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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #621491 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

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innovative critique of Finnegan's Wake yields new insights and understandings
In this critical tour de force on modern literature's most distinctive tour de force, 15 leading Joyce scholars (including the two editors) enhance understanding of "Finnegan's Wake" by "genetic criticism [whose] goal might be to show how the published text came into being or to demonstrate how the earlier documents can illuminate the published text, or might be more a matter of studying the writing process itself." "Genetic" implies the psychic origination, the embryonic, cellular-like growth, and the fruition of Joyce's work; which all combined like the strands of DNA as a code bringing it about. The code is not a code as in "secret code," as if the scholars were attempting to--or even could--decipher the book; but rather a biological or physiological code, something like a personality, making for its cogency as a work of art and its polyglot elements. "Finnegan's Wake" has a cogency, but not a coherence; an unpredictable, ultimately unfathomable mix of elements which is not in the end gibberish.

The number of authors who know Joyce and "Finnegan's Wake" inside out try to shed new light on what is going on by moving "away from a strictly textual approach" to consider factors of Joyce's life, including books he read, and also the creative writing process. Joyce worked on the book from 1922 to 1939. Thus the effects of time in this lengthy period are also considered. The insights and commentary of this approach by the authors with a lifetime of scholarship on Joyce are richly rewarding for ones interested in this singular modern author and in the currents and new terrain of modern literature in general.

How the Wake was writ
This book offers exactly what its subtitle declares - "a chapter-by-chapter genetic guide" to 'Finnegans Wake.' Of course, some chapters are grouped together because of their shared genetic history, and there are two essays on the first chapter of Book One - each of which offers different insights into the chapter's compositional history.

I'll admit that I wasn't a huge believer in genetic criticism before reading this book, but it has converted me to a large degree and I now believe wholeheartedly in the usefulness of the approach. At first I was suspicious that the Joyce industry needed a new approach and there are 28,000 notebook pages for FW, so genetic criticism had to be invented. I now realize that many sections of the Wake are so dense and abstruse as to almost require a genetic approach in order to unravel (to some degree) the polyvocality of the text. However, as Jean-Michel Rabate indicates in his essay, genetic criticism does not offer a key to the text as a whole, but like other critical appraoaches, provides a new way of reading the Wake - and thus a new method of investigation into the mysteries of meaning. Of course, due to the entropy of the Wake (and all texts), some ignorance always remains.

Surprisingly, many of the essays seem overly concerned with defending the validity of genetic criticism. Yet, some of the essays display the defects of the approach - they merely recite the genetic history of a certain chapter and look at changes between the different draft stages. I found those essays rote and uninteresting.

However, the best essays offer valuable insights into Joyce's compositional process and how it changes the ways one should "read" the book. For example, Jed Deppmann observes of Joyce's use of sources, if Joyce felt he needed to read all these books in order to write FW, how can the reader expect to read it without exposure to the same books? And the essays do demonstrate the importance of sources to FW and point out several interesting ones that play major and minor roles in the Wake's composition.

In the last essay, Finn Fordham observes that while the Wake may not present a linear narrative, genetic criticism reveals the linear narrative of Joyce's writing. Joyce himself emphasizes the compositional process throughout the published text of the Wake, a book that is truly about itself and how it writes itself.

This last is an important point in regard to genetic criticism, which perhaps overemphasizes the role of the author in Finnegans Wake. Joyce himself regarded the book as writing itself, and while we do not want to ignore Joyce's labor, we also do not want to simplify the author-text dynamic as one of creator-creation. As others have pointed out, what is interesting is not what material from the notebooks ended up in the published text of the Wake, but how the Wake began to work its way into the notebooks.

In any case, this collection of essays provides a wonderful introduction to Wakean genetic criticism. The introduction (to the Wake notebooks, the book's compositional history, and genetic criticism in general) is comprehensive and well-written. As with most essay collections, some essays are better than others, but most of them offer genuine insights into the Wake's genetic history that sheds light on one's reading of the book. Highly recommended.