Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Issue 1 (2011)
exclusivity. The Wake’s structure and thematic content also demand interpretation.
The text itself, at least, perhaps suggests its hermeneutic openness,
her leaves, my darling dearest, sinsinsinning since the night of time and each and all
of their branches meeting and shaking twisty hands all over again in their new
world through the germination of its germination from Ond’s outset to till Odd’s
end. 1
The pages (“leaves”) of the Wake reach its readers in a gesture of interpretation,
“shaking twisty hands all over again in their new world.” Curiously, in a
dendrological inversion, it is the “branches” of the “leaves“ that meet, suggestive
perhaps of the Wake’s four books interlocking with each other in their Vichian cycle,
but the “new world” (my emphasis, M.G.) of this interaction is bound up with a
“germination” of meaning, belying any notions of textual isolation or cyclic stability.
The text, that is, is not merely internally referential but comes to have meaning in
new horizons of interpretation. The world of the text is important — it provided the
enabling conditions, the historical climate in which its author wrote. Indeed, we learn
from the expert who advises on the interpretation of ALP’s great letter that, “to
concentrate solely on the literal sense […] of any document to the sore neglect of the
enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is […] hurtful to sound sense” (FW
109). The text itself, however, is encountered in a “new world,” and the “twisty
hands” of its interpretation elude any claims for perfected, linear meaning. As Hans-
Georg Gadamer realised, both author and reader exist within tradition, subject to
particular horizons of understanding and conditioned by particular prejudices.
Sensitive interpretation occurs through a fusion of horizons [Horizontverschmelzung]
whereby a reader establishes a dialectic between his own horizon and that of the
text’s.
Just as the events of history do not in general manifest any agreement with the
subjective ideas of the person who stands and acts within history, so the sense of a
text in general reaches far beyond what its author originally intended. The task of
understanding is concerned above all with the meaning of the text itself […]. The
hermeneutical reduction to the author’s meaning is just as inappropriate as the
reduction of historical events to the intentions of their protagonists. 2
1 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 505. In the following this source will
be quoted in the continuous text as FW.
2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth & Method, trans. Weinsheimer, Joel & Marshall, Donald (London:
Continuum, 2006 [1975]), 366 f.
2