JOYCE, James. Finnegans Wake.

‘Equivalent to About Seventeen Books by the Ordinary Gifted Writer.’

JOYCE, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber & Faber Limited. 1939.

8vo. Publisher’s red cloth, spine lettered and ruled in gilt, top-edge gilt, the others uncut, partly unopened; pp. [6], 628; lacking publisher’s yellow slipcase, spine and head of upper board slightly sunned; toning to fore-edge, light pencil mark to foot of p. 628, old label of Des Forges Books De Luxe, Milwaukee to rear pastedown; very good.

First limited edition, no. 300 of 425 copies signed by James Joyce.

The gestation of Finnegans Wake was long and arduous. Starting in 1922, after a period of exhaustion following the completion of Ulysses, Joyce wrote short sketches and notes that would become incorporated into the final work. They were published in journals, most notably the Paris-based Transatlantic Review and Transition, under the title Work In Progress. The sketches often produced a baffled reaction, partly because their place in the whole work was not clear and partly because his new writing was in an invented polyglot argot drawing on around seventy languages, comprising puns, portmanteau words, and multiple meanings.

So demoralised was Joyce by the negative reaction that in 1929 he considered giving it to the poet James Stephens to complete. In the same year Harry Crosby’s Black Sun Press published three sections as Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, for which Joyce was paid $2000, and he was emboldened to carry on with the work himself. However, he was further hampered by family crises and failing eyesight. After seventeen years, the book was finally published on 4 May 1939, with this limited edition being issued alongside a trade edition.

The finished work is impossible to summarise, although there is a discernible narrative concerning the main character Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, an effort to discredit him, a letter in his defence from his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, and his troublesome children. The narrative is cyclical, divided into seventeen digressive chapters, and most of the main events are alluded to rather than described, so that it is hard for any two readers to agree on precise details of character or action. That is precisely Joyce’s intention. As he wrote in a letter to his editor, Harriet Shaw Weaver, on 24 November 1926: ‘One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot’ (see Ellmann below). Both life and language are dreamlike.

Finnegans Wake has since become an icon of modernism, one of the least accessible but most artistically important products of twentieth century literature. Joyce regarded its complexity as essential and recommended that the reader devoted a lifetime to its contemplation ‘like the Koran’, as Cyril Connolly put it in The Modern Movement. Edmund Wilson gave the best advice: ‘The conditions for reading this book are different, as far as I know, from those for reading any other book ever written. You have to take it rather slowly, a section at a time, and you have to keep on rereading it. Joyce worked on it through seventeen years, and it is equivalent to about seventeen books by the ordinary gifted writer.’ (The New Yorker, 5 August 1944).

Slocum & Cahoon A49. See Ellmann, Richard. Letters of James Joyce III, 146; Connolly, The Modern Movement, p.81.

SKU: 2126691