The editors’ commentary is limited to a two-page “Preface” and a nine-page “Afterword,” in which they reveal that their text incorporates about nine thousand alterations to the first-edition text. The first part of the project to be published is a reading text without scholarly apparatus: The Restored “Finnegans Wake,” which first appeared in 2010 in a limited edition and is now made widely available by Penguin Classics. As described by the editors, this database (to be published “as soon as circumstances permit”) allows one not only to see the development of the text at every point but also to move from a word in the text to its counterpart in the notebooks (thus providing a context for any given neologism, especially when Joyce’s source for that particular list is known). The two scholars who have tackled the editing of Finnegans Wake, Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, spent thirty years creating a hypertext database recording the textual evidence from all the Finnegans Wake documents and providing links between them. Editors of all works encounter places that seem anomalous in one way or another, and they have to guard against making “corrections” that turn a writer’s distinctive expression into something conventional Finnegans Wake is the extreme instance, consisting almost entirely of such places. Deciding whether those words are spelled as Joyce intended (after typists had struggled with his handwriting, and typesetters with thousands of unfamiliar groupings of letters) can only be compared to what it would be like to edit Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” if that poem had been expanded to five hundred pages of prose. What makes the Finnegans Wake situation unique is the novel’s vocabulary, for nearly every line contains words created by Joyce. ![]() But this kind of difficulty is not unique to Finnegans Wake, for editors of many works, both ancient and modern, have to face a bewildering quantity of relevant material. This mass of documentary evidence would by itself make the task of reconsidering the text of Finnegans Wake a daunting one. ![]() There are also more than fifty notebooks containing lists of words and phrases that derive from his reading during those years, lists that he then drew on in his writing. The surviving materials (many preserved at the instigation of Joyce himself) amount to 20,000 pages of manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and marked up copies of interim publications, reflecting Joyce’s intricate process of composition and revision over a sixteen-year period. To undertake a critical edition of Finnegans Wake, with the aim of correcting the published text of 1939, requires a lot of courage and stamina.
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