Presented as part of the Literary Studies Seminar Series

In 2010, Houyhnhnm Press published a new edition of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, featuring over 9,000 emendations, some fourteen per page. Prior to then—though known to be badly in need of repair since the 1950s—the Wake had never even been typographically reset. Realising that any challenge to ‘the iconic status’ of the 1939 text would occasion resistance, editors John O’Hanlon and Danis Rose secured an ‘Afterword’ from Hans Walter Gabler, chief editor of the initially controversial, now highly regarded Ulysses: The Corrected Text (1984). Gabler’s ‘Afterword’ contains the suggestion that the reader of the 2010 Wake allay concerns about its novelty by placing it ‘in dialogue’ with the first edition. What such acts of ‘comparative reading’ will ‘comprehensively confirm,’ Gabler adds, ‘is that Finnegans Wake has not become other as a work, or as a reading experience, through the editing.’ This not-becoming-other accords with Gabler’s further contention that a ‘main quality of conscientious and critically informed editing is to sharpen our perception of the work … clarifying it time and again and thus focusing it.’

What, then, is a Finnegans Wake that ‘has not become other’ but rather clearer to the eye and ear?

Paul Magee is author of the ethnographic monograph From Here to Tierra del Fuego (University of Illinois Press, 2000) and two books of poetry: Cube Root of Book (John Leonard Press, 2006) and Stone Postcard (John Leonard Press, 2014). He is currently working on an academic book entitled Poetry and Knowledge. He teaches poetry and criticism at the University of Canberra, where he is Associate Professor.

Image shown above: ‘James Joyce’ by David Levine for the New York Review of Books