From: barger@ils.nwu.edu (Jorn Barger)
Subject: What is Finnegans Wake? (Was: Q about _Gravity's_Rainbow_)
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 18:21:47 GMT

Since last August, a Dublin-based mailing list of some 100 Joyceans has
been doing a group-reading of Chapter 4 of Finnegans Wake, pooling a
wide range of expertises (and access-to-ref-books) to dig deeper into
the text than has ever been done before.  Some of us acquired volumes
of the James Joyce Archive, with facsimiles of Joyce's manuscripts
and notebooks.  At some point, it struck me that, given the availability
of this material, the *right* way to undertake to read FW is to start
where he started, "picking up the thread" back at the level when his
constructions were comparatively simple and transparent.

It's known that he first wrote four "vignettes": Roderick O'Conor,
Patrick and Berkeley, Tristan and Isolde, and Saint Kevin, between
March and August 1923.  Four notebooks date from this period, but
the chronology connecting the notebooks and the various drafts of
the vignettes was very confused. (The notebooks consist almost
entirely of short phrases in no apparent sequence, maybe 10% exxed
in crayon when they were 'harvested' for integration into the text.)

I have managed to unravel this tangle, showing that the four
vignettes were constructed in parallel, with three of the notebooks
used sequentially, and the fourth ("Scribbledehobble") used alongside,
in distinct stages.

My working hypothesis was that Joyce was very carefully constructing
a framework that included a natural position for every sort of human
story: a thesaurus, a monomyth, a sequel to Georges Polti's "36
Dramatic Situations".  The vignettes support this, at least vaguely:

ROC is a fallen king,
Berkeley gives Patrick a gift of wisdom
T&I are classic lovers
Kevin illustrates the retreat from life's challenges.

Looking closely at the vignettes, I'm finding many subtle sorts
of correlation that indicate Joyce conceived them as the "cardinal
points" of his indexing scheme: the use of colourwords, the songs
and speeches and sounds they each make.

I've recently proposed that the underlying structure of FW may follow
a single male character who is born in the last half of the book,
reaches age 14 by the end, starts over at the beginning as a 14-y-o
and reaches 42 by the end, father to his earlier 14-y-o self, and
begins again, running thru the book a third time as a grandfather.

So all the male characters are one continuous lifecycle, though their
names change continually, and the continuity is hard to demonstrate
in detail.

The 'cubistic' style of the narrative is justified by the need to
compact many variations into a single story-pattern, so that Chapter
Four covers attack and punishment in a thousand different shapes.

There's a deep connection here to a form of Artificial Intelligence
research being done, among other places, here at ILS (Institute for
the Learning Sciences), under Roger Schank, trying to find an indexing
scheme that will allow the construction of programs that demonstrate
their intelligence by *telling interesting stories, in context*.

I'm pursuing now the theory that Joyce's image of "the Letter" in FW,
written by Shem, delivered by Shaun, is the root metaphor that every-
thing else can be traced back to.

(For subscription info, see my FAQ post "Finnegans Wake mailing list
FAQs", or write me.)

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Jorn Barger, Northwestern U., Chicago, Illinois.         barger@ils.nwu.edu 
   "And crazyheaded Jorn, the bulweh born?"   _Finnegans Wake_ 513.07
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