Madam, – It is never what is said but how, and the tone of Terence Killeen's review (Weekend Review, March 13th) of the Houyhnhnm Finnegans Wakeindicates remarkable begrudgery in the face of what many of Danis Rose's peers consider to be the finest feat of Irish textual scholarship of recent decades. This we have married to a realisation of form and content in the shape of the new edition perfected by Europe's most distinguished printer, Martino Mardersteig of Verona.
The fact that we are constrained from showing the editorial apparatus, or scaffolding, by legal considerations, is widely acknowledged. It is hoped that this databank will be revealed in all its complex beauty as soon as possible, when the work’s veritable DNA is disclosed. A small sample from it is being made available on our website within a week or two.
In the meantime it is surely shaming that a great newspaper of record has allowed such a peremptory rush to judgment. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – In his dismissive review of the new Finnegans Wake, edited by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, Terence Killeen makes the quite valid point that the critical issue faced by reviewers and readers concerns the methodology used by the editors and not the book itself (Weekend Review, March 13th).
Finnegans Wakehas been much reviewed, parsed, analysed and faulted during the 70 years since it was first published. Going over the book again was not the primary or appropriate purpose of any review of this new version. The issue is how the 30-year task was carried out. He then suggests that nothing is offered to help in this process of making judgments about how the work was done.
I travelled the same road in writing about the new Finnegans Wakein the Irish Independenta week ago and again last Thursday in the speech I made at the book's launch in Dublin Castle. In order to do this I sought and found help from Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon by simply going to their home on the Strawberry Beds Road in Lucan and asking them to explain their methodology to me. It was complicated, but it made sense and the sense it made was admirable. It was a unique privilege to be able to do this.
Any responsible journalist or writer about James Joyce, in Ireland and particularly in Dublin, should have done the same, making that simple trip and asking the questions that Mr Killeen put vacuously and at length in his review, but for which he had sought no practical or intelligent answer.
People less fortunate, living in the United States or not acquainted with the editors, or working on a preference for printed testimony, would have to make other arrangements and might be excused for writing the kind of sustained attack on the book which appeared in Saturday’s Irish Times. This, in short summary, simply stated the “complete absence of any rationale or basis for the [editorial] choices made”. It contained no other criticism at all.
Four hours spent with the editors on the morning of February 28th was sufficient time for me to absorb the methodology and was both a legitimate and the best scholarly basis for answering Mr Killeen’s only serious question about the 30 years’ work on this book: How was it done? Very substantial additional material is available elsewhere, in the Joyce Notebooks in the University of Buffalo, in the James Joyce Archive and from other editorial and textual scholars such as Michael Groden and of course Hans Walter Gabler, whose work of the same kind is world-renowned. I have documented a good deal of this in my own books and films on Joyce. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Responding to a query from the floor at the recent Joyce book launch in Dublin Castle, the Minister for Finance was right to be circumspect in acknowledging the likelihood of Nama appearing in Joyce's Finnegans Wake(Home News, March 12th). There are at least two candidates, both from Book 1: in chapter 4, there is the earnest conjuration: "let naaman laugh at Jordan!" In the washerwomen episode, however, the gossip on the (river) banks of the Liffey is all about misdemeanours and misbehaviour: "O, wasn't he the bold priest? And wasn't she the naughty Livvy? Nautic Naama's now her navn". – Yours, etc,