In The Wake Of The Wake by David Hayman

by David Hayman

This ground-breaking exploration of the influential aura of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake initially appeared as a special issue of TriQuarterly (No. 38, Winter 1977). Available now in a permanent format, if offers both students and scholars an excellent introduction to major contemporary figures writing within the Joycean tradition.

Hardcover

First published December 15, 1978

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Hayman's introductory essay is a nicens little compact explanifesto all about this bookstuff we deem "post-Wake", and if the rest of this comelypylation does nothung else (but it does, evermuch else!) it will give you raremost glimpses into Zettel's Traum (tho kindalika .00055 sec. teaser for a 7-hr. Bélatarrflic) and it'll light a match under your arse to quickasyoucan get to reeding and tuning the pages of that watery-flora Brooke-Rose, née Christine. Some of us GRers will be rearriving at a few of these materials, such as the Gasseus tunnel herein, or Gilbert's Great Mulligan's too, possibly a Fetteredman here and there. Howsoever, for all those inclined to be interested to partake to explore to study to know of to expand to admire to behold & maybe even to participate in the moving-forward of this collideorscaping practice of art known as literature, if this following sommario does not wet your whistler, I thinks I must be checking your pulse and dashing a baptism of whiskey 'pon thee!:

Contents

-David Hayman "Some writers in the wake of the Wake"

-Michael Finney "Eugene Jolas, transition, and the Revolution of the Word"

-Haroldo de Campos "Sanscreed latinized: The Wake in Brazil and hispanic America"

-Augusto de Campos "Poem"

-David Hayman "An interview with Maurice Roche"

-Maurice Roche "Funeral cantata"

-Hélène Cixous "From Partie"

-Phillipe Sollers "From Paradis"

-Phillipe Sollers "Joyce & Co."

-David Hayman "An interview with Phillipe Sollers"

-Arno Schmidt "From Zettel's Traum"

-Christine Brooke-Rose "From Thru"

-Samuel Beckett "Fizzle 1"

-Raymond Federman "The voice in the closet"

-John Cage "7 out of 23"

-Gilbert Sorrentino "O'Mara of no fixed abode"

-William Gass "Koh whistles up a wind"

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

In the Wake of the Wake, an anthology of and investigation into the possibilities of fictioning which were opened up by James Joyce’s masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, has led me to reevaluate the story I like to tell myself about the writing of novels and fiction in the 20th century. Under the tutelage of John Barth’s Literature of Exhaustion/ Literature of Replenishment story, I had understood something about the possibilities of noveling having been exhausted by the likes of Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the former ballooning linguistic possibilities to their outermost extreme, the later skinning experience to a bone of lowest common denominator of having come to be. These two authors I had marked with the exhaustion of a certain direction of possibility. The only thing left to do, then, was to return to the already said, to parody and irony, to recapitulation and retelling, to a disavowal of the New and celebration of the Old; to return after the fact to a postmodernism. But High Modernism did not find itself exhausted. The Wake did not close off possibilities, but opened up possibilities. Finnegan steht auf!!


What we've got here is a (non)failure to communicate.

David Hayman, “Some writers in the wake of the Wake.” Introductory essay.

Michael Finney, “Eugene Jolas, transition, and the Revolution of the Word. Finney investigates some of the silly manifesto-type materials of transition, in which Work-in-Progress was published, and Joyce’s relation to/ tolerance of, this set of Word Revolutionaries. Jolas don’t come across as a much astute kind of guy.

Haroldo de Campos, “Sanscreed latinized: The Wake in Brazil and hispanic America.” The brothers de Campos and Décio Pignatari founded the movement of Concrete Poetry in Brazil, also known as Noigandres.. The brothers also “transpositioned” (“transcreated”) portions of the The Wake into Portuguese, as well as translating Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (as “Jaguadarte”). The Wake becomes “Finnicius Revem,” ie, “Fim + Inicio = End + Beginning, onomastically resounding with an echo of both Finn and Vinicius. The latter is a latinized Portuguese proper name which carries a hint of vinho / vinum = wine; Re(Again) + Vem (Comes).”

Augusto de Campos: Poem. A Wake Thunder Word inspired poem, ending with cidade/city/cité.

Maurice Roche , an interview with. Great stuff. Thanks to Friend Nate D for bringing Roche to my attention, and don’t miss his photographs of CodeX. Very little available from Roche in English. An interview available on-line: http://sienese-shredder.com/3/mark_po...

Maurice Roche, “Funeral cantata,” translated by Carl Lovitt. This thirteen page piece reads as a Wake-light, but more Roche need be read.

Hélène Cixous , from Partie, with a Prolegomania and excerption by translator Keith Cohen. It would appear to be a work very difficult to produce an excerpt. Quite indescribable here. But if you’ve got interest in gender and fiction, or fiction and gender, my gods! Powerful, evasive stuff. Three pages ain’t enough.

Philippe Sollers, from Paradis, translated by Carl Lovitt. Six page excerpt which uses something that is not punctuation. Texts like this can contain a power not available to those who insist upon writing with what are known as conventions. With the requisite effort, it works.

An essay, by same, “Joyce & Co,” (translated by Stephen Heath) which is perhaps a favorite of mine as to essays on The Wake, next to something great like Beckett’s piece from James Joyce-Finnegans Wake: A Symposium, which is properly called Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. But it’s dense. Dense! I say!

An interview with this guy, Sollers. Sollers, by the way, you will end up, to your detriment, ignoring, because he was editor of Tel Quel. But this interview has a discussion about the Bible and the writing on and with the Bible which is, as one says, intriguing. Author interviews, what do we do with them? We keep coming back to them and find them rewarding.

Arno Schmidt, from Zettels Traum, which is ten pages in English, translated by H.I.S de Genez, followed by the first two pages repeated in the German original. Superstar translator of the Germans, John E. Woods, apparently has a translation of all 1300 pages (estimate) of Zettels Traum prepared and close to publication sometime in the next several decades. Zettels Traum is the most difficult of the post-Wakean writings I’ve come across. And the most Wakean in character. Dalkey Archive has published four volumes (translated by Woods) of Schmidt’s fiction.

Christine Brooke-Rose, from Thru. I don’t recall how or when exactly Brooke-Rose’s name first came to my attention. This extract will cause you to love her or hate her.

Samuel Backett, “Fizzle 1.”

Raymond Federman, “The voice in the closet.” Federman survived the Gestapo raid on his house, his entire family taken, because his mother shoved him in a closet. Federman, you perverts might find of interest, takes masturbation into its proper relation to being-human. I first learned about this guy last week from his interview in ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, and I now have one of his books, and oh boy! don’t this look promising. The piece here is happily sans punctuation. Who needs it?

John Cage, “7 out of 23.” Poem whose stanzas are acronymically organized on “JAMES JOYCE.”

wroth with twone nathandJoe. rot
A peck
of pa’s Malt
had jhEm
or Shen entailed at such short notice

the pftJschute
Of finnegan, erse solid man,
that the humptYhillhead of humself
is at the knoCk out
in thE park

But it looks better on the page than I’ve done here.

Gilbert Sorrentino, “O’Mara of no fixed abode,” an excerpt from that incomparable book, Mulligans Stew. In this context, one should again and repeatedly emphasize Blue Pastoral. Sorrentino preserves the humor of Finnegans Wake like no one else.

William Gass, “Koh whistles up a wind” from The Tunnel. And in this context right here we need to emphasize that Gass, who is the most acknowledged and successful of all those included herein, has not yet sufficient bulk to his pedestal. More! Higher! Upward! Onward! Dig it!


In which more names are rehearsed

The left and right waves of the wake of The Wake: Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés and Pound’s Cantos.
In mind, Eco’s opera aperta and Barthes’ texte scriptible.
Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, Salammbô, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, Bouvard et Pecuchet
Lewis Carroll
Anthony Burgess
Flan O’Brien
Stan Brakhage
Robert Wilson
Leopoldo Marechal, his Adán Buenosayres
Cabrera Infante, his Très Tristes Tigres, translated as Three Trapped Tigers
Lautréamont
Artaud
Bataille
Eugene Wildman’s Experiments in Prose
Michel Butor
Raymond Queneau
Marinetti
Apollinaire’s Calligrammes
Ernest Fenollosa’s theories in “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry”
e.e. cummings
verbivocovisual
Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and Our Town
Dante’s Commedia
Poe, who haunts all of Schmidt.
Sade
Soller’s oeuvre limite
Tristram Shandy
“and, yes, like Rabelais”; whereby at which Review by YersTruly will find itself another similiar list which threatens to overlap with this one here.
Molly Bloom
Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics & t zero
Gertrude Stein

Okay, and but you get the idea. I’ll add these names:
Kathy Acker
Mark Leyner

That is (das) All

[This Review copy-edited by the team at Fantagraphics]

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoroughly satisfying range of essays, opinion and insight. All seventeen essay styles are rewardig in their construction and stance on language and prose. I have been circling Finnegans Wake for an overly extended time and this collection is a portal into said vortex of idiosyncratic-language-neologistic-multilingual-punning-portmanteau-wordplay.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this anthology of essays in college 18,000 years ago and it introduced me to writers that remain unsurpassed today in taking risks with language. I don't want to do these works a disservice by bemoaning their apparent lack of equivalent in today's literature, so let's leave that alone. It's a little frustrating that this book hooks you with the Finnegans Wake angle as I feel these writers occupy their own place and are influenced as much by later Joyce as they are by Mallarme, Apollinaire, Kafka, Rimbaud, etc. It's not that Mallarme, etc. aren't cited or given due, but that Joyce gets enough already without the whole "In The Wake Of" framing. It's a quibble only, though.

This and 'The Avant-Garde Tradition In Literature" edited by Richard Kostelanetz really helped me at the time. They included the Concrete Poets but immediately graduated me from much interest in them. Writers like Maurice Roche and Arno Schmidt rendered the Concretes cute at best. As for Joyce, this idea of Finnegans Wake as an end, albeit spectacular, is thoroughly refuted by the writers surveyed in this anthology, placing it as a generative text.

What you're really seeing is the culmination of the Symbolist, Dada, Surrealist traditions surviving and even thriving after the Great War and then WWII encountering the hideous aftermath of reckoning with its rewards. New technologies, comforts, wealth, plastic, pop overabundance and the glut of information presaging the 24-hour news cycle and the looming Internet, new wars, new atrocities, capitalism fully realized, industrialization fully realized, communism fully realized in its betrayal of the people, the hilarity and the horror of the End Days finally inevitable. This anthology gives light to fascinating texts that are a lot more contemporaneously accessible than Joyce's final work, more rooted in their current day. "Accessible" is a odd choice of word to select here because many works given the spotlight here are out of print, untranslated or otherwise difficult to find nowadays. Here is a great introduction to anyone interested in radical literature of the post-WWII-1970's period, when (I said I wouldn't mention it, but) there still was a thing as radical and/or literature.