James Joyce describes Finnegans Wake

'We are both somewhat dazed by the heavy heat here. I work every day at my big long wide high deep dense prosework.' 

Joyce to Giorgio and Helen Joyce, 1 June 1934. Letters III p.306

Following my last post on descriptions of Finnegans Wake, let's look at what Joyce himself had to say about his book. He loved talking about 'Work in Progress', as it was known until publication. The best single source of these conversations is Portraits of the Artist in Exile, edited by Willard Potts, which every Wake lover should seek out.

From that book, here's Ole Vinding, who interviewed Joyce in Copenhagen in 1936:

'I haven't lived a normal life since 1922, when I began 'Work in Progress'. It demands an enormous amount of concentration. I want to describe the night itself. Ulysses is related to this book as day is to night. Otherwise there is no connection between the two books. Ulysses did not require the same amount of concentration. Since 1922 my book has become more real to me than reality, and everything has led to it; all other things have been insurmountable difficulties, even the smallest realities such as, for instance, having to shave in the morning. There are, so to say, no individual people in the book – it is as in a dream, the style gliding and unreal as the way it is in dreams. If one were to speak of a person in the book, it would have to be of an old man, but even his relationship with reality is doubtful.'

Ole Vinding, 'James Joyce in Copenhagen',  in Portraits of the Artist in Exile (ed Willard Potts), pp 149

  

The next four quotations come from the Czech artist and writer, Adolf Hoffmeister, who met Joyce in Paris in 1930.

'I am thinking of a beautiful book where each occasion, each situation and each word will choose its own language.  In all the languages of the world there is only one word that exactly designates a given thing....' 
'If you write that way few people can read you.'
'What is that to me? In the work I am now writing I use eighteen languages. The English-Parisian of the Americans is a language that no one understands any longer.'

''Work in Progress' gives the first view into the kneading trough of creation. In the beginning was chaos. But chaos is also at the end. The reader participates in the beginning or the end of the world as it occurs. Everyone is anyone and every instant is any instant. The fall of angels is mixed with the Battle of Waterloo, and H.C.E. is more changeable than history can provide names for.'

'I don't think that the difficulties in reading it are so insurmountable.  Certainly any intelligent reader can read and understand it, if he returns to the text again and again. He is setting out on an adventure with words. 'Work in Progress' can satisfy more readers than any other book because it gives them the opportunity to use their own ideas in the reading. Some readers will be interested in the exploration of words, the play of technique, the philological experiment in each poetic unit. Each word has the charm of a living thing and each living thing is plastic.' 

''Work in Progress' has a significance completely above reality; transcending humans, things, senses, and entering the realm of complete abstraction. Anna and Humphrey are at the same time the city and its founder, the river and the mountain, as well as both sexual organs; there is not even a chronological ordering of the action. It is simultaneous action, represented by the novel's circular construction, as Elliot Paul* has pointed out very accurately.  Wherever the book begins it also ends.'

Adolf Hoffmeister, 'Portrait of Joyce',  in Portraits of the Artist in Exile (ed Willard Potts), pp 126-32

*'Many indications aside from the fact that the book begins in the middle of a sentence point out that its design is circular, without the beginning, middle and ending prescribed for chronological narratives.'

Elliot Paul, 'Mr Joyce's Treatment of Plot', transition 9, December 1927.

Granta have published a wonderful extended new translation of the Hoffmeister interview, which you can read here. It includes this description of ALP and HCE:

'Work in Progress is not written in English or French or Czech or Irish. Anna Livia does not speak any of these languages, she speaks the speech of a river.

It is the river Liffey. That is a woman, it is Anna Liffey. She is not quite a river, nor wholly a woman. She could be a goddess or a washerwoman, she is abstract. ‘Plurabella’ is for her humorous possibilities of tributaries and the diversity of her beauty.

Anna is of course a simple corruption of the Latin for river, amnis. Anna Liffey on the old maps is Amnis Livius. From this I then turned her name by analogy into a series of Saint Annas from different countries. Like Anna Sequana, Annie Hudson, Susquehanna etc: the names of women or rivers.

Opposite her stands Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (Here Comes Everybody) or HCE, the male character of the story. He appears under many names, most often as Persse O’Reilley, which is from perce-oreille (earwig). Initials hint at the main character, when he appears in various guises in the course of the story. As for instance Hic cubat edilis. Apud libertinam parvulam (H.C.E.A.L.P.). And out of the other characters, who appear in Work in Progress, come part of the whole. Finn Mac Cool, Adam and Eve, Humpty-Dumpty, Napoleon, Lucifer, Wyndham Lewis, Archangel Michael, Tristan and Isolde, Noah, Saint Patrick etc. Hircus Civis Eblanensis . . . Well, you know Anna Livia?'
 
My favourite description is this 1937 one from Jan Parandowski, which I've quoted before:

'Perhaps you have heard that I am writing something...'
'Work in Progress.'
'Yes, it doesn't have a title yet. The few fragments which I have published have been enough to convince many critics that I have finally lost my mind, which by the way they have been predicting faithfully for many years. And perhaps it is madness to grind up words in order to extract their substance, or to graft them one onto another, to create crossbreeds and unknown variants, to open up unsuspected possibilities for these words, to marry sounds which were not usually joined together before, although they were meant for one another, to allow water to speak like water, birds to chirp in the words of birds, to liberate all sounds of rustling, breaking, arguing, shouting, cracking, whistling, creaking, gurgling - from their servile, contemptible role and to attach them to the feelers of expressions which grope for definitions of the undefined. I took literally Gautier's dictum, 'The inexpressible does not exist.' With this hash of sounds I am building the great myth of everyday life.'

Jan Parandowski, 'Meeting with Joyce', in Portraits of the Artist in Exile (ed Willard Potts), pp 160-2

Here's the French Swiss writer, Jacques Mercanton, who got to know Joyce well in the late 1930s:

"Work in Progress'? A nocturnal state, lunar. That is what I wanted to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream. Not what is left over afterward, in the memory. Afterward, nothing is left....
  I reconstruct the nocturnal life as the Demiurge goes about the business of creation, starting from a mental outline that never varies. The only difference is that I obey laws I have not chosen. While He?...
  It is I who could draw up the best indictment against my work. Isn't it arbitrary to pretend to express the nocturnal life by means of conscious work, or through children's games?....Isn't it arbitrary of me to make use, as I do, of forty tongues I don't know in order to express the dream state? Isn't it contradictory of me to make two men speak in Chinese and Japanese in a pub in Phoenix Park, Dublin? Nevertheless, that is a logical and objective method of expressing a deep conflict, an irreducible antagonism.'
  ....He later explained to me his method of working according to the precise laws of phonetics, the laws that rule over all languages....'The only difference,' he declared, 'is that in my imitation of the dream-state, I effect in a few minutes what it has sometimes taken centuries to bring about....Nevertheless, my whole book is shaky. There is only one thing that keeps it on its feet: the author's obstinacy....This book has to do with the ideal suffering caused by an ideal insomnia. a sentence in the text describes it in those terms. When you say it in advance yourself, you silence the critics.'

Jaques Mercanton, 'The Hours of James Joyce', in Portraits of the Artist in Exile (ed Willard Potts), pp 209-221

 

It's a shame Mercanton didn't say more about these 'precise laws of phonetics'.

Joyce also told Mercanton about his belief in his book's wide appeal:

'You are not Irish and the meaning of some passages will perhaps escape you. But you are Catholic, so you will recognize this and that allusion. You don’t play cricket; this word may mean nothing to you. But you are a musician, so you will feel at ease with this passage. When my friends come to Paris, it is not the philosophical subtleties of the book that amuse them, but my recollection of O’Connell’s top hat.'

Jaques Mercanton, 'The Hours of James Joyce', in Portraits of the Artist in Exile (ed Willard Potts), p 234

Joyce also gave Mercanton detailed notes on the Phoenix Park Nocturne episode.  He gave another set of notes, on Anna Livia Plurabelle, to C.K.Ogden, which you can read here.

"Explanations actually originating with Joyce can be found in a collection of essays published in 1929 under the strange title Our Examination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. I met one of the commentators, Stuart Gilbert, in Paris, shortly before his death. He told me that he had been given an extract to discuss, and having no idea what it meant, took all his glossary directly from Joyce."

Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience, 198,  p47

The extract Joyce gave Gilbert was from Jaun's sermon, on pages 448.34-452.07. You can read Gilbert's essay, 'Prolegomena to Work in Progress', online here.

'I remember Joyce telling me that he thought it necessary to issue his work one small volume at a time, with a preface by one of his friends, because it was a little too "difficult" to be absorbed by the general reader all at once and without help.  I asked him if he did not find that prefatory intrusion by an alien hand distasteful on aesthetic grounds. I said: "Why don't you put into your creation itself whatever hints to the reader you deem an indispensable minimum?"

  His answer was a shrewd one: "You know people never value anything unless they have to steal it. Even an alley cat would rather snake an old bone out o' the garbage can than come up and eat a nicely prepared chop from your saucer."'

Max Eastman, The Literary Mind, 1931, p.103-4

Yet, while explaining references, Joyce also downplayed the importance of reference hunting. He told Professor Heinrich Straumann of Zurich:

'One should not pay any particular attention to the allusions to placenames, historical events, literary happenings and personalities, but let the linguistic phenomenon affect one as such.'

H Straumann, 'Last Meeting with Joyce', A James Joyce Yearbook, ed Maria Jolas, p.114 

Apart from Potts' book, there are three other major statements, quoted by Eugene Jolas,  Max Eastman and Arthur Power. These are harder to track down:

'There really is no coincidence in this book,' he said during one of our walks. 'I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner.... Every novelist knows the recipe....It is not very difficult to follow a simple, chronological scheme which the critics will understand....But I, after all, am trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way. Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book....Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death....There is nothing paradoxical about this....Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose....Did you ever read Laurence Sterne?'

  A British clipping came saying that Joyce was trying to revive Swift's little language to Stella. 'Not at all,' said Joyce to me. 'I am using a Big Language.'  He said one evening: 'I have discovered I can do anything with language I want.' His linguistic memory was extraordinary. He seemed constantly à l'aflût, always to be listening rather than talking. 'Really it is not I who am writing this crazy book,' he said in his whimsical way one evening. 'It is you, and you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table.''

Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce' in Givens (ed), James Joyce:Two Decades of Criticism, 1948, p.11-13. The elision marks are in Jolas's original text.

'In writing of the night', – he told me – 'I really could not, I felt I could not, use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages – the conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious. I found that it could not be done with words in their ordinary relations and connections. When morning comes of course everything will be clear again. They really needn't worry and scold so much. I'll give them back their English language. I'm not destroying it for good!' 

Max Eastman, The Literary Mind, 1931, p.101

'The demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.'

Max Eastman, The Literary Mind, 1931, p.100

Arthur Power's book has one of Joyce's most revealing statements about the general principles and methods of his new way of writing:

'Emotion has dictated the course and detail of my book, and in emotional writing one arrives at the unpredictable which can be of more value, since its sources are deeper, than the products of the intellectual method....In writing one must create an endlessly changing surface, dictated by the mood and curent impulse in contrast to the fixed mood of the classical style. That is 'Work in Progress'. The important thing is not what we write, but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. in other words we must write dangerously: everything is inclined to flux and change nowadays and modern literature, to be valid, must express that flux....A book, in my opinion, should not be planned out beforehand, but as one writes it will form itself, subject, as I say, to the constant emotional promptings of one's personality.'

Conversations with James Joyce, 1974, p.110 

 

In 1926, Joyce gave another description of general principles to the Japanese academic Takaoki Katta. His notes, transcribed by Yasuo Kamagei, were published in Genetic Joyce Studies, Spring 2002:

'I. Words & phrases should sound like the meaning they express. a.) To attain this the writer may well invent new wds within the extent that the reader can understand the meaning of those new words[.] b.) The writers should go over grammar and dictionary. Grammar & Dictionary sh d follow writers. It is a great anachronism & absurdness that writers sh d follow grammar & dictionary. Writers shd always be younger than grammar & dictionary. II. Words must be spelt as they are pronounced. a.) The object of spelling is to let the reader know the pronunciation of the words.... There’s no reason whatever to keep this silly spelling but the so-called custom & conservativeness. III. We want to feel literature. We want to see the spirit of life. Various accidents external are merely the voices & shadows of our internal spirit. / Realistic treatment of things external is indirect & round-about way of treating. / We should try to express our spirit flowing from the inmost recesses of our heart without being controlled by external things. External things will follow./ Literature should be a living picture of the living spirit....‘[...] He said that he is writing a voluminous book very metaphisical [sic], & said that it would take him 10 years....He said that he is putting many Jap. wds in his new book & asked me who was the first woman in Japan.... He said he thinks very highly of slang & dialect (pidgin-English even). / Slang & dialect, tho first detested, are very apt to become the standard language not in so long a time.'

In 1929, Joyce gave Cyril Connolly an account of his plan of the book, which Connolly described in his essay, "The Position of Joyce":

'The new book is full of fables, because the whole of the first part is really a surréaliste approach to the prehistory of Dublin, the myths and legends of its origin, Duke Humphrey and Anna Livia, the mountain and the river, from a black reach of which the city took its name. The first words “riverrun brings us back to Howth Castle and Environs” suggest the melodies to follow. All the urban culture of Ireland is by origin Scandinavian; and, to emphasize this, Joyce has introduced the greatest possible amount of Norse words into his description of it. There are four parts to the new work of Joyce: the first is a kind of air photograph of Irish history, a celebration of the dim past of Dublin, as was Ulysses of its grimy present; the second is an interlude in a bam near Chapelizod; some children are playing, and react unconsciously the old stories of the first (Iseult of Ireland linking in the suburb’s name); and the third part, jumping from the “past events leave their shadows behind” of the first, to “coming events cast their shadows before,” deals in four sections with the four watches of one night. As this is literary criticism, I cannot go into the metaphysics of Joyce’s new book, which are based on the history of Vico and on a new philosophy of Time and Space; but two other things emerge, the same preoccupation of the author with his native town, his desire to see all the universe through that small lens, and his poetic feeling for the phases of the dusk, for that twilight which originally gave the Celtic revival its name.'

This can only have come from Joyce, since he had not yet written the children's games section. When Connolly republished the essay in 1944 in  The Condemned Playground, he described it as 'the first English account of Finnegans Wake as told me by him'. 

His account of the first part as an 'air photograph of Irish history, a celebration of the dim past of Dublin' reminds me that Joyce told Herbert Gorman that Part 1 was 'curdling with the intertwining shadows and phantoms of the past', Samuel Beckett that it was 'a mass of past shadow' and E.R.Curtius that '1st 8 episodes are a kind of immense shadow.''

ELLMANN

  
Richard Ellmann's biography is another major source of Joyce's accounts of the Wake.  Joyce gives another description of the writing process as a journey of exploration:

'When the sculptor August Suter asked what he was writing, he could answer truthfully, 'It's hard to say.' 'Then what is the title of it?' asked Suter. This time Joyce was less candid: 'I don't know. It's like a mountain that I tunnel into from every direction, but I don't know what I will find.' Actually he did know the title at least, and had told it to Nora in strictest secrecy 
....Joyce informed a friend later, he conceived of his book as the dream of old Finn, lying in death beside the River Liffey and watching the history of Ireland and the world – past and future – flow through his mind like flotsam on the river of life....
  'Jes suis au bout de l'anglais,' Joyce said to August Suter, and he remarked to another friend, 'I have put the language to sleep.'
....He said to Edmond Jaloux that his novel would be written ‘to suit the esthetic of the dream, when the forms prolong and multiply themselves, when the visions pass from the trivial to the apocalyptic, when the brain uses the roots of vocables to make others from them which will be capable of naming its phantasms, its allegories, its allusions.''

Ellmann, James Joyce,  p.543-6. 

 
The Jaloux quotation comes from an article, 'James Joyce' in Le Temps, 30 January 1941. 

Clive Hart gives a slightly different version of the 'dream of old Finn' story, as well as its source:

'Mrs Adaline Glasheen reports that Dr O'Brien, a friend of Joyce's, told her in conversation that Joyce had told him 'that Finnegans Wake was 'about' Finn lying dying by the River Liffey with the history of Ireland and the world circling through his mind.''

Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, 1962 p81

This reminds me of Vinding's 'If one were to speak of a person in the book, it would have to be of an old man'.

There are more quotations on p 590 of Ellmann's biography:

'About my new work – do you know, Bird, I confess I can't understand my critics, like Pound and Miss Weaver. They say it's obscure. They compare it of course with Ulysses. But the action of my new work takes place at night. It's natural that things should not be so clear at night, isn't it?' 

Joyce to William Bird, recalled in a 1954 letter to Ellmann

'It's all so simple. If anyone doesn't understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud.'  

 
Joyce to Claude Sykes, recalled in a 1954 interview with Ellmann

'Perhaps it is insanity. One will be able to judge in a century.'

Louis Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, 59

 

FRANK BUDGEN

Frank Budgen, Joyce's closest friend in Zurich, remembered some of Joyce's comments on FW in his obituary:

 

'In my hearing he answered  (perhaps for the hundreth time) the question: 'Aren't there enough words for you in the English language?' 'Yes, there are enough of them, but they're not the right ones.' Rebutting the charge of vulgarity against the use of the pun, he said: 'The Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun. It ought to be good enough for me.' And a studied ripost: 'Yes, some of the means I use are trivial – and some are quidrivial.'

 

'James Joyce', 1941, reprinted in James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, OUP, 1972, p 347 

 

HARRIET SHAW WEAVER

 

Joyce's patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver, is another source of his descriptions of the Wake. She wrote to Professor Joseph Prescott, 'In the summer of 1923 when Mr Joyce was staying with his family in England he told me he wanted to write a book which should be a kind of universal history.' (Joseph Prescott, 'Concerning the Genesis of Finnegans Wake', PMLA, Vol LXIX, No. 5, Dec 1954) 

Joyce's letters to Weaver provide several readings of specific passages, including the opening page and the Ondt and the Gracehoper (414-6), as well as some general descriptions:

'One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutandry grammar and goahead plot.'

To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 24 November 1926, Letters Vol 3, p146 (Selected Letters p.318)

His letters also reveal the process of the book's composition. After sending her the earliest sketches, he explained:

'The construction is quite different from Ulysses where at least the ports of call were known beforehand. I am sorry that Patrick and Luchru-Berkeley are unsuccessful in explaining themselves. The answer, I suppose, is that given by Paddy Dignam's apparition: metempsychosis. Or perhaps the theory of history so well set forth (after Hegel and Giambattista Vico) by the four eminent annalists who are even now treading the typepress in sorrow will explain part of my meaning. I work as much as I can because these are not fragments but active elements and when they are more and a little older they will begin to fuse of themselves.'

To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 9 October 1923, Letters I,

'I compose ridiculous prose writing on a green suitcase which I bought in Bognor. I want to get as many sketches done or get as many boring parties at work as possible before removal somewhere.'

To HSW, 17 October 1923, Letters I

You can read many more letters like this in the appendix to the Joyce Digital Archive.  See also his letters to her on the book's title, which I've posted here.

 

 

Joyce also describes his book in the pages of the Wake itself, most famously on page 120:  

'and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.'
120.09-17

 

See also the ninth question in the Questions and Answers chapter, whose answer is 'A collideorscape!' (143.28)