From: lynch@ils.nwu.edu (Richard Lynch)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: New Stories by Joyce
Date: 6 Oct 92 16:24:31 GMT
Article-I.D.: ils.1992Oct6.162431.7403
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences


ncramer offers this:
  [From the article "7 Stories by Joyce Discovered", in the Sunday Boston
  Globe, 4OCT92.]
  Reuters
  LONDON -- An Irish scholar has found a manuscript written by James Joyce
  in 1923 and abandoned by him a year later, a British newspaper reported
  yesterday.
  Danis Rose found the texts of seven short stories as he worked on the
  Irish author's papers while researching material for a critical edition
  of Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" the Guardian stated.  [...]
  Rose, who has been sifting through Joyce's papers for 16 years, found
  that the author began a collection of stories called "Finn's Hotel"
  between writing "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake".
  Unlike "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake", the new manuscript is clear
  in style.  "It's lucid," Rose said, "That's very unusual."
  The stories are to be published in March, the Guardian stated.

Sorry to burst the bubble, but there ain't no way this is new material.
On March 11 1923 Joyce wrote to his patroness that he'd just the
day before written the first lines since Ulysses, the first vignette
of Finnegans Wake, known as "Roderick O'Conor".  In the course of the
next ten months he wrote six other pieces, attested by the letters,
included in FW in much-revised form.  Close study of the workbooks
Joyce kept at the time (Buffalo notebooks VI.B.10, 3, 25, 2, and 11)
allows for no mysterious alternate-universe stories to be concealed,
so Rose is straining the truth, and "Finn's Hotel" will turn out to be
these seven vignettes.

Here's a preview of Rose's book:

Chapter 1: "Roderick O'Conor" The last king of Ireland, abandoned by his 
subjects at the end of an evening of drinking, walks round his round 
table drinking their dregs. (one page)

Chapter 2: "Saint Kevin" A pious man flees the temptations of women and 
retreats to a bathtub on an island in the Wicklow Hills, the center of 
nine concentric circles of water and land, there to meditate on the 
sacrament of baptism. (one page)

Chapter 3: "Patrick and the Archdruid" (Rose will put this third: it was 
really the fourth) Saint Patrick, arriving in pagan Ireland as a 
missionary, is taught a lesson by a druid mage: the emperor has no
clothes! (one page)

Chapter 4: "Tristan & Isolde" Wagner's romantic duo share their first 
kiss in a self-projected rainbow-heaven, and are transformed. (5 pages)

Chapter 5 "HCE" Isolde's 'first father' admits to the king he's been 
earwigging on the job, and is rewarded with the name Earwicker, and
a noble reputation, and riches.  Rumors of exhibitionism dog him. (4
pages)

Chapter 6: "Mamalujo" Four senile ancients-- Matthew, Mark, Luke and 
John-- reminisce about their good old days as they spy on Tristan and 
Isolde's first kiss. (10 pages)

Chapter 7: "The Persecution of HCE" Earwicker's guilty conscience
betrays him, he's lampooned in song, attacked from every side,
retreats and begins assembling his defense. (20 pages)

While "Finn's Hotel" is a witty and partially defensible title for 
these pieces, "A Third-Draft Version of (half of) Finnegans Wake"
is more to the point. (Rose claimed several years ago in "A FW
Circular" that Finn's Hotel was the "real" title of FW.)

These stories were reprinted by Garland in facsimile in 1977 in the 
James Joyce Archive, edited by Danis Rose, David Hayman, and Michael 
Groden, and available in every good research library. (If you want to
track them down, they're indexed by their ultimate placement in FW: 
1- II.3,  2 and 3- IV, 4 and 6- II.4, 5- I.2, 7- I.2-4.  Look for
the typewritten sections.)  Hayman's "First Draft Version of FW" 
is somewhat more widely available and transcribes them in a
slightly rougher form.

Rose is quite right to call them lucid, and for all the attention
they've gotten, they're as good as unpublished.  But they were never
abandoned: they form the armature upon which the rest of FW was hung.

And the way they're being touted as new discoveries is highly improper.
Rose allows us to speculate that they must have been part of the
Dublin hoard unlocked earlier this year... but they weren't!  The
originals have been in the British Museum for decades, and are well
known to FW scholars.  Rose's "sifting" involves microfilm and/or
the JJA volumes, nothing any more obscure.

(I'm posting this from my officemate's account.  Reply to him, or to
me (Jorn Barger) at jorn@chinet.chi.il.us)






-- 
"TANSTAAFL"     lynch@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books