Path: nuchat!menudo.uh.edu!swrinde!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!ddsw1!not-for-mail From: jorn@genesis.MCS.COM (Jorn Barger) Newsgroups: rec.arts.books Subject: James Joyce FAQ Date: 1 Sep 1993 00:01:05 -0500 Organization: MCSNet Subscriber, Chicago, IL Lines: 184 Distribution: world Message-ID: <261aah$42d@genesis.MCS.COM> NNTP-Posting-Host: genesis.mcs.com Topics: - Joyce on the Net (mailing lists) - Joycean e-texts - Finn's Hotel (a recent brouhaha) - Ulysses: Kidd vs Gabler (an older brouhaha) - FW and FWAKE-L - The Polti proposition (a future brouhaha :^) = Joyce on the Net ====================================================== There are two Joyce-related mailing lists on Internet, one for Joyce-in- general, called J-JOYCE and one for Finnegans Wake, called FWAKE-L. Each has about 100 subscribers, posting anywhere from five to 50 messages total per month. To subscribe to J-JOYCE send any short request to: j-joyce-request@cc.utah.edu To subscribe to FWAKE-L send this exact message: subscribe FWAKE-L [your name spelled out normally] to listserv@irlearn.bitnet or listserv@irlearn.ucd.ie (The "subscribe" message must be in the *body* of the email, not just in the subjectline.) To send a message to the entire subscription list, address it either to: j-joyce@cc.utah.edu or fwake-l@irlearn.ucd.ie (or .bitnet) (Be warned: replying to a message received from the group will normally cause your response to go to everyone, and not just the original sender!) The j-joyce list especially appreciates postings on the theme "Things that still mystify me in Ulysses". FWAKE-L is meandering slowly thru Chapter Four, soliciting interpretations of one paragraph at a time. (see below) = Joycean e-texts ======================================================== Last winter (1993), the Joyce Estate asked that etexts of Joyce's works no longer be distributed freely by the Oxford Text Archive (or any other source). This will be challenged, no doubt, if it hasn't been resolved by January 1, 1994, when most of Joyce's works go out of copyright worldwide. = Finn's Hotel: the battle ============================================== In September 1992, Danis Rose of Dublin announced the 'discovery' of an unknown collection of short stories written by Joyce in 1923, between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Rose claimed Joyce's intended title had been "Finn's Hotel". These were to be published by Viking/Penguin in March 1993, but that date has been postponed indefinitely. In the Times Literary Supplement in February 1993, Stephen James Joyce (Joyce's grandson) declared that the Joyce Estate did not accept Rose's claims, and would not allow this work to be published. Rose had also announced his 'corrected' edition of FW for 1995, but Stephen promised to block that, too. = Finn's Hotel: the stories ============================================ You can read the Finn's Hotel stories in either of two published formats: David Hayman's 1963 "First Draft Version of FW" (FDV) or the massive 63- volume James Joyce Archive, Garland's facsimile edition of all Joyce's manuscripts and notebooks (JJA). The latter offers every level of draft; Rose presumable intended to use the typescripts that were approximately third drafts. 1. Roderick O'Conor (FDV203-4, JJA55 p463-65) 2. Tristan and Isolde (FDV208-12, JJA56 p20-24) 3. Saint Kevin (FDV273-4, JJA63 p38e-f) 4. Berkeley and Patrick (FDV279, JJA63 p148-165) 5. H.C.E. (FDV62-3, JJA45 p14-17) 6. Mamalujo (FDV213-19, JJA56 p71-80) 7. The Revered Letter (FDV81-3, JJA46 p281-87) = Finn's Hotel: the case against ======================================== Rose had presented the argument in the Spring 1989 issue of "A Finnegans Wake Circular" that "Finn's Hotel" was the 'real' original title of FW, based mostly on a couple of ambiguous hints in Joyce's unpublished letters. This case is not strengthened by claiming the original vignettes were for an entirely different book. The astonishing thing is that the early history of FW is still so poorly understood, that a claim like this is hard to argue for *or* against! = Ulysses: Kidd vs Gabler ============================================== The 1986 'corrected' edition of Ulysses by Hans Gabler has been pretty conclusively shown by John Kidd to have introduced more errors than it fixed. (The bulk of this case is presented in The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, December 1988.) Kidd's own edition of Ulysses will be published by Norton on January 1, 1994. = FW and FWAKE-L ====================================================== "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce, published in 1939 after 16 years of inspired work, is the greatest, most difficult, and most enjoyable novel ever written. After the warming-up exercise of "Ulysses" (1914-1922), Joyce set out to write "a history of the world", circular in form, built around the recurring human drama of a hero's fall into disgrace and his reconstitution-by-synthesis from the warring poles of his fractured personality: virtuous conformity and artistic experiment. While Ulysses is more studied than any other novel in history, FW offers such a *sheer rock face* of puns and allusions, that it is just coming into its own as a respectable topic for scholarly research. The Finnegans Wake mailing list was created in 1988 by Michael O'Kelly under the auspices of IRLEARN, out of University College, Dublin. In late August 1991, we undertook a group-reading project, starting arbitrarily at Chapter 4 (FW75). We've been moving forward at the rate of about two paragraphs per month, with a handful of subscribers regularly contributing 2 or 3 pages of *brilliant* notes each, and many more putting in a helpful word here and there. The agreement seems to be that all is permitted: there's been very little nay-saying. The most unlikely impulses often turn out to bear delightful fruit. Even anachronisms are worth mentioning if just to clear the air of them. The economics of Internet make this an ideal medium for digging however- deep-is-necessary to unpack Joyce's crossmess parzel. If we keep straight on at this rate, in 50 years or so we'll have half a million pages of insight, and be ready to begin a "second pass". But the more the merrier, and we're open to suggestions about sequence et al. (Group efforts have slowed and declined somewhat during 1992 and 93.) Jorn Barger undertook to collate submissions into an anonymous-but- more-readable digest, sorting the notes line by line. Paragraph one is available for ftp from genesis.mcs.com in mcsnet.users/jorn, under the title "fwdigest1.jj". (One formatting oddity in the Digests: I'm setting off Joyce's own words with equals signs (=hi=there=) instead of spaces: =As=the=lion=in=our=teargarden================================75.01= so that on a normal word-processor, string-searches can be limited to finding *Joyce's* use of the word: ie, "=lion=", and will not find others' notes that mention lions, or dandelions, so you can jump to a particular point more readily. = The Polti proposition =============================================== Also available for ftp from genesis.mcs.com (in mcsnet.users/jorn) is a file labelled "storymath.jj" that sketches an argument about Joyce's intentions in writing FW, viewing it as a *thesaurus of story plots* similar to Georges Polti's "36 Dramatic Situations". Arguments for and against this hypothesis must be grounded in a deep study of the surviving notebooks, in which Joyce accumulated the individual text elements that became Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. One of the obstacles to understanding the early evolution of FW has been the riddle posed by a large early notebook known as "Scribbledehobble". The file "stratig.jj" presents a preliminary solution to this riddle. Another Joyce file available from this site is "hypertext.jj" that presents samples of the early FW notes and drafts, and discusses the problems of building a hypertext version of this material. The file "decentwrite.dw" discusses the nature of "reconstructive genetic word processing" in more general terms. =----------=- ,!. --=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=----= Jorn Barger j't Anon-ftp to genesis.mcs.com in mcsnet.users/jorn for: <:^)^:< K=-=:: -=-> Finnegans Wake, artificial intelligence, Ascii-TV, .::.:.::.. "=i.: [-' fractal-thicket indexing, semantic-topology theory, jorn@mcs.com /;:":.\ DecentWrite, MiniTech, nant/nart, flame theory &c! =----------= ;}' '(, -=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=----=