CUNY Academic Commons

This is an article by my former mentor Sam Slote on the appropriateness of genetic scholarship for the study of Finnegans Wake. Genetic scholarship often functions on a theoretical framework that relies on post-structuralist understanding of the inherent instability of any text. In the words of Jean-Michel Rabaté: “Therefore the ‘genreader’ will be genetic in that (s)he…is always becoming, and transforming the text whose intentions are to be ascribed to a whole unstable archive, and generic because always poised in some sort of textual and sexual undecidability.” While Slote’s essay certainly takes this understanding of text as its presupposition, it also works to provide a practical methodology for reading the Wake, a kind of learn to crawl before you can walk sensibility. Instead of looking for sources for the tortuous passages of the Wake, or working to translate the Wake into English or any other coherent language, Slote suggests, using Ezra Pound’s poetic categories, that we pay attention to what Joyce is doing to the language. By looking at the manuscripts, which are almost always closer to plain English than the final Wakese, the genetic reader can document the transformation that takes place under Joyce’s multifarious pressures, aural, visual, and semantic. Only after identifying such changes, Slote argues, can we get a sense (if any is to be got from Finnegans Wake) of the project itself.