Hello, my name is Raphael Slepon and I will be your guide to this site,
dedicated to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The next tour is just
about to start, so why don't you join in. You may be thinking that you
don't need no silly guided tours, what with you being such a seasoned
web surfer, thank you very much. Tip. You may be thinking that
you can march off right into the
search engine page, which, let us be
frank, is what you are after, and figure it out all by yourself. Tip.
Well, maybe you can, but it's way more likely that you'll just get lost
in its multitude of options and end up all bitter and frustrated. So
why don't you reconsider? Please, pretty please...
Let me welcome you to the site. The tour will take about 15 to 20
minutes to complete in its entirety. Please walk this way; mind your
hats going in. Actually, we should really start right here, in the
foyer, to figure out what this site is all about and what's with the
weird name anyhow.
This site houses a collection of
97,063
notes on James Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake,
gathered from numerous sources (all listed on the bibliography page).
It also houses a search engine to allow you to search the entire
collection of notes. To better understand this site we should
really look no further than the bizarre title of this page, examining
it word by word:
Finnegans: Well, perhaps not word by word...
Wake: This site is about James Joyce's Finnegans Wake,
but you probably already know that. That said, it is not
intended for the absolute beginner, who has just opened page 3 of
Finnegans Wake and wants to know what it's all about. This
site is more aimed towards someone who already knows something
– not a lot, mind you, but something – about the book,
about its characters, about its themes, about its style, about its
motifs, and wants to delve deeper. It is also aimed at scholars,
amateurs and professionals alike, studying Finnegans Wake and
looking for a powerful research tool. There are no general-purpose
introductions, no lengthy articles, no scholarly essays; just
elucidations.
Excuse me? Yes, ma'am, yes. I will, yes. I was just getting to that.
As this lady in the back row has just pointed out, there is a weird
little button on the corner of the page, bearing the ominous words
"Comment on Me!". We will get to it in a minute, ma'am. Thank you.
Extensible: This is the central aspect of this site. This
is not a Finnegans Wake museum, a static collection of notes;
this is a work in progress, a dynamically-growing repository of
elucidations. Now we come to the "Comment on Me!" button, what this
lady back there commented upon. Every single page of this site has
this button on it. It is there to encourage you to comment on
everything, and I do mean everything, and make a difference. The
button opens a new window or tab (depending on your browser
settings, you may need to allow popup windows for this site) with a
simple form through which you can send a message to the maintainer
of this site. You can comment on anything, and please do. If you
see a typo, please send a comment; if you encounter a bug, please
send a comment; if you have a question (preferably having to do with
Fweet or Finnegans Wake), please send a comment; if
you find some feature uncomfortable or confusing, please send a
comment; if you have some helpful suggestion to make, please send a
comment; if a search you have performed failed to return the
expected results and you are at a loss as to why, please send a
comment; if you wish to volunteer your services to help the growth
of this site, please send a comment; if you have new elucidations to
donate to the growing collection, please send a comment; if you come
across an elucidation that is, to the best of your knowledge, wrong
(and, believe me, there are lots of them lurking around in dark
corners), please, o please, send a comment. Don't be bashful, don't
be coy. You can even comment on the sophomoric sense of humour or
the increasingly long sentences and interminable paragraphs of your
trusty guide, if you want to.
Please don't wander off to the "Comment on Me!" page just yet, we will
come to it along the path of this tour.
Elucidation: An elucidation is a short note, often just a few
words, intended to comment on and clarify – elucidate, as it
were – a small unit, usually a word or even a part of a word,
of Finnegans Wake. All elucidations are associated with a
given Finnegans Wake location in the form of a page-dot-line
reference. As brevity is an important attribute of elucidations,
some may be inadvertently too brief to be lucid; if you encounter
such an elucidation, – a lengthy pause for theatrical purposes
– please send a comment. You may wonder about the difference
between an elucidation and an annotation. Well, there is none, which
is why each bears a different name. The term annotation is
already firmly associated with Roland McHugh's monumental
Annotations to Finnegans Wake, which formed the backbone of
this collection. The two terms are there to clarify that although
annotations and elucidations share a common origin,
different editorial decisions have carried them, and will continue
to carry them, in different directions.
Treasury: How treasurous this space turns out to be, and
whether it remains buried or comes back to life, time will tell...
Sorry? Yes, sir, yes. I will, yes. I am often asked how to pronounce
the name of this site. Well, it's pronounced just like sweet,
but with an ever so slight – well, perhaps not slight –
with an ever so noticeable lisp (which the OED tells us is "that defect
of utterance which consists in substituting for s and z sounds
approaching þ and ð; either by reason of a defect in the
organs of speech or as an affectation"). You may wonder why it starts
with an F, then. A quotation from The Annals of the Six
Masters may clarify this point: "My name is spelt 'Luxury
Yacht' but it's pronounced 'Throatwobbler Mangrove'" – then again
it may not. With this tantalising piece of useless information, perhaps
we should move on.
We are now faced with two doors. Through the right door, you may later
(by which I probably mean "not now") want to visit the
"Map" room, which houses links to all
the pages on this site and which is in turn accessible from all those
pages. But we will, instead, continue our tour by taking the left door,
moving on to the "Search Engine" room,
easily identifiable by its noisy din.
If you are reading this sentence, you have probably forgotten to click
on the link saying "Search Engine" in the previous paragraph; please
do! Tip!
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ake
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Site Last Updated: May 23 2024