From: barger@ils.nwu.edu (Jorn Barger)
Subject: Finnegans Wake mailing list FAQs
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 22:04:56 GMT

The very short version: 

It's a hard book and we're reading it slowly, together.  

The intermediate version: 

Some 100 Joyceans have subscribed to a mailing list where Finnegans Wake is
being read, one paragraph every two weeks, everyone contributing whatever
insights they can.  To subscribe, send the message:  

subscribe FWAKE-L [your name spelled out normally]  

to 

listserv@irlearn.bitnet or listserv@irlearn.ucd.ie  

And post messages to the group via  

fwake-l@irlearn.bitnet or .ucd.ie  

(Be warned: replying to a message posted over the group will normally cause
your response to go to everyone, and not just the original sender.)   


The long version:  

"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 1990(?) 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.  

Jorn Barger has undertaken to collate submissions into an anonymous-but-
more-readable digest, sorting the notes line by line.  These digests are
available from him by email (barger@ils.nwu.edu), or via FTP from
irlearn.ucd.ie.  They are broken into paragraphs, with "FWake Digest #4.1"
covering paragraph one of Chapter 4. They range up to 100k in size, each.  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.  

One needs to get used to the fact that in electronic-space, blank lines are
cheap (only one carriage-return character actually has to be transmitted), so
one can be much more self-indulgent in spelling things out at length and
formatting them generously.  Most of us are computer novices, tolerant of
fumblings and stutterings.   

Michael O'Kelly has designed a database format after the model of Roland
McHugh's "Annotations to FW" (revised edition 1992), and appreciates all
efforts to contribute annotations in this "fwaken-l" format, eg:  

003.04.05 OE 003.04.05 "fr'over" comforting: the Frover Ghost = the Holy Ghost

where 003 is page 3, line 4, starting and ending with word 5; and OE is one of
the notetypes (Old English).  

Some other jargon:  Joyce had symbolic shorthand for each of the main
characters, called "sigla".  It's impossible to type them in exactly, so here
are ASCII equivalents: $E = HCE  $A = ALP  $[ = Shem  $/\ = Shaun  
$/[ = Tristram $I.1 = Issy  $I.2 = the maggies  $I.29 = the rainbow girls 
$K = Kate   $S = Sackerson   $P = saint Patrick $X = Mamalujo  
$[] = the letter/book $O = the twelve  

Some of us are digging back into the facsimiles of Joyce's drafts and
workbooks, as reprinted by Garland in the 63-volume James Joyce Archive. 
Chapter 4 is mostly in JJA volume 46, with the final galleys in JJA49 and
JJA50.  David Hayman's "First Draft Version of FW" (FDV) is endlessly
enlightening, if you can find a copy.  Enquire with Jorn about getting xeroxes
of the JJA, if your local library can't help.  

And Jorn has run off on his own, lately, thunderstruck with the theory that
the only logical place to *pick up the thread* is with the earliest, 1923,
drafts and workbooks, so he is transcribing thse, painstakingly, and posing
many riddles that he uncovers there.

Newsgroups: rec.arts.books