No More Learning

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(V. J. CHENG 1984 : 198ff)
? HAMLET: ACT ONE (quoted by Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, 9. 144)
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In fact, I have foregrounded not only Hamlet (as Cheng indeed does), but I have also taken the rest of what I prefer to call 'Shakespeare's Supreme Quartet' together with it, namely, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello! Adding The Tempest and Julius Caesar, for good measure. The rest of the plays follow 'in alphabetical order,' as Cheng himself had decided.
After all, these entries--the whole bunch of these lexicographic items--are to be linearized properly, in chronological page-and-line order, at a later stage: but, for the moment do scrutinize and enjoy (Finn is fun! ) the literary paradigms in the natural groupings that they fall from the pen of Vincent Cheng, who does his utmost to reconstruct Joyce's vision
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of Shakespeare as a unitary philosophical entity.
Do remember that this whole series of books attempts to
summarize the endless discussions I had with Anthony Burgess about McHugh's Annotations book.
But to begin at the beginning--the range of availability of Finnegans Wake Reference Books. This is best outlined by Clive Hart in the opening lines of his 1982 Madrid Address to the Joyce Convention:
Not only is the body of exegetical material concerned with Finnegans Wake now very large indeed, but there are many highly specialised studies dealing with particular aspects of its content and compositional methods. We have several lexica, a character- list, a gazeteer, a study of its use of types and symbols. Recently we saw the publication of Roland McHugh's volume of Annotations, designed to provide a compendium of explications and so save the reader time in his quest for meaning. What seems to me to be conspicuously absent is any cogent equivalent of a "unified field theory". Until we think we understand all the primary semantic references, I am sure we should continue to be fussed about the meaning of individual words and phrases, but unless we
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believe that Finnegans Wake is a coherent book, a shapely whole whose meaning lies partly in its shapeliness, I don't know why we bother with it. (Francisco Garcia Tortosa, Editor, p. 243)
But to get to a 'unified theory' we need to unify the 'lexica'! We cannot possibly jump to the moon: we need a vast range of paraphernalia in order to get there. And the plethora of items we have are incompatible: this lexicography series is desperately trying to put order in the chaos. In order to pave the way for the particle accelerator to function properly.
Atherton'59/ Bonheim'67/ Christiani'65 / Glasheen'56'63'77/ Hart'63/ Mink'78/ OHehir'67'77/ Schenoni'78/Skrabanek'76 are as disparate in lexicographic conception as the spare-parts of umpteen very widely different makes of Formula One racing cars! (Incidentally, nine capital
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sins, if you count the names alphabetically listed here. ) Until they match properly together to achieve co-ordinated functioning, there can never be even the beginning of a take-off towards a 'unified' target, or goal. . . that Clive Hart is dreaming about and aiming at.
McHugh attempted a modest first step in that direction, but his handicap was over-great, for he was over-greedy. He wanted to swallow the 628-page FW mammoth at one gulp, and have it done and over with. . .
But it is at this point that I come back to my discussions with Anthony Burgess.
Just because:
both Burgess and I strongly resented McHugh's one-to-one Bucures? ti 2012
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relationship, correlated only through fuzzy position-on-the- page approximations. . . That is the worst thing that McHugh can do: for no respectable dictionary can go for a one-to-one correlation. . . except the good-for-nothing parlez-vous's you buy at any airport tobacconist in order to learn a micro-smattering of Italian on board a flight to one or another Joyce Congress in Venice. . .
This present Dictionary I am dealing with here puts no space limits whatever on the correlation between the FW item and its corresponding gloss: ideally, one FW entry can and should take dozens of pages in order to spectralize everything properly in common student parlance. Particularly so, for the benefit of the
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areas of the world which have been hardest hit by the catastrophic totalitarianism imposed for half a century or more by the Western World's notorious former(? ) ally, who temporarily called themselves Soviet! ( Incidentally, in Swedish, Sovjet is a noun, and can function as the name of the then country. . . ) Or by any other name that would sound as sweet!
Joyce's is the Higgs boson, and we'll eventually 'capture' it, but the preparatory work is enormous, much underestimated by Clive Hart in his correct and global statement. . . The MonteCarlo 1990 Joyce Convention that I had organised with the substantial assistance and advice of Clive Hart himself never contributed an iota towards that goal. For media sensationalism focused
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everybody's eyes on Lady Brenda Maddox's just-out biography of Nora Joyce, who knew even less than an iota about what her dear husband was out and after in Finnegans Wake. . . or even in Ulysses for that matter.
? ? ?
One last point, perhaps the most important of them all: the present series of lexicographic expansions of FW is totally different from all the previous ones, in that in contradistinction to trying to give an answer to the question "What does this item mean? ", it focuses on the giving an answer to the far more
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fundamental, and far more subtle, question "WHY? ", as broken down into the following sample questions:
"Why is this item phrased that way? ",
"What is the reason behind this formulation? ",
"What is the justification behind this particular distortion from 'normality'(a term that you often find in Clive Hart's discussion of his own motifs) ? "
"WHY does Joyce focus on Deviation from Normality, for 17 solid years? "
"WHY is the Deviation so massive? "
"Why is the Story so hidden, so flimsy, and why is it so pretextual for something else? "
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