“The grandest tree in / all the world”
(47482b-85, JJA 58, 45 and see 503.33).

This study examines the growth of a particular passage of Finnegans Wake in chapter III.3, the cross-examination of Yawn by the four Senators, described by David Hayman as a ‘mock inquest’ (JJA 58; vii) and describing itself as a ‘drama parapolylogic’ (474.05). The passage in question is exactly two pages and a little over six-hundred words long, and forms a relatively self-contained description of a tree: ‘the grandest tree in all the world’ (47482b-85, JJA 58, 45 and 503.33). This tree marks the site where a ‘couple’ are said first to have met, an encounter which resembles that already narrated in 1.2 (35-36) where it lead to the fall of HCE. My examination illustrates Joyce’s accretive drafting processes from the earliest draft to the page proofs. I contextualise the passage in its earliest draft appearance, and then, moving through the drafts, interpret the kinds of revisions Joyce made, their intensity, their sources, their impact on the development of the passage’s significance, etc. In this example we see Joyce, having established the open category (or, if you like, an archetype) of the ‘tree’, then crams it with usually relevant associations, themselves often mediated by preoccupations that the text has developed or comes to develop elsewhere.(1) This practice of motif and embellishment is common in Joyce’s textual production where there is a will to an encyclopedic reach. Unlike conventional encyclopedias with their desire to appear objective and up-to-date, this will is mediated by preoccupations that are provided by a framework of absurd narratives.

I have chosen this particular passage in order to ask questions about Joyce’s relation to romantic theories of ‘organic’ form and formation, and to make some initial marks upon the field of Joyce’s relation to nature. This is a huge area whose surface has hardly been scratched; passed over, instead, for work that assumes Joyce’s relation to technology is more important, as it may well be – though that shouldn’t prevent an investigation of the field.(2) The ‘tree’ is conventionally a fundamental symbol of organicism, growth and unitary form, a phallic embodiment of the natural. When used as a symbol of systems of proliferating knowledge and structured reason, these are given organic qualities. (3) While the inorganic form of the stone is associated with death and with Shaun, the tree seems to receive an endorsement in the Wake by being associated with Shem. Together they are ‘Tree-stone’ or ‘Tristan’. Similarly the washerwomen turn into ‘stem’ and ‘stone’ at the end of Anna Livia. In the Shem-Shaun binary, sympathies tend to lie with Shem, and therefore with the organic. On the other hand, elsewhere in Joyce’s texts, the romantic cult of nature and the production of phallic symbolic forms—like the monuments to King William of Orange, to Nelson and Wellington—are objects of suspicion for Joyce. In the ‘Cyclops’ chapter trees stand in for precisely such phallic symbols of national and volk-romantic pride:

--As treeless as Portugal we’ll be soon, says John Wyse…
--Save them says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O.
(Ulysses, “Cyclops”: 1258-1265)

and Joyce mocks their appropriation as fashion accessories:

The fashionable international world attended en masse this afternoon at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley. … the bride… looked exquisitely charming in a creation of… green mercerised silk … The maids of honour, Miss Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very becoming costumes in the same tone, a dainty motif of plume rose being worked into the pleats in a pinstripe and repeated capriciously in the jadegreen toques in the form of heron feathers of paletinteted coral.
(Ulysses, “Cyclops”: 1267-1288)

Conversely, as a young man, Joyce associated artistic processes with natural processes through his gloss on Aristotle’s theory of mimesis:

“E tekhne mimeitai ten physin” had been falsely rendered as “Art is an imitation of Nature. … Aristotle does not here define art, he says only ‘Art imitates nature’ and meant the artistic process is like the natural process.”
(Critical Writings of James Joyce, 145).

Tekhne is art as skill. Joyce renders the Aristotelian world in dynamic terms: art is distinct and independent from nature, resembling the latter only in its processes rather than in prescribed goals that limit art to slavishly producing imitations of the natural world. Art is nature’s twin, not its servant. Nonetheless it might be a less capable twin, since Joyce was apparently struck by the perfections which nature could achieve:

[T]he parable of the lilies of the field touches on a deeper note, but one wonders why that parable was not taken further, and why the great subconscious life of Nature was ignored, a life which without effort reaches to such great perfection. … Nowadays the churches regard the worship of God through nature as a sin.’ (Power, 48).

On the other hand, again, Joyce never had a garden or allotment nor did he camp. He mocked Oscar Wilde for following the ‘pompous professor Ruskin’ behind a wheelbarrow to the ‘promised land of the future society’, in a movement that was clearly an incipient model for contemporary organic movements that are critical of cosmopolitanism and industrialisation.(4) And Joyce, despite being the creator of Bloom and Henry Flower, nonetheless is said to have said: ‘I hate flowers’. All this could be a dislike of a suburban appropriation of nature, rather than a suspicion of Nature itself: but any worship of God through nature is going to be as fraught with problems in Joyce as are his attitudes to ‘sin’.

Such evidence of conceptual and ethical conflict is reflected in contradictions in the representation of this mythical tree of trees in Finnegans Wake which,while it may represent the life of nature, comes also to represent a domination of a single life form too. In the ease with which the tree can serve as a symbol, moreover, the tree, rather than being representative of nature, is representative of symbolisation itself, and in the fullness of its form, of well formed art. Thence the tree can represent the techne of language itself, which is able manipulate the meanings of the natural into a symbolic and structured order. Joyce’s excessive revisions qualify the meaning and value of the tree to such an extent as to produce a radically ambivalent form that explodes any reduction to a symbolic or structured logic. It comes to combine simultaneously the oppositions of what is most living and what is most dead, most natural and most artificial, most controlled and most contingent. The greatest tree in all the world as it appears in the greatest book in all the world, seems to stand as an emblem of the book, of nature, of his book as a natural form, of nature as a book (the ‘leaves’, shared by both objects, ‘sinsinsinning’), and of the symbolic itself. But both the natural and the symbolic are expanded to bursting point throughout the book of Finnegans Wake and so, as a fallen tree, it comes to stand for the fallen ideologies of the natural and, paradoxically, of the symbolic: so we have a fall of nature, of nature as language and of language itself. What is left to be celebrated is a sublime technicity of language which can continually both make and unmake the natural and the symbolic, its signifiers, its signifieds, and thence, even, its referents.

First draft

A transcription of the first draft of the passage has already appeared in David Hayman’s ‘First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake’. Methods of transcription determine the idea of a text’s genesis and radically alter the sense of a text’s growth. Here is Hayman’s transcription of the first draft next to my own transcription.

The bold material in Hayman’s transcriptions are substitutions for words that are crossed out. The italic material constitutes additions, much of which appeared in the margins and the versos (84v and 85v) facing the rectos where Joyce wrote out his first draft (84v and 85v).

The method of transcription I use here—and other methods I use below—differ from Hayman’s, since where his work presents all the workings on any given document in a running transcription, I attempt to separate the different levels of work that may be evidenced in a single document. This separation, in which layerings made subsequent to a base level are ignored, produces an idealised text, its complexity simplified. There may on any given manuscript, for instance, be four levels of revision that can be separated: a first level base draft, with corrections made during the process of its drafting that constitutes a second level. Then there are additions when the writer returns to this draft - the third level, and then a fourth level when there are additions to that. And there may be more as we shall see. My transcriptions reconstruct a temporal axis, along which the production of text once emerged. Knowing that a revision comes after the text which it is revising (erasing or supplementing) is relatively easy – a word is written, later crossed out then substituted. But there are challenges in the separation of temporal levels and their chronological arrangement: knowing that revision ‘x’ of text ‘a’ happens after revision ‘y’ of text ‘b’ is much harder to distinguish. Hypotheses and guess work is part of such genetic transcriptions. The consequence of such a ‘simplified’ transcription is that it is easier to see how an original sequence flowed and unfolded.

In the narrative constructed in the first draft, the tree is simply a brief topological marker for the point in space (in a park) where two people met, and where some event happened. The original appearance of the tree was extremely brief and embedded in an ongoing enquiry which attempts to reconstruct a narrative out of a much told myth. But as we’ll see it soon gets embedded in masses of increasingly interfering context, all irrelevant digressions from the narrative. That event has already been told in the early sketch of HCE meeting a cad with a pipe in Phoenix Park, an event whose significance, through gossip, got blown out of proportion. Gossip shares with Joyce’s methods of revision, the power of filling and multiplying the significance of a given banal and vacant signifier.

Joyce often wrote his first drafts on just the rectos of a notebook, leaving both wide margins and the verso blank for extensive revision later. The spaces which Joyce left are a sign of his expectation and deferral of extra material, a sign that a draft is nearly always a skeleton to be fleshed out later with material which, moreover, will draw on other material that will have developed in the meantime elsewhere. This technique, I suggest, lends itself to the establishment of what could be described as open categories or archetypes – fundamental forms that will be embellished with particular embodiments that will appear over time. The extent of Joyce’s revisions can be understood by comparing this initial draft with the final version: the seven words of the dialogue ‘There is a tree there / That’s right’ will eventually expand to six hundred words.

My transcriptions place a given draft and its revisions side by side for comparison. Joyce returned and reread his work, sometimes perhaps rapidly as he went along, then he would qualify it and make additions to his first draft. Into the sequence of dialogue, Joyce sometimes added lengthy interpollations. In the following transcription I have separated four separate sequences and arranged them in a possible chronological order. Notes are attached below each sequence.

Joyce next wrote out the densely written working draft as a second working draft, and then began revising it:

Redraft

As well as small scale tinkering, Joyce made an insertion of considerable length, addressing this quality of this gigantic and grand form.

This insertion begins the work on the long list and extravaganza that will describe the tree, at first just four elements – women (maids), men (robbers), the young (sweeps) and the old (pensioners). They are outside (‘growing’ and ‘chucking coins at’) and also inside (hiding). There is a formal symmetry at work here, emphasised by the symmetry of androgyny with its masculine appearance and its feminine essence. Initially, the tree is predominantly femine: ‘her… her… her… her…her…her’, but eventually it is equally male and femine (with exactly eight of ‘his’ and ‘her’ in the final version). Also, ultimatley, the passage is curiously devoid of the acronymic ‘HCE’ and ‘ALP’ motifs. Without their presence, being neither HCE nor ALP, nor both together, I would suggest that the tree is a likely candidate for the form that features with any clarity only once in the whole book – in question nine of I.6: the circle with a cross in it: a mandala, the view down a gun-sight, or a structured totality. One of the four old men responds to this account of the tree’s grandeur with the first piece of text taken from the notebooks in the passage so far:

Tree bisexual
m form fem gend
(The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebook VI.B.3 126 (a), page 99)

The bisexuality of the tree emphasises the context of sexual perversity already present in the passage, since the tree as a meeting point for a ‘couple’ revises Genesis’s Tree of Knowledge at which Satan and Eve ‘first met’. The two who are supposed once to have met here are two men, HCE and the cad, whose brief dialogue (35-36) is fraught with paranoid homosexuality and sexual guilt.

This insertion undergoes heavy and complex revision on the verso (see illustration). To show its growth, I’ve shifted the table so the levels can be read vertically downwards rather than horizontally across. I’ve also added ‘revision marks’ linking points of revision with the elements being added and these marks are coded for ease of reference.

Special features of these revisions include Joyce’s emphasis on the Irish political context with mention of ‘fenians’ and the attempt to find a place for ‘mistletoe’ which occurs in revision 5, 9, 10 and 14, though only one will appear finally. With mistletoe, Joyce opens his tree up to the primitive rituals associated with the death and rebirth of the priest-king told in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the compendious study of ancient folklore that attempted to reduce all mythic narratives to an ur-narrative about fertility and which had a powerful effect on modernism and the course of anthropology. The tree, already symbolic of knowledge, will be developed in terms of representing the genealogical structure of sciences. A mythological time is evoked through a simple addition of the word ‘of’ (*7) into the word ‘nighttime’ to become ‘night of time’, as if this tree exists both prior to the dawn of time and after the end of time, like Molly who was, like the earth, ‘prehuman’ and ‘posthuman’ (LI, 180). Leaves and branches, part of the initial query about the tree, are cancelled from the question and redistributed in the answer: the leaves, anthropomorphised, onomatopoeically sing the sounds of sin, ‘sinsinning’ (*6) in the night, evoking fabrics rustling erotically in the dark. Joyce also draws on the tree as a metaphor of social structures: the ‘branches’ (*8) meet and shake hands as if in agreement about some new world order. Handshaking is an image of truce, exchange and an ending – however temporary - throughout the Wake.

The fertility of this tree is reflected in these proliferating associations with it. Its disseminating potency is given a slightly aggressive edge with the phrase about the ‘acorns flying wild … after all the birds of the air’. The writing is itself flying a little wild at this point. ‘All the birds of the air’ quotes from another primitive folktale about the death of ‘cock robin’, already used in one of the earliest drafts which concerned Tristan and Isolde, but who reappears here in revision 9, fighting.

Joyce copied out this passage which was part of a section of the episode drafted and redrafted with great complexity, putting into a different sequence elements whose initial order wasn’t clear in the wild draft. He also added material as he went which I’ve put in bold in the transcription below. He also made marginal additions subsequently which appear in the box below that transcription.

The bisexuality of the tree means it can be both a father and a mother. Several revisions make the people associated with the tree more criminal: the fenians are now associated with Tyburn, a word transferred from notebook VI.B.10, page 21, where one entry reads ‘Tyburn tree – gallows’; the ‘sweeps’ have become ‘culprits’, the pensioners throw farthings – farts as well as coins - which don’t just go up to but now up into her. The ‘old canon’, initially a crossed-out note to himself on the second draft, has now been specified as ‘hermits of the desert’, introducing, I suggest, St Jerome who translated the bible while living as a hermit in the desert. That the tree’s roots are ‘infernal’ implies a kind of world tree, like Ygdrasil, with roots in hell and branches in heaven, though an explicit reference to such an axis mundi is reserved for later. Joyce’s method is to take trees from everywhere, including ‘Iris Tree’ one of Herbert Beerbohm’s Bohemian daughters, a poetess, Bloomsbury model and occasional actress. She will eventually fall out (to surface at the opening of chapter 2), however, as if such a gossipy allusion is too explicit here.

Fair copy and first typescript
Joyce now fair copied this worked over draft to send to Harriet Shaw Weaver for it to be typed up:

Just one marginal addition is made here: crossbones at the base of the tree indicating it as a site of ritual slaughter, a graveyard, Golgotha itself, the place of skulls. The passage has now swollen from seven words to two hundred, the extravagant description in the middle accounting for the bulk of the addition. One tiny telling addition made while printing it out is an extra ‘sin’, a stuttering of the sound and extension of the sense of the original sin, repeated over and over again. A typescript is made of this with a carbon copy (see 47484a-72, JJA 58, 154). On the top copy, many additions are made that we will now examine:

These revisions follow a pattern of qualification which make the scenario more particularly royal. Extra adjectives mean it is no longer just a ‘maypole tree’ but a ‘consecrated maypole tree’, the world becomes a ‘reignladen world’, the giant a ‘pre-eminent giant’. Several basically elemental words are substituted by other more specific or exotic and certainly always playfully hybrid words, as Joyce ‘murdered all the English he knew’ (95.12) and replaced it with ‘Wakeish’:

Royalty is present in the fifth and sixth of these revisions, higher ranks of society in the first and second. The bisexuality or hermaphroditism of the tree is emphasised with words that hermaphroditically blend sexes (squire-maid and dames-man), while also indicating positions of servitude: the maid assisting a squire and the man assisting the ‘dame’. The old men plausibly chucking farthings are now implausibly chucking ‘overthrown milestones’, symbols of the end of an era, as they themselves approaching the end of the era of their lives. The words are one element in an echoing series: they echo what the boys are doing—climbing with their ‘underhand leadpencils’ (*17), which codes such juvenile naughtiness as graffiti and masturbation. This in turn echoes the phrase ‘overgrown leadpencil’ from I.3 (56.12 or ‘monumental leadpencil’ in the first draft.(5) And this in turn echoes the nickname of the Phoenix Monument in Phoenix Park, ‘the overgrown milestone’, a popular appropriation here appropriated by Joyce.
Revision 3, where ‘infernal’ becomes ‘triliteral’ enables the connection to St Jerome mentioned earlier to be extended, since ‘trilteral’ roots refer specifically to Semitic languages, whose verbal roots contain just three consonants, and to the acronyms of the Wake – ALP and HCE. Yggdrasil may be present here since it had three roots: one in hell, one in the place of the gods and one in the place of the giants.
As well as royality a number of additions – 9, 12, 13, 14 - allude to the culture of ‘cardinals’, which I suggest are here because of the way the inquest is an inquisition or a confessional.
A whole new dialogue is added too at this level, which is itself heavily revised. Deploying the discourses of cross-examination, it seeks details about the manner in which Yawn, as witness, spied on the encounter between the older and younger man. The power relations are rendered increasingly unstable between the inquisitor and Yawn, as the latter gives diversionary and mocking responses, much as Shaun the Post does in Boucicault’s play Arrah-na-Pogue – a model for much of the chapter’s dramatic form. Truth too is is destabilised as Yawn talks ambivalently of his ‘lying’ place. He recalls taking his place, but the place had already been taken: to take a taken place would, in this context, involve lying or sitting on top of someone else. So the question of homosocial relations in the encounter is raised on the side of the witness – which makes the trial now resemble the trial of Oscar Wilde (later in the chapter, in a passage already drafted, Oscar Wilde himself appears in coded form as ‘Old Whitehoath’ (47484a-35, JJA 58, 129).
In addition, the tree is milked for associations – for the industrial uses of its matter, with references to ‘resin’ and ‘tar’: in a subsequent draft Joyce will refer to the word ‘melamine’ – another wood-based by-product. The passage is now about half its ultimate length. Joyce wanted this and neighbouring passages to be typed out by Lily Bollach, so, in 1926, he wrote them out ‘very clearly and large’ (LIII,141) to make it easier. Unless there is a missing set of manuscripts, which looks quite possible, Joyce seems to have made several additions as he copied it out.

Fair copy of revised typescript
In the following transcription of this fair copy I have put the new material which Joyce had added in bold.

-- There used to be a tree there stuck up?
-- There used sure enough. And the crandest consecrated maypole tree in all the reignladen history of Wilds world. Squiremade and damesman of plantagenet, high and holy!
-- What was it doing there, tell us for instance?
-- Standing foreninst us.
-- You saw it visibly from your hidingplace?
-- No. From my invisibly lyingplace
-- And you then took down in stereo what took place being tunc committed?
-- I then tuk my takenplace lying down, I thunk I told you.
-- Just how grand in cardinal rounders is this pre-eminent giant? I would like to hear you tell us in strict conclave what you know in petto about the sovereign beanstalk. Show us the latitidue of his omnitude. [gets lost]
-- Your Ominence, Your Imminence and delicted fraternitrees. There’s Tuodore queensmaids and Idahore shopgirls and they woody babies growing upon her, and Tyburn fenians snoring in his bole and crossbones strewing its holy floor and culprinses of Erasmus Smith’s boys climbing to her crotch with their underhand leadpencils and the Killmaimthem pensioners chucking overthrown milestones up to her to fall her cranberries and cock robins muchmore hatching most out of his mistletoe missado eggs for him, the sun and moon pegging honeysuckle and white heather down and some tomtits tapping resin there and more tomahawks watching tar there elsewhere, creatures of the wold approaching him, hollow mid ivy, for to claw and rub hermits of the desert barking their infernal shins over her triliteral roots and his acorns and pinecorns shooting wide all sides out of him after the birds truants of the air and her leaves my darling dearest, sinsinsinning since the night of time and each and all of their branches meeting and shaking twisty hands once more all over again in the new world.
-- I’ve got that now. The form masculine. The gender feminine. I see. Now, are you connected with it yourself in any way? The tree, I mean.
-- Upfellbowm.
(47484a-104; JJA 58, 224)

Glossing the previous draft, I mentioned the presence of Oscar Wilde and he now seems to be alluded to again through the obvious pun, in ‘the history of Wilds’. As Sam Slote discovered, Joyce read Frank Harris’s biography (a ‘history’) of Wilde and used notes he took about Wilde’s father-in-law exposing himself to nursemaids in Temple Gardens.(6) While richly populated and seemingly potent, the tree now appears to be ‘hollow’ as well. In a typical kind of revision, relatively banal forms of language, the paired words ‘some’ and ‘more’ are replaced by the more exotic and balanced terms of ‘tomtits’ and ‘tomahawks’, holding on each side small and large birds, one an insectivore, the other a bird of prey within an axe. Such balancing can be seen in the qualifiers ‘Tuodore’ and ‘Idahore’ and the phrase ‘for instance’ and its echo ‘foreninst us’. The place ‘Kilmainham’ has been distorted punningly into ‘kilmaimthem’, the pensioners of Kilmainham hospital recalling perhaps the violence of their lives in the armed forces.

Lily Bollach typed up a great deal of Joyce’s manuscript during the month of May which Joyce received and then seems to have revised by June 7 (see LIII, 140-141). He added the line “In your ear! Wellingtonia Ibernica, Gigantea Sequoia’ which in fact never made it through and moved one phrase (with their underhand leadpencils) backwards a few words. A this stage he also makes two additions which are thick with clichés of Darwinism:

Both additions offer purposes and reasons (just as Darwin offers purposes and reasons for forms of life) for what these males (boys and pensioners) are doing to the tree. The additions refer back to the following Darwinian cliches and encode Darwin through the initials of his name:

Darwin is present here presumably because of his notion of the ‘tree of life’ and because it opens up further the presence of scientific discourse already present in the tree of knowledge and the prohibition on knowledge which that tree represented, a prohibition that can lead to mythicalisation and thence to the kind of superstitions that Darwin’s research had to contend with. We have already encountered the ‘bad science’ of Frazer: now we have the ‘updated science’ of Darwin. Later Joyce will add the ‘new science’ of Quantum Mechanics. Finally Joyce adds a climax to the expanded speech about the tree and its branches meeting and hands shaking till they ‘encircle him circuly. Evovae’ taking us again into the Frazer’s folkloric world of tree worship, maypole dancing and Bacchic festivals around the tree – though the followers of Bacchus also uprooted the tree from which Pentheus spied on them.
From this revised copy a new typescript was made of the whole of the book of Shaun, and sent to The Dial which, however, turned it down. Joyce would shortly find a new set of people keen to publish his ‘work in progress’ - Eugene and Maria Jolas, the editors of the soon-to-be-launched transition. They agreed to do more than just the watches of Shaun that Joyce had written, and publish the entire book in installments. The next time Joyce turned to this passage was in November 1928 when he was preparing the whole chapter for publication in transtion.

preparation for transition
At this time Joyce was suffering from an attack of glaucoma and he had to have the manuscript typed up in a large font. Joyce made several revisions on to this manuscript (47484a-205; JJA 58, 356). The parallel text below shows the typescript level on the left and the additions on the right. The transcriptions begin from where the point at which the first revisions were made:

The mock-Darwinism of the ‘origin of spices’ receives a pre-echo from the Senator whose investigation seeks a return to an origin, to the ‘ouragan of spaces’ (revision #2). The request takes the the inquest back up (‘remounts’) into the rarified air of the high tree tops where, in the wide spaces of the sky, ‘ouragans’ (hurricanes in French) blow. The height of the tree is emphasised in the notion of a ‘bird’s eye-view’, like that of the God-like artist, looking down from above, refined from off the surface of the earth, with a ‘bard’s highview’. The bird-like God is the dove or holy spirit, who, like a God-like bard, made the void pregnant and set creation going. Dressed as a bird, the Dublin eccentric Bird Flanagan, an acquaintance of Oliver St John Gogarty’s, who had died about three years before Joyce was revising this section, went to a party and simulated giving birth to a huge egg (a rugby ball painted white) and said, heretically, that he had just made the universe and that he was the holy ghost (at which point he was set upon by the guests).(7) This eccentric jokey poet, then, is here on the ‘tipmast’, in the top of the tree, like the Irish king Sweeney, who, cursed to madness and to leap (‘swing’) about the earth, chose to live with birds in a tree. Flanagan is morphed into ‘flamingan’, a flaming bird like a ‘flamingo’ and a phoenix, whose flaming inidicates the end and beginning of a long cycle of time. The tree has been used as a sign of the structure of space in the universe, a world tree, or ‘axle tree’, an axis mundi. Yggdrasil, for instance, is such a tree and it features in old Nrose accounts of the end of the world (or Ragnarok), burned by the ‘fire giants’, though in other accounts the tree conceal a couple away from the battle who will enable a repopulation of the human world. Whichever tale is relevant, in his retelling Joyce evokes an ‘egg drizzling’: an unfertilized egg, broken and leaking – hardly the image of sublime potency that Yggdrasil is supposed to evoke.
Towards the end of the passage an addition is made which reflects on the presence of science through the allusions to Newton and Darwin, but such ‘science’ is to be mediated by a ‘pundit’, Joyce acknowledging, I suspect, his own intense but ultimately amateur interest in science and the extent to which science was increasingly being mediated by pundits in newspapers into a somewhat debased form (a form which Joyce nods to in the clichés which he then appropriates). There are some other allusions – that make use of Italian - perhaps produced by the presence of the cardinals in the previous revisions. They also strengthen the drama in which the four Senators are always attempting to make sense of the nonsense which issues from their witness. The power struggle between the four and Yawnis again being sharpened in these revisions, the witness’s upper hand stregthened over his cross-examiners: he speaks in riddles and commands them to ‘solve it!’. One of them asks him not to speak in nonsensical quasi-Italian (‘italioate’) but he immediately begs them to listen up in Italian: ‘Corcor andy, Udite Udite’. The nonsense that he produces is like the interference on a radio: here ‘interfairance’. Nonsense appears in the response of the Senators themselves as they try to grasp what he says and to seem more intelligent than he is being: ‘I’ve got that now. Finenight mens midinfinite true’, one of them says, attempting to separate the lies (mens) that are mixed in with the truth, the bounds of the false from the sublime infinity of a divine truth, the kind embodied in the meaning of ‘the true tree’ or Christ’s cross. Crossing out the word ‘connected with’, Joyce inserts ‘derevatov’ making the hands of the Russian word for ‘tree’ shake hands with the word ‘derivative’. The tree of text – here and elsehwere - has grown sufficiently for it to appear in transition 15, 1929.
The tracing of this passage, and a conclusion about Joyce’s method will continue in the next part.

Bibliography

Armand, Louis Techne: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology (Prague: Charles University Press, 2003).
Crispi, Luca and Sam Slote (eds) How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake (Wisconsin: Wisconsin University Press, 2007)
Hayman, David “From Finnegans Wake: A Sentence in Progress”, in PMLA, vol. 73, no. 1 (March 1958), pp. 136-154.
--- A First Draft Version of ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963).
Higginson, Fred H. Anna Livia Plurabelle: the Making of a Chapter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960)
Joyce, James Finnegans Wake 3rd edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1975)
--- The James Joyce Archive, edited by Michael Groden et al (Garland Press: New York, 1976)
--- The ‘Finnegans Wake’ Notebooks at Buffalo, VI.B.3, edited by Vincent Deane et al. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003)
--- Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings edited by Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
MacCabe, Colin (ed.) James Joyce: New Perspectives (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982)
McHugh, Roland Annotations to ‘Finnegans Wake’ 3rd edition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)
Power, Arthur Conversations with James Joyce edited by Clive Hart(Dublin: Millington, 1974).