Finnegans
Wake is 80 years-old today! It was officially published on 4 May 1939,
though Joyce had received the first copy from Faber on 30 January, in
time for his birthday party on 2 February. It was simultaneously published in London, by Faber and Faber, and New York, by the Viking Press.
Publication also meant the revelation of a secret, which Joyce had kept for sixteen years - the title of the book.
This is the Viking Press cover.
Here's Faber and Faber's version. What they share is the reddish brown colour of the River Liffey, which Joyce had previously chosen for the Anna Livia Plurabelle booklet. He told an Italian journalist, 'The river at Dublin passes dye-houses, and so has reddish water.'
Apart from the covers, the texts are the same, and both publishers' names appear on the title page.
For publicity, Joyce agreed to a photo session for Time magazine with Gisèle Freund, in March 1939. This was the only time that Joyce was photographed in colour.
Joyce also looks reddish brown, just like his book!
You can read Freund's account of the session on my post marking the Wake's 75th birthday.
Time magazine put Joyce on their cover on 8 May. They have a framed copy on the wall of the Palace bar in Dublin (left). The magazine carried a long article by Whittaker Chambers, titled 'Night Thoughts':
'All children are afraid of the night; when they grow up, they are still afraid, but more afraid of admitting it. In this frightening darkness men lie down to sleep and dream. Generations of diviners, black magicians, fortune tellers and poets have made night and dreams their province, interpreting the troubled images that float through men’s sleeping minds as omens of good & evil. Only of late have psychologists asserted that dreams tell nothing about men’s future, much about their hidden or forgotten past. In dreams, this past floats, usually uncensored and distorted, to the surface of their slumbering consciousness. This week, for the first time, a writer had attempted to make articulate this wordless world of sleep. The writer is James Joyce; the book, Finnegans Wake — final title of his long-heralded Work in Progress. In his 57 years this erudite and fanciful Irishman, from homes in exile all over Europe, has written two books that have influenced the work of his contemporaries more than any others of his time: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the best of innumerable novels picturing an artist’s struggle with his environment; Ulysses, considered baffling and obscure 15 years ago, now accepted as a modern masterpiece.
Finnegans Wake is a difficult book — too difficult for most people to read. In fact, it cannot be “read” in the ordinary sense. It is perhaps the most consciously obscure work that a man of acknowledged genius has produced. Its four sections run to 628 pages, and from its first line:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay
to its last:
A way a lone a last a loved a long the
there is not a sentence to guide the reader in interpreting it; there is not a single direct statement of what it is about, where its action takes place, what, in the simplest sense, it means.
As a gigantic laboratory experiment with language, Finnegans Wake is bound to exert an influence far beyond the circle of its immediate readers. Whether Joyce is eventually convicted of assaulting the King’s English with intent to kill or whether he has really added a cubit to her stature, she will never be quite the same again....
Method. Joyce’s idea in Finnegans Wake is not new. More than a hundred years ago, when Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in Salem, he jotted in his notebook an idea for a story: “To write a dream which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its strange transformations . . . with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.”
But Joyce’s method is new. Dreams exist as sensation or impression, not as speech. Words are spoken in dreams, but they are usually not the words of waking life, may be capable of multiple meanings, or may even be understood in several different senses by the same dreamer at the same moment. Since dreams take place in a state of suspended consciousness, out of which language itself arises, Joyce creates, in Finnegans Wake, a dream language to communicate the dream itself.'
Publication also meant the revelation of a secret, which Joyce had kept for sixteen years - the title of the book.
This is the Viking Press cover.
Here's Faber and Faber's version. What they share is the reddish brown colour of the River Liffey, which Joyce had previously chosen for the Anna Livia Plurabelle booklet. He told an Italian journalist, 'The river at Dublin passes dye-houses, and so has reddish water.'
Apart from the covers, the texts are the same, and both publishers' names appear on the title page.
For publicity, Joyce agreed to a photo session for Time magazine with Gisèle Freund, in March 1939. This was the only time that Joyce was photographed in colour.
Joyce also looks reddish brown, just like his book!
'All children are afraid of the night; when they grow up, they are still afraid, but more afraid of admitting it. In this frightening darkness men lie down to sleep and dream. Generations of diviners, black magicians, fortune tellers and poets have made night and dreams their province, interpreting the troubled images that float through men’s sleeping minds as omens of good & evil. Only of late have psychologists asserted that dreams tell nothing about men’s future, much about their hidden or forgotten past. In dreams, this past floats, usually uncensored and distorted, to the surface of their slumbering consciousness. This week, for the first time, a writer had attempted to make articulate this wordless world of sleep. The writer is James Joyce; the book, Finnegans Wake — final title of his long-heralded Work in Progress. In his 57 years this erudite and fanciful Irishman, from homes in exile all over Europe, has written two books that have influenced the work of his contemporaries more than any others of his time: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the best of innumerable novels picturing an artist’s struggle with his environment; Ulysses, considered baffling and obscure 15 years ago, now accepted as a modern masterpiece.
Finnegans Wake is a difficult book — too difficult for most people to read. In fact, it cannot be “read” in the ordinary sense. It is perhaps the most consciously obscure work that a man of acknowledged genius has produced. Its four sections run to 628 pages, and from its first line:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay
to its last:
A way a lone a last a loved a long the
there is not a sentence to guide the reader in interpreting it; there is not a single direct statement of what it is about, where its action takes place, what, in the simplest sense, it means.
As a gigantic laboratory experiment with language, Finnegans Wake is bound to exert an influence far beyond the circle of its immediate readers. Whether Joyce is eventually convicted of assaulting the King’s English with intent to kill or whether he has really added a cubit to her stature, she will never be quite the same again....
Method. Joyce’s idea in Finnegans Wake is not new. More than a hundred years ago, when Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in Salem, he jotted in his notebook an idea for a story: “To write a dream which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its strange transformations . . . with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.”
But Joyce’s method is new. Dreams exist as sensation or impression, not as speech. Words are spoken in dreams, but they are usually not the words of waking life, may be capable of multiple meanings, or may even be understood in several different senses by the same dreamer at the same moment. Since dreams take place in a state of suspended consciousness, out of which language itself arises, Joyce creates, in Finnegans Wake, a dream language to communicate the dream itself.'
So the Time cover bears the text 'he wrote Hawthorne's dream book'.
The article also reveals that 'At present Joyce is not writing. His wife is trying to get him started on something, because when he is not working he is hard to live with.'
You can read the whole article on the Whittaker Chambers website.
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