Notable Misquotes

https://d-nb.info/1238141900/34

Finnegans Wake as a System of Knowledge

Without Primitive Terms:

A Proposal Against the Paradigm of

Competence in the So-called Joyce Industry.

understandable, this unit might be prioritized. Still, there are many examples of disregard for the word in FW; e.g., a thunderword (FW 3.15-17) is misspelled by Plath (1966: 130) and R. A. Wilson (2000: 88). FW words can be misquoted in a book on literary theory (Culler 2000: 40; cf. FW 152.18-19). Numerous misquotations can be found in the work of Marshall McLuhan (1962: 19, 1970: 48, 200, 214, 1997). Also, “the rite words by the rote order” (FW 167.33), “History as her is harped” (FW 486.6) were misquoted as “History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order” (McLuhan and Fiore 2014: 108-109). Terence McKenna’s words “mama matrix most mysterious” (1999: 64) are an example of misassigning words to Joyce (cf. FW 15.32-33). Since the annotator succeeded “in reading the Wake in particles but not as a whole” (Donoghue 2011: 186), the reader often concentrates their efforts on the well-annotated “select passages” (Senn 1984: xi). To identify them, one may see what sections are most often taken up by translators. A selection (!) o

1. FW is peculiar in that it ‘provides’ its readers with incomprehension and self-doubt, which is the type of knowledge they did not necessarily already possess and which they might not wish to enhance.

2. Attempts to find primitive terms in the epistemology of FW fail, unable to instate intuition to found them. As has been indicated, in the volume of FW exegesis there are some initial conflicts of intuition vs. counterintuition. Since counterintuition can be turned into intuition by an extended effort of the mind,7 one might assume that such conflicts can be resolved by the duality of two intuitions, one instinctive (lay), the other developed (expert), or corresponding to the duality of fast/slow thinking (Kahneman 2011: 20-21). However, an intuition-based expertise about FW cannot be established.8 Even from an individual perspective, the decades of examination of FW suggest a duality of incompetence instead, the one more immediate, the other at the end of a longer effort to deny it.

3. Some scholars changed their mind about the availability of a “complete exegesis” (McHugh 1980, 1991: v) and the passage of time exposed the failure of the selfappointed to “discuss Finnegans Wake with scholarly pretense” (Senn 1984: xi). If the interpreter’s approach is to “keep piling up information” (John S. Gordon in Hamada 2013: 41) without a plan when to stop, it is teleologically indeterminate.

4. There exists no “common center to which to relate ideas generated by Finnegans Wake” (C. Hart 1966a: 144, 1992: 15). The volume of exegesis is a nonhierarchical pool of verbal and non-verbal reactions to FW (with any referent), and reactions to these reactions, and so on (here indiscriminately called exegetical). Some wish to separate exegesis from hermeneutics, annotation from interpretation (W. van Mierlo 2020), more subjective criticism from scholarship as “objective research and facts” (id. 2002: 35), specialists from ordinary readers (e.g., Burgess 1965) or common readers (e.g., Bishop 1999: viii, see Brannon 2003), and so on, yet every approach to FW is equally subject to the rule of NMA.

5. Thirdly, FW cannot be misinterpreted if one cannot misinterpret incomprehension, which is the usual result of processing FW. It is perhaps useful with other texts to tell experts who “know when they don’t know” from nonexperts who “do not know when they don’t know” (Kahneman and Klein 2009: 524); in the case of FW, however, the idea that academics are more competent than other exegetes because some of the former announce their semantic despair later than some of the latter do is not enough to justify a hierarchy of competence. (In fact, if this hierarchy were established, then the scholars, as they take more time to realise their interpretive helplessness, would be less competent than any such people who followed their intuition to come earlier to the equivalent epistemic conclusion.)

6. The volume of FW exegesis contains claims in which the nonsense of the text is called a “coherent nonsense” (Bishop 1986: 27), a nonsense dependent “on which definition of nonsense is being used” (H. Palmer 2014: 58), “nonsense, or rather the limit between nonsense and sense” (Bourbon 2004: 150), a “lack of sense” meant to test “how we, individually and collectively, construct sense” (Watson 2014: 267), and so on. This model relates to claims as diverse as those that FW is “nonsense masquerading as literature” (J. Davenport 2007: 255), that to read FW means to move from nonsense toward sense (Lewandowska 2016: 532), that FW is “a mix of recognisable sense and incomprehensible nonsense” (Fordham 2007: 6), or that “FW contains no nonsense” (C. Hart 1963: 8). These assertions may be in no conflict given that no definition of nonsense has been agreed on while the intuitive understanding of adjective-free nonsense has been lost to the exegete. And yet, there seems to be this conviction among the professionals––a bias––that even if FW is nonsense, this nonsense is literary. Accordingly, FW represents nonsense writing (J. Williams 2008), and not, say, nonsense gardening; also, a good translation that strives to “let nonsense be nonsense” (Zabaloy 2015b) is literary; also, since FW serves a dictionary definition of nonsense, it is to be found in a dictionary of literary terms (see Cuddon 2013: 475), not, say, genetic terms. Apart from the text principle, in the nonsense-reading model safe are the author principle (nonsense is attributed to Joyce)43 and the language principle (nonsense is in English).

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“Complete understanding [of FW] is not to be snatched at greedily in one sitting (or in fifty)” (Joseph Campbell qtd. in T. McKenna 1995).