What would you ask James Joyce?

 

I have some questions for you Mr Joyce

Suppose you could time travel back to Paris in the 1930s, and ask James Joyce to explain Finnegans Wake. What questions would you ask him?

He loved talking about his Work in Progress, as it was called until publication, but the people who interviewed him hadn't read the published book, and they didn't ask the questions we would ask now.  I've collected his statements in an earlier post, James Joyce describes Finnegans Wake.

Here are a few I would start with.

Is there a dreamer? Who is it?

What did you mean when you told Frank Budgen that your father's encounter with a tramp in the Phoenix Park was the 'whole basis' of your book?  What actually happened with your father and the tramp?

You also told Frank Budgen, in 1939, that the St Patrick and the Druid sketch was 'the indictment and defense of the book.' Did you have any idea that of that when you wrote it in 1923?

You started the project in Nice in October 1922, taking notes from newspaper ads e.g. Bird's substitute cake meal ('a tin with a purpose'). What did you think you were doing?

Why is so much of the book, even everyday phrases, recycled from newspapers and books? Did you want us to find your notebooks and track down all those sources?

Did you believe that in writing the book you were performing a work of magic?

What is the significance of the date 1132?  

Joyce invents 1132, from the National Library of Ireland

 

How much of the book takes place in the Mullingar House in Chapelizod, where this plaque can be seen?

 

Who are the 'we' who narrate the opening chapters of Book One?

Who is the 'I' who narrates the opening of Book Three? Is it really the old men's donkey?

How did you learn to write pidgin English in a Bognor guest house?

What's making all the 'tip' sounds in the Museyroom on pages 8-10?

What's making all these BENK! BINK! noises on page 379

Explaining the Phoenix Park Nocturne on p244, you told Jacques Mercanton that here ‘two little birds, male and female, release their little prayers, the two dots on the i's.'

Do you often use letters as pictures like this?

You also told Mercanton that you were following a 'method of working according to the precise laws of phonetics, the laws that rule over all languages'. What did you mean?

You told Max Eastman that in writing of the night, you couldn't 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.'  

Where do these different stages appear in the book? Is the Porter chapter, where there's more visual description, closer to waking?

Why and when did you abandon the title Finn's Hotel and rename it Finnegans Wake? 

Why did you drop your plan to make the fourth Shaun chapter 'all about roads, all about dawn and roads'?

Who is the late archdeacon J.F.X. Preserved Coppinger?

What did you mean when you told C.K.Odgen, explaining 'Hircus civis eblanensis', that 'the first man of Dublin was a he-goat'?

A Glass of Goat's Milk (1909)

When you got the chance to correct the text in 1939, why didn't you correct the real misprints instead of adding all those commas?

Richard Ellmann says that you 'spent a week in November (1929) explaining to James Stephens the whole plan of Finnegans Wake.'  What did you tell him?

What would you ask Mr Joyce?