Television in Finnegans Wake

Here's a scene from Mary Ellen Bute's wonderful film 'Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake', which you can see on youtube and ubuweb.  Bute needed to find ways of visualising Joyce's text, and one of them was to re-invent the Wake narrator as a television newsreader. It might seem that she's taking liberties here, but television is in Joyce's book.

The 'Stories' chapter (p309-82) is set in a pub, based on the Mullingar House in Chapelizod, which I visited in 2013 and which has this plaque on the wall.

The extraordinary thing about the Wake pub is that it has a television set! 

If you travelled back to the Mullingar House in 1937-8, when the chapter was written, and told Mr Keenan, the landlord, that one day his pub would have a television, he would surely have dismissed the idea as science fiction. But I can confirm that it really now does have television – three sets, showing sporting events. Finnegans Wake has the power to predict the future!

A Mullingar House television, photographed in April 2019

'There were no television sets in bars until eight years after FW was published, and no television sets in Irish bars for about twenty years later.  And yet Joyce has a television set in the bar!' 

Robert Anton Wilson from an interview transcribed by Scott McKinney and published in 2012 on the OnlyMaybe blog  

The pub television is first introduced as a radio, a  'tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modern as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute....eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.' (309.26).   Later we receive its broadcasts, first a weather forecast (p324) and then a Horse Race report (341-2).  The radio seems to be turning into a television, for the horse race is 'verbivocovisual':

'Up to this curkscraw bind an admirable verbivocovisual presentment of the worldrenownced Caerholme Event has been being given by The Irish Race and World....Hippohopparray helioscope flashed winsor places as the gates might see....' 341.18

Another Mullingar House television

Soon after, there's we get the first explicit mention of television:

'The other foregotthened abbosed in the Mullingaria are during this swishingsight teilweisioned.' 345.34

Zwischenzeit is German for 'interval' and Teilweise' means 'partly'. Perhaps the radio is only partly a television here.

Now follows the key passage, which Joyce wrote in December 1937. The pub drinkers have been listening to a double act, Butt and Taff, who are trying to tell the Crimean War story of 'How Buckley Shot the Russian General.' On page 349, the characters appear on the pub television screen, with Taff fading (becoming Tuff) and Butt emerging (becoming Batt). They are then replaced on the screen by the figure of the Russian General, a version of HCE:
 

A 1938 Baird television

In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of transformed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, if tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to the charge of a light barricade. Down the photoslope in syncopanc pulses, with the bitts bugtwug their teffs, the missledhropes, glitteraglatteraglutt, borne by their carnier walve. Spraygun rakes and splits them from a double focus: grenadite, damnymite, alextronite, nichilite: and the scanning firespot of the sgunners traverses the rutilanced illustred sunksundered lines. Shlossh ! A gaspel truce leaks out over the caeseine coatings. Amid a fluorescence of spectracular mephiticism there caoculates through the inconoscope stealdily a still, the figure of a fellowchap in the wohly ghast, Popey O’Donoshough, the jesuneral of the russuates. The idolon exhibisces the seals of his orders: the starre of the Son of Heaven, the girtel of Izodella the Calottica, the cross of Michelides Apaleogos, the latchet of Jan of Nepomuk, the puffpuff and pompom of Powther and Pall, the great belt, band and bucklings of the Martyrology of Gorman. It is for the castomercies mudwake surveice. The victar. Pleace to notnoys speach above your dreadths, please to doughboys. Hll, smthngs gnwrng wthth sprsnwtch! He blanks his oggles because he confesses to all his tellavicious nieces.                 349.06-29

This is an astonishing account of the working of television, merged with the Crimean War.  'Charge of a light barricade' combines beams of light firing at the 'bombardment screen' with the Light Brigade charging the Russian guns at Balaclava.  You can imagine how Joyce's imagination took off at the name 'Light Brigade'!

Here's Erroll Flynn in the 1936 film, 'Charge of the Light Brigade'. If you've ever seen this on a cathode ray set, you will have experienced both the beams of light and the charging cavalrymen simultaneously. I wonder if Joyce saw this film, released just two years before his own Crimean War treatment.

There's also a religious dimension to Joyce's text, suggested by the word 'iconoscope', a technical television term, from the Greek eikon (image) and skopon (to watch). The General's appearance on the screen is like that of a Saint from a Russian Icon, or a Spectre - 'idolon' is from the Greek eidolon - spectre - which also gives us 'idol' . This all suggests the miraculous impact of early television.

icon of Alexander Nevsky, another Russian general

To Joyce, with his Jesuit education, 'General' would also recall the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, nicknamed the 'Black Pope'.  Between 1915 and 1942, this was Wlodimir Ledóchowski (right).

So Joyce calls his General 'Popey O’Donoshough, the jesuneral of the russuates', and describes him wearing various religious seals.

JOHN LOGIE BAIRD

 

'Bairdboard' is named after John Logie Baird, who transmitted the first television images in 1925.  This is the first known photograph of a moving image produced by Baird's 'televisor', in around 1926. It shows his business partner Oliver Hutchinson.

This is how I picture Joyce's Russian General emerging, like a spectre, on the screen of the Mullingar House television.

Joyce, who opened Ireland's first cinema in 1909, followed the development of television almost from the beginning. The Wake has what may be the earliest use of 'television' in literature, published in transition in 1927. This appears in the published text at 150.32-5:

transition, October 1927

I think one reason that Joyce was interested in television was that it was a new technology which required new words. 'Television' itself combines the Greek 'tēle' (far) and the Latin 'visio' (seeing). It's almost a Wake word!  According to the OED, the word goes back to 1900, when The Century Magazine, imagining the future, declared 'Through television and telephone we shall see and hear each other as though face to face.'

Frank McNally of the Irish Times told me on twitter that his paper first used the word in 1906. He also discovered that there was a racehorse called Television in 1927, the same year that Joyce published his piece. Frank posted this picture from the 'Gossip from the Course' column of 9 June 1927.

Horses and televisions again! This is what Jung would have called a synchronicity.

In the passage above, Joyce has come up with his own alternative, 'faroscope', meaning 'far seer' (Greek 'skopon' again). It also has the special Wake echo of the 'fire escape' in Medina Place, Hove, used by Charles Stewart Parnell to escape from being caught with Kitty O'Shea (cf 'a skyerscape' 4.36; 'fuyerescaper! 228.29; 'fairescapading in his natsirt' 388.03). There's also 'Pharos', the Greek lighthouse.  

Imagine if the television pioneers had been Joyce fans. Along with the physicists' 'quark', adopted from Finnegans Wake by Murray Gell-Man, we might today talk about what we saw last night on our faroscopes rather than our televisions.

Here's another early use of the term, added to the text in the early 1930s:

'Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!' 52.18

Television will replace the telephone, for our eyes demand their turn, after our ears.

THE ICONOSCOPE

Zworykin with his iconoscope

The 1930s saw big leaps forward, with electronic television improving on Baird's mechanical system. This was the work of many inventors, but the most important was probably Vladimir Zworykin, who invented and named the iconoscope, the first practical television camera tube.

An iconoscope focussed an image through a camera lens on a  'mosaic screen', a mica plate, covered with vast numbers of tiny silver cells, made photo-sensitive by being coated with caesium (Joyce's 'caeseine coatings'). Each cell on the screen built up an electrical charge, whose strength depended on how much light it received. This complete image, or teleframe, was then scanned by a stream of electrons, which traversed the mosaic screen in a series of slightly sloped parallel lines. So Joyce gives us:

'Down the photoslope....the scanning firespot of the sgunners traverses the rutilanced illustred sunksundered lines'

Again, there's the Battle of Balaclava here, as the Russian gunners traverse the British lines. 'sunksundered' is an echo of 'rode the six hundred', from Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade'.

The image captured on the mosaic screen, in the form of a stream of electical impulses, was then converted into a radio carrier wave for transmission - 'borne by their carnier walve'

These signals were then picked up by radio receivers - tv aerials -and converted back into an electrical current, which was then amplified and used to create the image on the television screen.

Synchronizing pulses added to the signal at the end of every scan line and teleframe ensured that the receiver remained locked in step with the transmitted signal ('Down the photoslope in syncopanc pulses').

THE CATHODE RAY TUBE

To convert the electrical current back into the original image ('its viseversion'), televisions used the Cathode Ray Tube, also named by Zworykin. This was a vacuum tube containing an electron or spray gun, which bombarded a flourescent screen with a narrow beam of electrons ('bombardment screen... Spraygun rakes and splits them'). This caused the screen to glow, recreating the original teleframe.

BRITISH TELEVISION IN 1937

1937, when Joyce was writing, was a big year for television in Britain.  On 12 May, the BBC broadcast the coronation of George VI, which drew much a bigger and more widespread audience than expected.  Here's a passage from May the Twelfth, the Mass Observation survey.

May the Twelfth,  Faber and Faber, 1937

According to Television and Short Wave World, of April 1937,  pubs in South East England were now buying tv sets (despite Robert Anton Wilson's comment at the beginning of this post).

Thanks to Finn Fordham, who quotes this in his article 'Early Television and Finnegans Wake'.

Most viewers would have been watching on cathode-ray sets like this Baird televisor, advertised in the same magazine.

1937 advert for a Baird cathode-ray television.

But a new type of mechanical television was coming....

'ELECTROSCOPHONIOUS' TELEVISION

In the same year, the British Scophony company demonstrated a new system, a mechanical rival to the cathode-ray.  Scophony gave the the highest performance ever achieved with mechanical scanners.  This was designed for the home and for theatres.   

'There is no other television company or experimenter in the world, who has today anything equivalent in size of picture for the home and larger screens to those shown by Scophony. This is, therefore, an achievement of which Britain can be very proud.'

Television and Short Wave World  April 1937

 

'Scophony have developed a special type of liquid cell....The introduction of this special light relay which permits of the modulation of an almost unlimited amount of light puts an entirely different complexion on the possibilities of optical mechanical systems.... The whole secret of the success of the Scophony system can be summed up in four words, 'plenty of modulated light.''

Television and Short Wave World, April 1937

The system was able to produce plenty of modulated light thanks to two Scophony inventions -  Supersonic Light Control (the liquid cell above) and Split Focus. Here's how they are described in Scophony's 1938 manual, from Scotland's Early Technology library.

The Supersonic Light Control System was invented by John Henry Jeffree, Scophony's chief engineer, in 1934. You can read some articles about the system by Jeffree, posted by Chris Long on his optics website.

From the Perluma optics site

This 'simple explanation'(!) shows how the control worked.

I still don't fully understand this, but it looks mighty impressive! 

Here's another diagram from Scophony's brochure showing the light control's use in a television set. The light was scanned across the screen by two mirror drums, a small high speed one to produce the line scan, and a large slow speed unit to produce the frame scan.  

Joyce knew about Scophony.  'Split Focus' is referred to in 'splits them from a double focus'. He mentions the light control in a passage added to the Letter chapter in May 1938 in which he imagines the future of television:

'(his electroscophonious* photosensition under suprasonic light control may be logged for by our none too distant futures as soon as tone values can be turned out from Chromophilomos, Limited at a millicentime the microamp)' 123.12-15

*The published text has 'dectroscophonious', a mistake by the typist who misread Joyce's 'el' as 'd'.

A Scophony home television at Radiolympia

It looks as if the television in the pub episode is also a Scophony one. At the end the transmission seems to break down, as a voice exclaims:

'Hll, smthngs gnwrng wthth sprsnwtch!' 349.26

Hell, something's gone wrong with the supersonic switch! The missing letters represent missing parts of the television image.

In 1937, Scophony looked like the future, but that future never came. With the outbreak of war, the BBC stopped its transmissions. It was feared that German bombers would lock on to the signals, which would guide them straight to the Alexandra Palace. The radio engineers were needed for the war effort. 

 

Yet Scophony lives on in the pages of Finnegans Wake.

 

And here come those racehorses again!

JOYCE'S NOTES ON TELEVISION

A lot of the information above comes from Danis Rose, who transcribed Joyce's notes on television in his Index Manuscript, published by the Wake Newslitter Press in 1978. The Index Manuscript is a transcription of one of Joyce's last working notebooks, known as VI.B.46. You can also read Rose's explanations of television in the James Joyce Digital Archive.

Here are Joyce's notes, with page and line numbers added by Rose, showing where each item appears in the Wake.  The letters 'G' and 'S' refer to the green and sienna coloured crayons which Joyce used to cross out each entry when he transferred it to his text.  So 'shortwave' is not crossed out because Joyce didn't use it.

Rose writes, 'I have not been able to find a reference to the singular material, guranium satin, with whch Joyce, in II.3, constructs his bairdboard bombardment screen.'

Another unusual entry for an account of television is the word 'ghastly' which inspired Joyce's description of the Russian General as 'the wholly ghast' 349.19

POSTCRIPT 2021: JOYCE'S SOURCE DISCOVERED!

The source of Joyce's notes was finally tracked down, 42 years after Rose published them, in a brilliant piece of detective work by Ian MacArthur and Viviana-Mirela Braslasu's.  You can read their discoveries in 'Television in Notebook VI.B.46', in Genetic Joyce Studies 2020:

'Having earlier given the hostelry a radio, Joyce then added a television. The source of most of the notes that Joyce made in notebook VI.B.46 on page 095 come from the December 25th 1937 edition of Popular Wireless & Television Times3 with the magazine cover cameo’s boasting “All the Latest Television News”.'

The magazine is online here thanks to to worldradiohistory.com.

This is the source of most of Joyce's notes, but not 'telavicious nieces' which is MacArthur and Braslau's transcription of Rose's 'telavicious mica'.

'It may be a pun on ‘television pieces’, which would tie the entry to the index Joyce was recording, or, to speculate even further, it may be a reference to some distant—hence the use of the prefix ‘tele-’ as ‘tella-’—relatives: the ‘vicious nieces’. But what Joyce really meant, we may never know.'

MacArthur and Braslau couldn't find  'guranium satin' either, but they suggest another possible source for this:

‘‘Uranium Satin’ was a type of glass, popular in the 1930’s and used mainly for vases and ornaments. Mildly radioactive from the compounds of the element added in the glass making, today it is a collecters’ item..... Joyce may have included it in his notes because of its green fluorescent properties. He had read the article “CONCERNING FLUORESCENCE” on page 394 of the magazine we identified. Public demonstrations of television started in 1936. The pictures were small and described as ‘greenish-hued’. Perhaps we can see a greenish ghostly image of the slain Russian General intruding onto the television screen of the pub...'

A uranium satin vase from ebay

Another mystery is 'logged'.  It's possible that Joyce was thinking of a radio log, which is referred to several times in the magazine's articles on radio.

Most of Joyce's notes were taken from just two articles, 'Television Topics', on the Scophony mechanical system, and 'Light and Electrons', a technical description of the electron beam system. He then used the notes to create a strange hybrid of a mechanical and an electronic television.  The Finnegans Wake device combines split focus and a supersonic light system from a mechanical television with the spray gun, caesium coating and iconoscope of an electronic one.

'I am really one of the great engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things.'

To Harriet Shaw Weaver, postcard of 16 April 1927, Letters Vol I, p250.

'TELEVISION TOPICS'

The most interesting article, 'Television Topics', is Joyce's source for his information on the Scophony system. From this, he took 'electric', 'scophony', 'split focus', 'supersonic light control', 'scanners', 'viceversus', 'traverses the picture', and 'scanning spot'. 

Imagine the reaction of James Joyce, who had never seen a television set, to this description:

'We have had the privilege of witnessing the first demonstration of television pictures received from Alexandra Palace on a large screen by mechanical means. And when we say large, we refer to a picture nearly six feet wide....Our biggest difficulty was in realising that we were actually looking at television and not watching an ordinary film being run through.'

The next page of the article supplied Joyce's list with 'teleframes' and 'Baird board'

MacArthur and Breslasu cite this section from 'Television Topics' as the source of 'Baird Board'.

What struck me here was the mention of the possibility of colour television, which Joyce also refers to in Finnegans Wake.

'his electroscophonious photosensition under suprasonic light control may be logged for by our none too distant futures as soon astone values can be turned out from Chromophilomos, Limited at a millicentime the microamp' 123.12

Here Joyce, imagining the none too distant future of television, invents his own colour television company -  Chromophilomos, Limited (Chrômophilos is artificial Greek, meaning colour-loving).

MacArthur and Breslasu tracked down Joyce's 'ghastly' to 'ghostly' which appears twice in a section on fluorescence in the 'Television Topics' article. This section also gave him 'fluorescence' (used in 'amid a fluorescence') and 'energy beam' (used in 'metenergic reglow of beaming Batt').

'LIGHT AND ELECTRONS'

The second article used by Joyce is a highly technical explanation of the electron multiplier. Here he found 'spray gun',  'photo-sensitive',  'bombarded', 'caesium coating', 'micro-amp',  'tone values'. 'stepped up' and 'iconoscope'

'Shortwave', the first item in Joyce's list, came from the heading of another article. 

The whole magazine is fascinating to read now, looking back from the television future that the writers were imagining. 

To finish, here's a lovely page showing what a family Christmas might be like around a television set.

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)