First a joke, an old and idiosyncratic favourite of mine. Very few people to whom I’ve told it in past years –maybe one in nine– have actually found it funny, but here goes:

A man goes to a baker and orders a German chocolate cake. “Come back this afternoon,” the baker tells him. When the man returns and flips open the lid of the cake box, his face falls. “What’s wrong?” asks the baker. “Oh, nothing,” the man says, but the baker insists. “Well, it’s perfect, really, but I forgot this morning to be more precise: I wanted a German chocolate cake in the shape of the letter B.” The baker tells him to come back the next day, when he’ll have just that item for him. The next afternoon, the man returns and flips open the lid of the cake box, and again is disappointed: “This is wonderful, really, but I should have been more precise: I wanted a German chocolate cake in the shape of a lower-case B, and this one is as you can see an upper-case B.” The baker, who will not take his money, is adamant about satisfying his customer: “Come back tomorrow morning at the very instant that we open and I will have it ready.” So early the next morning the man returns, flips open the lid of the cake box, and beams with joy: “Absolutely perfect!” The baker, also thrilled, asks, “Shall I wrap it up for you?” And the man says, “No thanks, I’ll eat it here.”

Why this joke is funny (if it is!) has much to do, I think, with the problems that any editorial effort faces with so convoluted a text as Finnegans Wake, and with the particular questions I have for this new Rose and O’Hanlon edition. Amid the eccentric-seeming demands of his customer, the baker loses sight of the specific purpose of his work –cake is to be eaten, and you can just eat it here, without its being wrapped up or transported– and we laugh, if we do, because we too have momentarily lost sight of this purpose. How we want to eat a cake is linked to its form, and how we read a text is linked to its presentation. If we want a new Finnegans Wake, it would be best if we knew what we wanted it for (how we’d like to eat it) even before we start the oven.

My interest here, then, is in discussing the editorial mandate of the new Wake (as well as plausible conceptions of future editions), with only a few remarks on methodology. This is not to suggest, though, that mandate and method are separable (a view which this edition seems to endorse by its example), but my comments on methodology will be by and large confined to their conceptual and theoretical implications. Jerome McGann’s concept of “bibliographical codings” proves useful to us in reading not (or at any rate, not merely) the text of the Wake that this edition proffers, but the ways in which it shapes a reader as well as a literary and cultural history. McGann is also worth invoking here because Rose has pointedly done so in his stated “Rationale” for his ill-fated Ulysses: A Reader’s Edition (1997), though in truth McGann’s thinking is brought up on that occasion only to be effectively dismissed in favour of “the traditional approach” of editors such as W. W. Greg.(1)

Writes McGann in The Textual Condition:

As the process of textual transmission expands, whether vertically (i.e., over time), or horizontally (in institutional space), the signifying processes of the work become increasingly collaborative and socialized. . . . authors (and authorial intentions) do not govern those textual dimensions of a work which become most clearly present to us in bibliographical forms.(2)

It might well be argued, too, that editors (and editorial intentions) do not absolutely or entirely govern these dimensions, and for this reason it seems best to try to attain a careful balance between consideration of stated or otherwise discernible editorial intentions and the editorial effects, if we may call them such, so as neither to privilege the former nor neglect the latter. And this seems a wise course even if, as I suspect, Rose and O’Hanlon would have us see every aspect of the edition as meticulously deliberate on their part as they assert that each word in the text is Joyce’s, as verified by themselves. Examination of the contradictions of this edition’s mandate and production yields useful considerations of the problems faced by current and prospective editors, publishers, scholars, and readers of the Wake.

As an interesting first note of context for this new edition, consider the proliferation of Joyce guides and introductions published within the past few years, books optimistically aimed at a wide readership, and in some instances not so optimistically aimed rather away from Joyce scholars. This bumper crop includes, for example, Peter Mahon’s Joyce: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2009), Lee Spinks’s James Joyce: A Critical Guide (Edinburgh UP, 2009), the design-heavy W. Terrance Gordon’s Everyman’s Joyce (Mark Batty Publisher, 2009), and Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (Norton, 2009), which in part argues that said masterpiece has been unjustly kept from “real people” by what he calls “specialist bohemians”.(3) Furthermore, within this publishing phenomenon is a significant subset of books specifically on Finnegans Wake, such as Edmund Lloyd Epstein’s A Guide Through Finnegans Wake (University Press of Florida, 2009) and Philip Kitcher’s Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake (Oxford, 2009); and to this list we might add the growing number of websites on the Wake, the ongoing publication of the Buffalo notebooks, and the appearance of the third edition of Roland McHugh’s Annotations in 2006, with promise of a fourth. All of this deserves more attention than the cynical comment that the “Joyce industry” is thriving; here we see many serious efforts to expand the readership of and fan curiosity about a book still often written off as an altogether hermetic obscurity.(4) (As one Amazon.com reviewer wrote last year, “I award [the author] no stars and may God have mercy on his soul.”)

Given this surge in popular critical reclamations, a new edition of the Wake is in itself not surprising, and that same attention may in part explain its appearance in 2010, two years before the copyright expires in the European Union. Houyhnhnm Press announces on its website that its “limited edition” produced “by arrangement with Penguin Books” is “now delivered to its reading public seventy years after the novel’s first publication.”(5) This last phrase has a couple of points of interest:

(1) Finnegans Wake is a “novel.” Joyce, to my knowledge, never referred to it as such, but this is perhaps an instance of the editors rectifying this authorial omission for the doubtful or confused reader’s assurance.
(2) The phrase implies that the Wake, though “first” published seventy years ago, is only “now delivered to its reading public.” This is surely taking Ellmann’s famous remark about learning to be Joyce’s contemporaries to a literal extreme. No wonder I don’t understand Finnegans Wake; I have been reading some other text all these years.

There is a “limited edition” and then an even more “limited edition”: a “standard” volume, 800 copies of a hardcover volume plus paper-cover booklet in a cardboard slipcase, and a “special” version, 150 signed, numbered, and stamped copies with “full leather binding in black calfskin” plus hardcover booklet in a full cloth slipcase. The former is priced at 300 euros (or $410 US), the latter at 900 euros (or $1200 US), postage not included.

Obviously the limited print run points to a pretty small “reading public” and the expected outlay is rather out of tune with the publication wave exhorting new readers to join the fun: in fact, one can purchase all of the critical titles I mentioned for less than the price of the “standard.”(6) Meaningful discussion of book costs has often proved tricky for literary history and criticism – where, that is, such discussion is attempted at all. (I remember seeing several years ago a review by a left-leaning Canadian politician of a new collection of Orwell’s writings in a national newspaper. His praise for a writer he clearly judged essential was unchecked by even a mention of the collection’s exorbitant price.) Although Joyce is one of the first of the still relatively few cases where twentieth-century literary studies stoops to ponder price tags, the attention has been primarily on Ulysses, first because of the narrative of its travails (antipathy of publishers, piracy, censorship), then its inexorably heady rise in collector value, and later because of the counternarrative of elitism presented by critics such as Lawrence Rainey, who posits the marketing of Ulysses as symptomatic of a modernism in which “aesthetic value became confused with speculation, collecting, investment, and dealing . . . modernism and commodity culture were not implacable enemies but fraternal rivals.”(7)

It is worth recalling a few of the details of that publication precisely because Houyhnhnm Press so clearly has Beach’s advertising model in mind (prospectus, order form, etc). The “private” first edition of Ulysses that was offered to subscribers by Shakespeare and Company had a print run of 1000 copies and came at three different prices, depending on paper quality and the inclusion (for 100 only) of Joyce’s signature. Rainey handily points out that the least expensive of these (150 francs) was half the cost of a month’s rent for Ezra and Dorothy Pound, then newly arrived in Paris.(8) Thus it might be pointed out in defence of the price of this Wake that Paris apartments now cost more than twice the “standard” volume – but here we must remember why these comparisons are misleading. The historical differences between 1922 and 2010 are not to be judged by prices but by economic systems, and the economy of publishing is now a very different affair.

Richard Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull Books and currently something of an iconoclastic thinker on the state and future of publishing, has pointed out that one of the major shifts between twentieth-century publishing and today’s is from the primacy of determination of supply (which titles will be published, and in which quantity) to the sorting of demand.(9) This shift is in large part the consequence of new media, and it effectively questions the point of limited editions, which previously (as in 1922, when Sylvia Beach produced a book no commercial publisher would take) could cite pressing financial exigencies and distribution problems which have, since the spread of digital media, lost most of their teeth. The only plausible reasons for the high price tag on this Finnegans Wake is to dictate the supply of this self-proclaimed definitive text without any regard for the demand except in so far as it makes the limited number of prospective buyers perforce collectors. As for its causes, we might speculate about the specific demands of Penguin Books or the Joyce Estate, but in any case the clock is surely running on just how long it will take Google Books and company to liberate these pages, just as it is already running on the copyright.

It is not as though Rose and O’Hanlon are unfamiliar with these new technologies: indeed, this is a computer-generated edition of the Wake, which edition is in turn being advertised by website. But these innovations are the wizard kept hidden behind the curtain, and besides needlessly making a great and terrible mystery of the processes of textual production, this disparity between production and dissemination is as inconsistent as delivering gas-guzzling SUVs with a solar-powered truck. The mystery has a name, the “isotext,” and here is how Rose defines this term in his 1997 “Reader’s Edition” of Ulysses:

an isotext is an error-free, “naked” transcription of the author’s words as written down by him or a surrogate, positive faults and all, with their individual diachronic interrelationships defined. It is not a transcription, however edited, of any single text, but a blending together of the members of a series of texts.(10)

The second sentence sounds somewhat like a description of Gabler’s “continuous copy-text,” but the first pointedly does not. In what is called “a very brief overview” of the editorial methodology of the new Finnegans Wake, posted on the publisher’s website, Rose offers this noticeably different definition: “an electronic hypertext databank specifying, differentiating and layering all authorial/non-authorial (scribal), documented/undocumented, valid, suspect or corrupting textual operations”. This sounds rather like that list that Santa Claus keeps of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, not only because it has a certain abstract quality that befits and even fortifies the mythological, but because it seems to be two lists somehow codified as one (naughty and nice together, valid operations weighed with or against suspect or corrupting ones).

I include my own confusion about this “isotext” not just in anticipation of its appearance online, but to show that this edition is not aimed at an exclusively scholarly audience, which explanation might explain the limited print run as pragmatic targeting and the asking price as part of a worthy tradition of gouging university libraries. The isotext, Rose and O’Hanlon assure us, is to be made available on the web “as soon as circumstances permit,”(11) and accordingly the “circumstances” themselves are as occluded as the isotext. If, as McGann has observed (and Rose, at least in his Ulysses project, has registered agreement), the meaning of a text is effectively synonymous with the social history of that text, a critical edition without an apparatus or even a substantial narrative or history of its production is an edition that seeks to efface meanings other than those which it explicitly or implicitly endorses. The moniker Finnegans Wake 2 is thus a little troubling.

Just as puzzling as why such apparatus should by unspecified delay follow the edition is why it should be published electronically and made “available to scholars and to the interested public” when the edition itself is not thus available.(12) Certainly it makes sense to web-publish the isotext, but if that is to prove a legally viable enterprise, then so would an electronic text of this reset Wake. But this material bifurcation, which decidedly evinces a divided notion of the book’s readership, is in fact a trifurcation, dividing that notion yet further. Apart from the hard-bound text is the booklet of editorial commentary, “separated out,” the editors explain, “as a final gesture of deference to the monumentality of Finnegans Wake, a book that brooks no equal.”(13) This gesture of deference is composed of a note from Seamus Deane, a short preface by the editors, a foreword by Hans Walter Gabler, an introduction by David Greetham, and an afterword by the editors. There is no agreement among these authors as to whom they are addressing and why. Deane writes with astonishment of the “miracle” achieved by the editors, seemingly to a reader reasonably aware of what he rightly calls “the sheer agglomerative scale of Joyce’s undertaking,” with a sidelong acknowledgment of a particular class of readers, “Joyceans,” who are “acclimatized” to the vagaries and controversies of the Wake.(14) Greetham’s contribution, which has the most footnotes, has a curatorial quality: the scholar opening an exhibition not in his field to an audience likewise interested but unfamiliar. Gabler, for his part, offers more a defense of the general principle of critical editions (“texts can always be otherwise,” he emphasizes(15) and the benefits of multiple editions than a justification of the specific decisions made by these editors, which are as unavailable to him as to us. This “foreword” ought perhaps to be read as a caution against resurgent and unnecessary “Joyce wars,” and as such represents a direct address to Joyce scholars.(16)

Little surprise that among this praetorian guard of prefacers and introducers, Rose and O’Hanlon are themselves the most bewildering and frustrating in how they rhetorically mold their implied reader. The editors’ preface speaks to the “gentle reader,” that pre-modernist chestnut that Joyce himself ridicules in the Wake.(17) They write:

Gentle reader, were you to ask How should I read this book? we would answer: passively, like any good book, neither too fast nor too slow. Do not pause because you cannot understand a word or words: you are not expected to understand it all. Imagine yourself a child, leaning over the banisters, listening to the grown-up banter going on below.(18)

This last injunction, hardly necessary since the reader is already belittled by this mode of address, is all the more irritating because it sums up the expectations this edition has of its reader. Because a reader is by definition “passive” and is “not expected to understand it all” (note the use of the passive voice there: whose expectations are we talking about?), the ultimate hint to take is that the edition itself is best read in this trusting, passive, uncomprehending way.

Deane lauds the editors for having achieved “the clear reading text”:

There has always been a large majority of readers for whom Finnegans Wake is, as part of its rationale, unreadable; indeed, unreadability has always been part of its attraction, the pseudo-suave explanation for never having read it. That view of, approach to and refusal of the work are all now outdated. The new edition brings Finnegans Wake to its audience again, but this time with the barriers of twentieth-century critical reception (if that it the word) cleared away.(19)

Not only does it remain unclear just what “barriers” have been “cleared away” by this edition –a confusion rather similar to that many of us felt at Rose’s previous suggestion that hyphenating “snotgreen” and punctuating the monologue of “Penelope” were revolutionary feats which cleared the way for previously obstructed readers into Ulysses– it seems all too likely that new barriers are here in the offing, and we return to the anxious “elitism” against which critics, editors, teachers, and readers have had to struggle (and against which, it could well be argued, Joyce posed his book about, for, and in a sense by “everybody”).(20)

Limited editions of a text that so exuberantly defies limitations make for a disservice rather than merely a contradiction or misreading. Rather than retrace ideas from my own past work about what the Wake’s avowed textual instabilities and its problematization of authorship mean for editors, I’d like to suggest, by way of conclusion to what is clearly only the most preliminary evaluation of this new stage in the textual history, that future editors of the Wake seriously reflect on both how Joyce’s text represents conceptions of circulation and consumption different from those of Ulysses, among of course many other texts, and how readers have in the past seventy years engaged with that text, rather than taking us back to a nursery introduction and/or neglecting the particular needs and wishes of such readers.

If a wider audience for the Wake is what’s truly wanted, a print-on-demand option makes more sense than a de luxe volume of limited number and high price. Moreover, the force of Joyce’s blurring of the distinction between “producers” and “consumers” (FW 497.01-02) can be felt in attempts to find a second-hand copy of Finnegans Wake without marginal scribbles, and one wonders how many calfskin-bound volumes will be so liberally (and liberatingly) defaced. A more fluid and participatory model, one which would record within itself the history of and conversation about the text, is with each passing day more and more technologically possible. These possibilities depend on a clearer conception of who reads the Wake and how –in Nash’s terms, a better sorting of demand– than Rose and O’Hanlon demonstrate.

Readers of Joyce, and especially those perpetual readers of Finnegans Wake, are not passive but the very opposite: relentlessly active, ever stumbling forward and sometimes back. We are demanding, and as idiosyncratic and precise in our demands as the baker’s customer, because this idiosyncratically and precisely demanding book has made us so. We want to have our Wake and read it too.