Annotations to Finnegans Wake

by Roland McHugh

Long considered the essential guide to Joyce's famously difficult work, Roland McHugh's Annotations to "Finnegans Wake" provides both novice readers and seasoned Joyceans with a wealth of information in an easy-to-use format uniquely suited to this densely layered text. Each page of the Annotations corresponds directly with a page of the standard Viking/Penguin edition of Finnegans Wake and contains line-by-line notes following the placement of the passages to which they refer. The reader can thus look directly from text to notes and back again, with no need to consult separate glossaries or other listings.

McHugh's richly detailed notes distill decades of scholarship, explicating foreign words, unusual English connotations and colloquial expressions, place names, historical events, song titles and quotations, parodies of other texts, and Joyce's diverse literary and popular sources. The third edition has added material reflecting fifteen years of research, including significant new insights from Joyce's compositional notebooks (the "Buffalo Notebooks"), now being edited for the first time.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Literature, Reference, Criticism, Ireland, Esoterica

628 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential. I could not imagine a reading of the Wake without McHugh on the desktop within arm's rach. The farther along one goes with McHugh the more one is astounded by his achievement. One can ask for no better guide through Joyce's nightworld than this, that takes the text apart at the level of fragment and instance of construction of etym. A round of applause, people.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

There's very little to say except for the thing Sissy may have said which sounds something like "No duh!" which is not a very nice thing to say and when someone says that you get all violent feeling inside. But as to the presence of the McHugh at your Wake side, I have little more to say than "No duh!" 3rd edition please; zwei tousand naught sex. Do with it vhat an dhow you may, but do it with it samehow.

[Lane Wilkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've looked at a lot of guides to Finnegan's Wake, and this is by far, my favorite if only because it is the only guide that allows you to read Joyce (relatively) straight through. McHugh gives us a single page for each page of the Wake with line-by-line annotations covering suggested translations, puns, allusions, and historical references. As McHugh explains in the preface, "the reader examining any of Joyce's pages simply holds the Annotations page alongside it and examines the area corresponding to the passage" (vi). The annotations are culled from dozens of critical works by several Joyce scholars and McHugh avoids unnecessary exegesis.

Rather than read a pile of traditional guides to the Wake, get this volume and read Joyce as he intended.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential text for reading and understanding - as much as possible anyway - what Joyce was doing when he scrambled together 'Finnegans Wake'. This book mirrors the Penguin version of FW, and even though I am reading the Oxford World Classics version of FW (I like OWC better), it is still quite easy to follow. There is so much going on in 'Finnegans Wake' so having this resource is wonderful. Not really a book to read as one reads a novel, and not likely to be a book I am ever finished with, academically speaking.

[Aaron]

Absolutely essential to making local sense of the book. That's all there is to it. Yes, the book has flaws. No, it doesn't give you everything you might want, even for what it claims to do. No, it isn't a proper annotation in that when Joyce makes references to various things, McHugh only tells you what he is referencing, but generally nothing about what is referenced, meaning it's on you to look up that information (if you desire). But, armed with the understanding that McHugh is far from the final word, I can't think of a better source for figuring out what the hell a "felibrine trancoped metre affectioned by Taiocebo" is supposed to be. Plenty of books will offer ready-made interpretations of the book—McHugh offers you the tools you need to build your own.

[Mesoscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't imagine even trying to read Finnegans Wake without this invaluable guide. The concept is simple - McHugh provides a running gloss to Joyce's masterpiece, concisely explaining the multilingual puns and obscure allusions in a layout that matches that of the Penguin edition, so the reader can easily scan from one work to the other.

This must have been grueling to research and assemble, and the author has my considerable gratitude.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite an astounding work to read along side the "Wake". Its set up to line up line by line and page by page with the printed text--unless you're reading Finnegan's Wake on an e-reader.

This and Joseph Campbell's "A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake" were for me the two indispensable texts for reading the "Wake".

[Xanthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used this work quite extensively for my thesis. While it definitely didn't answer all of my questions, it gave me a good starting point for a lot of them.

[David Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

McHugh's Annotations is an amazing piece scholarship that must have taken quite a long time to complete. McHugh supplies line-by-line references and sources for all of Finnegans Wake. It's probably not complete. How could it be? However, it does help one get through the dreamy babble of Joyce's final novel with greater ease. I do not give it a five-star rating because McHugh's is really a single-purpose book. I am glad, though, that he did this.

[Joey · Rating 5 out of 5]

indispensable or unnecessarily cumbersome? Really only way to find out unfortunately is to fork over the money for this spendy tome and see if the layout works for you over time. Personally found it exquisite in helping with adding marginal notes I hadn't gleaned in my own and other readings. Truly breaks the dam over working class ability to discuss this text

[Jerry Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though I'm not sure how useful McHugh's Annotations were for me getting a good grasp on Finnegans Wake, I sure have to give him enormous credit for this impressive example of good old fashioned scholarship. Very impressive!

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a necessity for reading Finnegans Wake in the 1990s.

There are now many online resources that are easier to use than the paper copy. Yet it is still on my shelf and I sometimes refer to it.

[Dan]

Acquired Sept 8, 1999
City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

an essential companion to finnegans wake, though the online searchable notes at fweet.org allow for even more explication with the slight tradeoff of a less preferable (to me) reading format

[Roland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike the Ulysses annotations, you definitely do need the original to use this. It is not so much a book that you can read for your own pleasure, but a tool to figure out as much as you can from Finnegans Wake. The layout is great because each page corresponds to that in "Wake," but it can get damn cumbersome to have to keep darting your eyes back and forth between two books.

[Ed Smiley]

I can't really have been said to have "read".
But it has useful page by page notes on Finnegans Wake Finnegans Wake, which I consult from time to time.
(The latter I've read 4 times or so.)

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great help for identifying some of Joyce's sources. Comprehensive, but luckily McHugh leaves plenty of the Wake for the rest of us to unravel.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 4 out of 5]

отличный аннотарий, хотя автор, понятно, в силу поставленной задачи вскрывает лишь поверхностный слой, может объяснить, к примеру, анатомию шутки, но нинасколько не приближает к пониманию целого

[Fionnuala]

Useful though cumbersome companion to the Wake.

[Caitlin]

I'm not sure if I can entirely count this as having been "read." My class about Finnegans Wake was pretty big on not being tied down to everything's literal meaning and not getting too caught up in how others think we're supposed to interpret things, so I only half paid attention to what McHugh had to say. That being said, many of his notes were extremely helpful and if nothing else served as a launchpad for discussion and a bit of understanding (or at least whatever kind of understanding you can ever garner from FW).

[Abdalla Kamal]

Entering the review of existence the Finnigan is awake to nature and the silent beauties of the japanese monks as a standard press for release and its greatest accomplishment is the weave of existence itself as he finds his living among the dead writers of yore and nothing can stop the death nature in him but the love of aa woman whose greatest gift is the life that she seekks to have with him and her greatest acheivement is life itself not a job review like ost candidates. The psychological drama is the decomposition of Dostoevsky Idiot into a stolid man of Irish descent and he leaves the rest to fate in unrest of techological advances as he nurtures his soul and knowledge among the denizen nature of ancient human beings. His love precedes his judgment an procures him the life of stability check and only through her can he mind the existential crisis of not being among the dead or the writers of your in fledgeling poverty and the death of life itself becomes himself as he sublies to the Irish beauty that keepshim in check from the suicidal nature of juddgement an the sorting of afacts according to origin and leaves and greatest power over himself that she overpowers and represses asa the shield stalk that cannot exist in the night without her blessing.