, but also its nearly infinite interpretive
possibilities, possibilities so vast that they, together, exceed anything that
any individual person could have devised. But one must never forget that
the Joyce through which one articulates ones reading is a hypothetical
figure, and not a real onea momentary, imaginary mind rather than a

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stable consciousnessbecause to do otherwise would ossify a text that

must at all times be understood as unstable.
These conflicts emerge necessarily from the Wakes structure, writing
style, and difficulty. Because it is difficult, because its language unfamiliar,
because it draws on such a wide range of material that no person could
possibly grasp the totality of possible readings of a given passage, because
it makes the necessarily inscrutable process of its composition ineluctably
relevant to its untangling, because on top of all of this it is full of typo-
graphical errors and mis-prints and all the same problems that plagued
the first Ulysses editionbecause of all this, Finnegans Wake forces us to
face a source of great anxiety. This anxiety lies in the readers inescapable
responsibility for their own interpretations, and the corresponding drive
to discharge this responsibility by abdicating it, displacing it on an
author, or text, or anything external to the act of reading itself. This
process is inevitably mediated by the power structures into which the
reading subject has been interpolated. We can see evidence of this anxiety
in Foucaults essay, which he describes as a great peril, a great danger
with which fiction threatens our world, with the author allow[ing] a
limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations
with a world where one is thrifty not only with ones resources and riches,
but also with ones discourses and significations.31 A weakness in Fou-
caults essay, however, is its over-identification with the name of the
author, which on its own, no longer symbolic of an imagined person or
guiding intelligence, would be unable to perform the work to which Fou-
cault puts it. Rather, I argue that the name serves as a synecdoche for
a more elaborate conception of the intelligence that guides a particular
readinga simulacrum of who the reader thinks the author is, a manifes-
tation of the desire to push a reading outwards from oneself toward an
external other to which it is attributed.
In order to provide a concrete example of how the desire to attribute
ones reading of a text to some external intelligence can infiltrate the
reading process, I turn now to the story of Vladimir Dixon. In 1929, in
the face of mounting criticism of the early excerpts of Finnegans Wake
being published under the name Work in Progress, Joyce gathered some
of his friends and supporters to put together a collection of essays defend-
ing his work to the world. Sylvia Beach published these essays under the
pithy title of Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination
of Work in Progress. At the end of the collection were two short letters of
protest, the second of which was a litter to Mister Germs Choice

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76 j er em y c ol an ge lo

criticizing Work in Progress while at the same time parodying its style.32
For years, many Joyceans believed that this letter was written by Joyce
himself as an act of self-parody. Ellmann, for example, reprinted it in the
collection of Joyces letters that he edited (Letters III 18788), saying in a
note that this letter, obviously composed if not written by Joyce himself . . .
was delivered by an unknown hand to Sylvia Beachs bookshop (Letters
III 187n3, my emphasis). It was not until 1979, with the publication of a
short article by Thomas A. Goldwasser in James Joyce Quarterly, that
Joyceans learned that Dixon was a real persona Russian-born, MIT and
Harvard-educated engineer living in Paris who was also a minor author.33
A more extensive account of this story was published by John Whittier-
Ferguson in 1992, providing a more fleshed-out history of the letter and
characterizing Dixon as a willing but baffled middlebrow reader.34 The
article also includes a scan of the handwritten manuscript of the litter.35
John Whitter-Ferguson also highlights how unsubstantiated the rumor of
Joyce having written the letter was, describing how it started as essentially
a hunch on Beachs part that was picked up by the scholars.36
I describe this story here to show how readily a readereven one of
Richard Ellmanns calibercan easily jump on a supposed real or
authoritative author when the name in the byline has no identity (real
or imagined) behind it. Just as, for the conspiracy-minded, the name of
William Shakespeare can represent any number of real authors, each of
whose only claim to the plays and poetry is that they were alive at around
the right time and that their lives are better known than Shakespeares, so
too Vladimir Dixons real identity as a pseudonym for James Joyce
passed from the probably of Beach37 to the obviously of Ellmann.
What we see here is evidence that the process of attributing authority is
colored by what Derrida called mal darchive or archive fevera nos-
talgic ache for an origin which, because receding eternally into the past,
is impossible to reachbrought on by the invocation of the subjects (i.e.
the texts) origins through the apologia Judith Butler described in Excitable
Speech. What we see here is an interplay of displaced responsibility that is
processed by positing some kind of intelligence behind the arrangement
and writing of the text being read. That is, for this kind of reading to
occur, a reader needs not only a byline, but also an identity to attach to
it, if only an imaginary one. The name is not enough.

IV

This brings us back to the initial problem that I posed when quoting
Giving an Account of Oneself, regarding how one can be interpolated in

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PAGE 76
t ex tu al au th or it y a nd di ag no st ic jo yc e 77

the absence of an outside force, or how one can engage in a dialectic

when, instead of an Other consciousness, we are faced with mere text. It
is precisely this posited, imaginary consciousness behind the text that is
necessary for reading to occur; and most texts unproblematically supply
this Other, this authority. Following Butlers description of the role of
power in subject formation in The Psychic Life of Power, in which subjec-
tion occurs precisely in [a] fundamental dependency on a discourse we
never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency,38
we can postulate that a similar process is at work in the way readers
construct the author identity onto whom they inscribe their interpreta-
tion. The subject being formed, in this case, is a virtual one, but its forma-
tion within the mind of the reader is still derived from the power
dynamics into which the reader has been interpolated, particularly as
those dynamics dictate how a text should work and what an author is.
Thus, in the reading process as it most often proceeds, each reader creates
his/her own author out of the dynamics underlying their own subject
formation, and it is to this author that the reading is attributed. But
the Wake disrupts this process through its extreme heteroglossia, which
proceeds not only from the writing itself but also from variations in
Joyces writing process.
At many times in his letters, Joyce seems to hold at least two contradic-
tory views of his role in the process of writing the Wake. For example,
commenting on a letter that Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver (Letters
I 23435), Daniel Ferrer writes that Joyces description of his process
shift[s] from that of an all-powerful artificer in control of his creation
to a perplexed decipherer of constellations in a dark sky.39 In the letter
itself, Joyce had described how he had written some passages late at night
only to find himself the next day defeated by his own impossible hand-
writing (a problem that anyone who has studied his manuscripts could
sympathize with). Having been failed by his memory, Joyce found himself
saddled with the uncomfortable task of inventing a crude form of genetic
criticismcast out of the paradise of his own authority, he had to inter-
pret the writings before him to reconstruct their authors intentions. This
is but one of many instances in which Joyces account of his writing
wavered between arranging his composition process so that it proceeded
somewhat automatically and aleatorically40 (through a process of decom-
posing his source material into his notebooks and allowing them to
recombine partially by chance into short passages),41 while at the same
time valuing his own intentionality to the point that he would attempt to
assemble an account of the errors in the Wakes first edition (JJII 734).

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PAGE 77
78 j er em y c ol an ge lo

One result of this bifurcated process is that the heteroglossia that scores
of critics have seen in the language of the Wake is present also in the
underlying process of its composition. The text thereby re-introduces the
readerly anxiety, which, in most texts, is ameliorated in the process of
positing an author-consciousness to be interpolated into. In Finnegans
Wake, however, the layered heteroglossia disrupts the process of construct-
ing a unified author figure to whom the reading can be ascribed. Also at
play here is the way Joyce seemed to write the Wake in layerscontinually
adding material on top of pre-existing work, while almost never cutting.
The result is similar to the effect that Hugh Kenner observed in Penel-
ope, where the illusion created . . . [is] that anything at all can be
said, and at any moment.42 It is not merely as if the text were written
collaboratively, with different people writing discrete sections and putting
them together. Instead, the effect is that Finnegans Wake reads as if every
word, and every phrase, has been written over by multiple hands, and is
a node in several networks of referentiality at once. It would seem, then,
that the ideal reader of the Wake must be, among other things, in posses-
sion of an ideal multiple personality disorder.
We can see an engagement with this over-writing in a section of chapter
III.4the same episode that Joyce had begun in the episode described in
his letter.43 While it is impossible to tell which of the many complex and
messy notebook pages we have preserved is the one Joyce refers tonever
mind which text in the chapter the note becamewe do know from the
letter that the section refers to Shaun in some way, because Joyce describes
the bit in his letter as some wondrous devices for d during the night
(Letters I 235).44 ( here being Shauns sigla, with the d indicating
that the section was meant for the fourth chapter of its respective book.)
Given this information, we can draw some interesting conclusions from
the following passage: The other, twinned on codliverside, has been cry-
ing in his sleep . . . What a wretch! How his book of craven images! . . .
And he has pipettishly bespilled himself from his foundingpen as illspent
from inkinghorn. . . . Jerry Jehu. . . . O, foetal sleep! Ah, fatal slip! (FW
563.110).
There is quite a bit going on in this section, but one line we can discern
is that the narratorpresumably Kevin/Shaunis complaining about his
sleeping twin Jerry/Shem, who has spilled his ink, and whose crying has
disturbed Shauns sleep. There are also several allusions to beginnings
here, the most notable being foundingpena portmanteau of found-
ing and fountain penand a suggestion that Shems writing has in

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t ex tu al au th or it y a nd di ag no st ic jo yc e 79

some way impinged upon Shaun. The fatal slip of this foetal sleep
identifies sleep with the incubation of the womb and, by extension, the
act of waking with birth. In a sense, then, the ink has marked Kevin and
Jerry at their very origin. These puns and allusions, combined with the
blurring of the Jerry/Kevin distinction at the bottom of the page (kerry-
jevin [FW 563.36]), reflect an important aspect of the composition of the
chapter itself. As Ferrer observes, III.4s structural positionbeing a
ricorso chapter of its book as well as an echo of Book I (which it used to be
part of )meant that Joyce was writing under a great deal of constraint.45
Theres an important sense in which Joyces problem of the over-written
notebook page prefigures the general problems of the chapter, and indeed
of the Wake as a whole. Composing his text over such an extended period
of time, and under an increasing number of structural constraints, meant
that Joyce was frequently writing in conversation with a version of himself
that no longer existed, separated from his present by the span of years.
Just as the nature of ones birth conditions and structures the process of
ones life, so too do decisions early in the writing process continue to
speak years into the composition. Thus, the foundingpen spills its ink
onto the present page, ensuring that the Joyce of seventeen years later
could never write on a blank sheet, or sleep on a clean bed.46 The elon-
gated nature of the Wakes composition, then, helps create the texts
multi-voiced narration, by spilling Jerry into Kevin to produce Kerry-
jevin.47
It is here, at last, that we can return to the issues of the Rorschach test
metaphor and apologia, two apparently distinct concepts that, in Finneg-
ans Wake, come together at last in the power dynamics underlying the
reading process. The connection here takes the form of a Derridian hospi-
tality. I am not the first person to offer a version of this connection; as
recently as 2013, for instance, Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote described
the specter of Joyce as the visitor who is not always welcome.48 But the
association can be taken further. If we understand the role of Joyce qua
the author function in the terms laid out earlier, then we see that the
process of reading the Wake is defined in terms of a contradiction funda-
mental to Derridas understanding of hospitality:

We will always be threatened by this dilemma between, on the one

hand, unconditional hospitality that dispenses with law . . . and on
the other, hospitality circumscribed by law and duty. One of them

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80 j er em y c ol an ge lo

can always corrupt the other, and this capacity for perversion remains
irreducible. It must remain so.49

In Finnegans Wake, this division between restrained and unrestrained

hospitality takes the form of, on the one hand, the wishthe imperative
to grant command of the text over to a circumscribing author figure
while, on the other hand, being prevented from doing so by the books
refusal to adopt the singularity that such an interpretation requires. This
aporia is why the texts apologia must follow the dual logic of readerly
indulgence, a term that implies both the deference of one asking for
forgiveness and a suspension of normal prohibitions (as in a papal indul-
gence), so that one pays fealty to the laws even as they are abrogated. The
split hospitality of indulgence is thus another instance of what Peter
Mahon refers to as an ever-receding withdrawal and pursuit of truth as
presence across the entire text of the Wake.50 Thus, Derridas assessment
that, where Joyce is concerned, the very concept of competence finds
itself taken up by this event51 has earned new backing. Because Finnegans
Wake exploits and undermines the very processes of power, subjection,
and hospitality that interpretation is built on, it ensures that any reading
of the Wake necessarily requires the papering-over of an undecidable: the
very processes that permit one to say what a portion of text is shall also
compel one to say what it is not.
This problem presents Joyce scholars with a special opportunity, one
that I hope this essay has illuminated. Because any reading of Finnegans
Wake demands that one take a decisive leap of a kind that literary texts
normally do not require, a persons interpretation of the Wake provides
access to a normally invisible space between text and readerthat is ones
textual ideology, an unconscious hermeneutic that draws the unseen line
between Joyce the man and Joyce the author that is the basis of interpreta-
tion. Like his final book, the authority of James Joyce proceeds to rise and
fall cyclically, each time in a new iteration, with a different person writing
under the same name, both like and unlike HCE, who is always the same
person with a different name. Thus, we can imagine the name of Joyce
following the bilingual Tim Finnegan, soaked in whisky and newly risen
in the coffin to which his fall (and perhaps also Roland Barthes) con-
demned himalive and dead, present and absent, a specter leaning on
the threshhold, waiting to be brought inside.

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t ex tu al au th or it y a nd di ag no st ic jo yc e 81

NOTES

1. Tim Conley, Joyces Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 149.
2. Vicki Mahaffey, Reauthorizing Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 2.
3. Fritz Senn, Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce, ed. Christine ONeil (Dublin:
Lilliput Press, 1995), 227. Terry Eagleton makes a similar remark in Literary Theory:
An Introduction: It is always worth testing any literary theory by asking: How would
it work with Joyces Finnegans Wake? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008), 71.
4. One possible antecedent is the scene in A Portrait that records Stephens com-
position of his villanelle (P 18288). However, as Stanislaus Joyce reports, his brother
had not written the poem at the age that Stephen did, but much earlier (My Brothers
Keeper: James Joyces Early Years, ed. Richard Ellmann [New York: Viking, 1958], 151).
The apology at the start of Ulysses, meanwhile, reflects complications arising from the
novels actual composition, and thus brings that composition process into the critical
discourse in a way the poem does not.
5. Fritz Senn, Joyces Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. John Paul
Riquelme (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 85.
6. The fractal-like construction of the Wakeof which Joyce scholars have long
been awarehas recently been modeled mathematically. See Stanisaw Droz.dz. et al.,
Quantifying Origin and Character of Long-Range Correlations in Narrative Texts,
Information Sciences 331.20 (2016): 3244.
7. For details, see Irving B. Weiner, Principles of Rorschach Interpretation (London:
Routledge, 2003).
8. I would like to acknowledge Lorraine Weirs Writing Joyce: A Semiotics of the
Joyce System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), which provided an
important background to my reading of this word.
9. For details on Joyces use of Skeat, see Stephen Whittaker, Joyce and Skeat,
James Joyce Quarterly 24.2 (1987): 17792.
10. Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1882), 360.
11. Ibid, xiii.
12. Ibid, 363.
13. Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006), 628.
14. Jean-Michel Rabate, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), 196.
15. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), 148.
16. Tim Conley, Finnegans Wake: Some Assembly Required, in James Joyce, ed.
Sean Latham (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 133.

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82 j er em y c ol an ge lo

17. Finn Fordham, in the introduction to his Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake:
Unravelling Universals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), engages at length
with the imperative to read the Wake through a variety of hermeneutic systems. As
Fordham argues, the proliferation of meanings and stories in and next to the Wake
unravels universalsthe universals that it seems to set up through its mythic coinci-
dences and reproductive analogies. It does so because deviating detail overwhelms
those unitary elements that attempt to secure strategies of totalization (35).
18. Michel Foucault, What Is an Author? in The Foucault Reader, trans. Josue
V. Harari, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage, 2010), 119.
19. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 36.
20. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century
France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 44.
21. Kimberly J. Devlin, See Ourselves as Others See Us: Joyces Look at the Eye
of the Other, PMLA 104.5 (1989): 888.
22. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005), 8.
23. Ibid, 10.
24. Ibid, 37.
25. Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, in Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142.
26. Jean-Michel Rabate, James Joyce, Authorized Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991), 151.
27. Michael Groden, Ulysses in Focus: Genetic, Textual, and Personal Views
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 6.
28. For example, Jed Deppman, A Chapter in Composition: Chapters III.12,
in How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, ed. Luca
Crispi and Sam Slote (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 307.
29. For example, JJII 5354, as well as John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James
Joyce in Trieste 19041920 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), 21314.
30. For example, McHugh, Annotations, xixxx.
31. Foucault, What Is an Author? 118.
32. Vladimir Dixon, A Litter to Mr. James Joyce, in James Joyce/Finnegans
Wake: A Symposium (New York: New Directions, 1972), 193.
33. Thomas A. Goldwasser, Who Was Vladimir Dixon? Was He Vladimir
Dixon? James Joyce Quarterly 16.3 (1979): 21922.
34. John Whitter-Ferguson, The Voice behind the Echo: Vladimir Dixons Let-
ters to James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, James Joyce Quarterly 29.3 (1992): 512.
35. Ibid, 51721.
36. Ibid, 527.
37. Qtd. in Ibid, 512.
38. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997), 2.

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39. Daniel Ferrer, Wondrous Devices in the Dark: Chapter III.4, in How Joyce
Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, ed. Luca Crispi and
Sam Slote (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 410.
40. Alan Roughley, Reading Derrida Reading Joyce (Gainesville, University Press
of Florida, 1999), 94.
41. Dirk Van Hulle, Manuscript Genetics: Joyces Know-How, Becketts Nohow
(Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2009), 9091.
42. Hugh Kenner, Ulysses: Revised Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987), 148.
43. Ferrer, 410.
44. Given the trouble Joyce had with this page, his prediction in an earlier letter
that Shaun is going to give me a very great deal of trouble (Letters I 213) seems to
have come true.
45. Ferrer, 41112.
46. This continued presence of the past is quite similar to what Gabriel Renggli
has noted in relation to Joyces many invented words. As he writes: The nature of
Joyces non-words . . . is such that even once we prove conclusively which non-word
is the original one, the echo of the other one, of the one whose memory we are
supposed to erase from our minds, is still present in the original, authoritative,
remaining one (A Wakean Whodunit: Death and Authority in Finnegans Wake,
Joyce Studies Annual [2014]: 15).
47. This polyphony continues through the rest of the chapter. As Finn Fordham
writes in his summary of III.4 in the Oxford edition of the Wake: we seem to
float with two narrators through the Chapelizod inn at night (Chapter by Chapter
Outline, in Finnegans Wake, ed. Robbert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet, and Finn
Fordham [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], xliii).
48. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote, Introduction to Derrida and Joyce: Texts
and Contexts, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Sam Slote (New York: SUNY Press,
2013), 3.
49. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), 135.
50. Peter Mahon, Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and
Glas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 21.
51. Jacques Derrida, Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce, in Derrida
and Joyce: Texts and Contexts, trans. Francois Raffoul, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and
Sam Slote (New York: SUNY Press, 2013), 64.

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