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The sigla of Finnegans wake
150 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1976
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 19, 2017
[N.B. What a nuisance to attempt something like a review of a book about sigla using a character set which disallows use of sigla! Which century is this?]
FINNEGANS WAKE sends us scurrying after any explicative frame of reference to be found. It sent Roland McHugh to the Joyce archives at the University of Buffalo and in the British Museum. In his notebooks Joyce used simple abbreviatory symbols, or sigils, or sigla, to represent various characters, or character-blocs, to be portrayed in his last novel. (I'm reminded of a similar case for ULYSSES put forward in Daniel R Schwartz's book, which I reviewed elsewhere.) McHugh provides us with a guide to these sigla, to the roles they play in the novel and in relationship to one another, encouraging us always to think in terms of the foundational siglum in preference to any specific manifestation of that siglum as it appears within the text of the WAKE.
Exhorting us to recognize primary parallelisms and antiparallelisms within the structure of the WAKE at the broadest level, McHugh here jettisons a more conventional, straight-ahead-read and sequential exegesis of Joyce's novel in favor of a guiding principle that clusters on Joyce's most prevalent and prominent sigla; to wit, those which answer, or apply to, the questions posed in Book I Chapter 6 (I.6) which, to borrow from Mr Tolkien, we might christen "Riddles in the Dark." To grossly oversimplify McHugh's thesis, by replacing (or restoring) character names with their corresponding sigla, we see Book III is Book I in reverse: a chiasmic pattern (Joyce's favorite rhetorical device) well-established for the Penelope episode of ULYSSES. Book II then becomes a complex pursuit of conclusions which might be elaborated from I/III. Book IV wraps up loose ends and brings us via recirculation to where we once began. McHugh then orders his own discourse as I, III, II, IV, more or less.
This then is not the baedeker of choice for the first-time reader or browser of the WAKE. I would recommend it to anyone with a reasonably working familiarity with the WAKE, however. I don't know that McHugh's informative, thoughtful and condensed perspective is profound. Developing the mental habit of replacing character names with more rudimentary sigils may or may not in itself alter how we read the book. In the last few pages McHugh allows: "It is likely to be objected that my technique substitutes ciphers for established terminology without really telling us anything new." Yet I think it does a fine job of helping us organize our thoughts about how characters are iterated in the WAKE and, more importantly, how they interrelate, and most importantly, why the book is structured the way it is. These latter points are not as well examined in other books about the WAKE, which results in us not necessarily asking these vital how and why questions. Furthermore, THE SIGLA overflows with specific ideas and theories about the WAKE's content that are not specifically dependent on how one thinks about the sigla or character names. These ideas are so extensive that I can only mention them this way in passing. This material interests me greatly and strikes me as impressive, but then I'm still a relatively new reader of the WAKE.
Finally McHugh advises: "I must also observe that to appreciate the book fully one needs to live in Dublin."
I can't do anything about that, although no doubt the declaration is valid.
FINNEGANS WAKE sends us scurrying after any explicative frame of reference to be found. It sent Roland McHugh to the Joyce archives at the University of Buffalo and in the British Museum. In his notebooks Joyce used simple abbreviatory symbols, or sigils, or sigla, to represent various characters, or character-blocs, to be portrayed in his last novel. (I'm reminded of a similar case for ULYSSES put forward in Daniel R Schwartz's book, which I reviewed elsewhere.) McHugh provides us with a guide to these sigla, to the roles they play in the novel and in relationship to one another, encouraging us always to think in terms of the foundational siglum in preference to any specific manifestation of that siglum as it appears within the text of the WAKE.
Exhorting us to recognize primary parallelisms and antiparallelisms within the structure of the WAKE at the broadest level, McHugh here jettisons a more conventional, straight-ahead-read and sequential exegesis of Joyce's novel in favor of a guiding principle that clusters on Joyce's most prevalent and prominent sigla; to wit, those which answer, or apply to, the questions posed in Book I Chapter 6 (I.6) which, to borrow from Mr Tolkien, we might christen "Riddles in the Dark." To grossly oversimplify McHugh's thesis, by replacing (or restoring) character names with their corresponding sigla, we see Book III is Book I in reverse: a chiasmic pattern (Joyce's favorite rhetorical device) well-established for the Penelope episode of ULYSSES. Book II then becomes a complex pursuit of conclusions which might be elaborated from I/III. Book IV wraps up loose ends and brings us via recirculation to where we once began. McHugh then orders his own discourse as I, III, II, IV, more or less.
This then is not the baedeker of choice for the first-time reader or browser of the WAKE. I would recommend it to anyone with a reasonably working familiarity with the WAKE, however. I don't know that McHugh's informative, thoughtful and condensed perspective is profound. Developing the mental habit of replacing character names with more rudimentary sigils may or may not in itself alter how we read the book. In the last few pages McHugh allows: "It is likely to be objected that my technique substitutes ciphers for established terminology without really telling us anything new." Yet I think it does a fine job of helping us organize our thoughts about how characters are iterated in the WAKE and, more importantly, how they interrelate, and most importantly, why the book is structured the way it is. These latter points are not as well examined in other books about the WAKE, which results in us not necessarily asking these vital how and why questions. Furthermore, THE SIGLA overflows with specific ideas and theories about the WAKE's content that are not specifically dependent on how one thinks about the sigla or character names. These ideas are so extensive that I can only mention them this way in passing. This material interests me greatly and strikes me as impressive, but then I'm still a relatively new reader of the WAKE.
Finally McHugh advises: "I must also observe that to appreciate the book fully one needs to live in Dublin."
I can't do anything about that, although no doubt the declaration is valid.
June 16, 2020
This beats the Skeleton Key in terms of reckoning with the Wake. I will be referring to this in my future readings. The sigla approach looks very fruitful. I'm a fan of McHugh's approach.
This book cleared up some (certainly not all) of my confusion over Issy, Shem, and Shaun.
The "circled-cross" sigla fascinated me. A temporal aspect of the letter/FW to correspond with the spatial box/4-sided aspect...?
This book cleared up some (certainly not all) of my confusion over Issy, Shem, and Shaun.
The "circled-cross" sigla fascinated me. A temporal aspect of the letter/FW to correspond with the spatial box/4-sided aspect...?
February 14, 2014
My review is here: http://www.originalpositions.com/2014...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews