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A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake
David Hayman
James Joyce accumulated Finnegans Wake over a period of seventeen years, introducing new material as he advanced. This means that the book did not really have a true first draft. Nevertheless, by isolating the earliest versions of each segment of each chapter, David Hayman found a way to approximate an originary text. He innovated a typographical code for the purpose, wrote a comprehensive introduction that has resisted significant challenges, and produced the basic draft catalogue that enabled and still helps navigation of the manuscripts. In the process, he reproduced each of the author’s moves, and enabled generations of readers and scholars to recover the creative process.
A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, which has been out of print for many years, is the earliest and remains arguably the most ambitious attempt to map the development of James Joyce’s last and most demanding work. Since the passages it presents in transcription are among the most complex in the manuscript record and because we now have available facsimiles of the remainder, it has become, if anything, more useful than ever as a point of access to the creative process.
David Hayman, Evjue-Bascom emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of fifteen books and many essays on modern literature, which include the first scholarly approach to Finnegans Wake and the serious genetic criticism of Joyce. He is currently contributing to editorial projects on Joyce while writing a book on the creative evolution of Beckett’s Watt and genetic studies of Joyce’s notebooks for Finnegans Wake.