Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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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
eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) Authorial intent lays an important claim but does not exhaust textual meaning. One must allow meaning to enjoy the “germination of its germination” in new worldly horizons. Thus, Wakean interpretation is not solely archival but rather the archive supplements our evolving knowledge of the text as we encounter it in our time. Thus, as an evolving work, one must allow Finnegans Wake its prophetic resonance where it appears to anticipate an event ahead of its time, or its language recalls a modern colloquial expression unknown to its author. One must further allow approaches to the text through various theoretical discourses with which Joyce would not have been familiar. As Jacques Derrida recognised, Joyce anticipates these approaches and mocks them even as they produce their critical yield. 3 The Wake must retain this challenging force; criticism is never satisfying where it moves by domestication. The danger risked, of course, by total hermeneutic openness is that interpretation is reduced to complete textual anarchy. Joyce scholars remain particularly sensitive to the allegation that Finnegans Wake can mean absolutely anything. Yet this danger is avoided with the Wakean hermeneutics outlined above. The work’s pages are described as “shaking hands” with a “new world.” A contract of meaning is established. It is not at all that in thus reading the Wake ‘anything can mean anything’. Rather, it is that the strength of any possible interpretation must be ascertained by its receptive context. Literary and critical theories are now able to engage with the work if the novel’s text provides a successful thematic or syntactic context for their employment. This contextual hermeneutic provides a much needed rubric for Terry Eagleton’s humorous observation that “it is always worth testing out any literary theory by asking: How would it work with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.” 4 We are no longer in a realm where critical norms exert complete interpretive control over the text, yet we have avoided the anarchism of textual solipsism. Critical discourses 3 Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear say yes in Joyce,” trans. Shari Benstock, in James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, eds. Bernard Benstock (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988). Jacques Derrida, “Two Words For Joyce,” trans. Geoff Bennington, in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 4 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 71. 3
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Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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