[See slide #1] Joyce used sources to make notes. He composed first drafts of sections of Finnegans Wake using the notes and sometimes making direct use of material from the sources (as is true at all stages). He made early revisions of the first drafts, which work up to a fair copy ( "the kernel draft") for a typist. Occasionally, serial publication comes from this stage.

Then first elaborations work up to publication in transition, through heavy revision of the typescript and its fair copy and further typescripts and then proofs.

The second elaborations have two main stages. First Joyce adds overlay to a set of printed pages of transition, which is typed and indexed to a second set of pages. These relatively legible pages are used for the galley proofs of the Wake. Joyce then overlays great quantities of new material on two sets of galleys, each set of overlay typed up. A last, quite clean copy of the galleys with accompanying typescript led to page proofs which are missing, and which had a very few new additions. In 1940 Joyce made a set of corrections.

Obviously we need to study the sources and their relations to the notes, the ways the notes are incorporated into drafts and revisions at all levels, and the drafts and revisions themselves. My work focuses on this last, seeking to track Joyce's drafting and changing of his text.

Why add this "vertical" dimension to our study of what is "horizontally" plenty complicated? Because it is interesting and informative to observe how the writing process took what was in place at every stage and amplified, changed and enriched it. I will give a set of examples from the first revisions, the first elaborations, and the second elaborations.

Much of the delight and instruction is in observing how Joyce scruffs up the nap of his text. For instance [see slide #2], here Joyce works up a little joke on his chronicling narrator.  In four places in the first draft Joyce first writes "Humphrey", "he," "Humphrey" and "Humphrey" but adds "Harold or" in the first spot. On the second draft (level 1) he replaces "he" with that same "Harold or Humphrey" but strikes that out and changes it to "Humphrey or Harold": also at level 1, on the next page he copies "Humphrey bluntly" as "blunt Harompheyld" (changed at level 2 to "Haromphreyld") and on the next page he changes the final "Humphrey" to "Haromphrey". The narrator has tried it one way, then the other, but gives up and combines the possible names several different ways!—"Harold or Humphrey", "Humphrey or Harold", "Haromphreyld", "Haromphrey"! This is a minor instance of the major theme of these chapters' early drafts, what I call the "decay of information" theme: neither names nor events can remain stable as you return to them.

Another set of tinkerings with names does more than characterize a narrator.  In chapter 2 "Treacle Tom" and "Frisky Shorty" had overheard the cad encounter story which passed from the cad's wife to her spiritual director to a "layteacher of natural science" at the racetrack. [see slide 3] Tom repeats it to the trio "Peter Cloran", "O'Donnell" and "Hosty"; on the next page we hear that those same three sleep in the same bed; and chapter 3 begins by considering these still so-named Rann-makers' fates: "Hosty", "O'Donnell", "Peter Cloran", "Treacle Tom". But Joyce changes these characters' names, after their first appearance. [see slide 4]. In chapter 3 at level 1 Peter Cloran becomes Paul Horan, O'Donnell becomes O'Mara, and Treacle Tom becomes Sordid Sam. Since the original names remain in chapter 2, in effect the characters have twinned. The characters are who they originally were (for we can see from the story that we are hearing about the same people under different names) and at the same time they are who they have become (for the names are different).

It seems most likely that Joyce intended us to feel the kinship among the sets of names through level 4, since the names are enough like their originals. Peter Cloran has spawned in chapter 2 first Peter Doran and then Roche Moran, and in chapter 3 Paul Horan. O'Donnell has spawned O'Mara in one place at level 1, another at level 2 and a third at level 3, and O'Mara then becomes Lisa O'Dara and O'Hara, later A'Hara. But the final changes, on level 9, all seem designed to make the connections less obvious. The rhyme of Roche Moran with the Peter Cloran and Paul Horan who are still in the text is lost when he becomes Roche Mongan. And Lisa O'Deavis drops the "...ara" rhyme too. O'Donnell's name, note, is totally lost, disappearing even from the first location in chapter 2, to reappear however in chapter 4 as the name of the HCE character Pat O'Donnell in the encounter on the green. So again, HCE is both himself and his attacker, twinned just as his adversaries twin.

Joyce often inserts larger units which don't get the usual cascading elaboration but retain their quality of set-pieces throughout—for instance, all the poems, including the Rann, and such prose poems as the "geeser who calls on his skirt" (65.05-33). Sometimes the insertion of these miniatures affects the structure. For instance,  the level 2 version of what becomes FW: 51.03-55.02, is:

“Hence it is no smooth matter to identify the individual in baggy pants [who]. . . aptly sketched for our soontobe fathers and mothers the scene and, among lesser items of passing interest, the monolith rising stark from the twilit pinebarren, the angelus hour with ditchers bent upon their farm implements, the soft bell of the fallow doe advertising her milky approach as the hour was late and how brightly the great tribune outed his smokewallet and he gives him a topping swank cheroot and he says he was to just bluggy well suck that brown boyo and spend a whole half hour in Havana. And says he : As sure as eggs is known to be what they commercially are in high British quarters my business credit will immediately stand open as straight as that neighbouring monument’s fabrication before the hygienic globe . . . .”

"the soft bell of the fallow deers (doerehmoose genuane!) advertising their milky approach as the midnight was striking the hour (letate!) How he met his honour on Lorenzo Tooley street and he wished the master the bannocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick, year loudship, — a strange wish for you, my friend though your floruerunt heaved it oddtimes, and it would poleaxe your sonsonsgrandnephew utterly —and how brightly the great tribune outed the smokewallet from his frock and he tips him a topping swank cheroot, none of yere swellish soide, quoit the reverse, and he says he was to just bluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana. And says he Meggeg, M' dear fellow, ..."

(and HCE goes on with his self-excuses).

We have here the cad (heavily Irished) giving another version of his story, which the "strange wish for you" remark, set off by dashes, rather clearly undercuts as the narrator reflects on how embarrassed modern Irishmen would be at the obsequiousness.

But on the preceding verso of the typescript [see slide 7] Joyce drafts one of his most spectacular miniatures, the "And any dog's life you may hear them" passage (FW: 54.07-19) which is a sort of super-epiphany, in at least the 15 languages Joyce lists at the bottom of the page, which renders [see slide 8, its genetics and plaintext] just what kind of thing this cad encounter is, in its tissue of political and sexual innuendoes, and echoes and fragments from modern life. (This miniature too receives almost no revision after its copy to level 4, in which basically only a few phrases are dropped.) It makes perfect sense either following the added level 3 lead-in describing the meeting or following the description of what happens in the encounter itself, where it might come either after "Havana" or after the "smile" which replaces "globe" at the end of HCE's excuses. If placed after the dash after "utterly" ⁽¹⁾ [see slide #10] , the narrator reports the obsequious greeting which sets the terms of the encounter, gives his analogy to such encounters with the miniature, and goes on to tell how the encounter goes, with the offer of the "whole half hour in Havana" which offer HCE will supplement with his self-excuses. And that Joyce may have intended this is suggested by the facts that as we will see he copies the miniature into that spot at level 4, and that indeed at level 3 [see slide #11] there is an "R" before the miniature draft which matches an "R" which would have been right next to that dash after "utterly" when the margin of the typescript was empty of the various stages of the later overlays, "own old" and  "though your floruerunt heaved it oddtimes."

But several level 3 intentions are not carried out on level 4. In the first place, that after-dash "R" has another function, to index that very "floruerunt" overlay to be placed at another "R" after "a strange wish for you, my friend". Not very damagingly, Joyce misses this relation between "R"s entirely and as you can see [see slide 12] copies the "floruerunt" part (with a nice little addition) after "utterly", before the miniature—even if he hadn't intended that "R" for the miniature in the first place, this missing its function for the "floruerunt" overlay might well have released it for the miniature as he copied : "oh, I must have meant the 'dog's life' passage for this spot, there's its index".

But before missing that he had missed something else on level 3, the insertion mark "F" [see slide 5 again]which followed the inserted "(letate!)" and which led to the "F" at the top of the page and the overture to the encounter. Not noticing that, he has copied straight on from "(letate!)" exactly as if the mark weren't there, with "and how brightly....", until he comes to "Havana", and there he copies the "How he met Master" passage which should have been the introduction [see slide 12 again]. Thus we do not have (1) the sequence the indexes seem to support:'how they met: reflection on it: what they did'; or (2) the sequence which would make best sense of all: 'how they met: what they did: reflection on it'. Instead, we wind up with the sequence (3) 'what they did: how they met: reflection on it', with, moreover, the two parts of 'what they did' split up: the offer of the cheroot precedes the meeting, and then after the reflection HCE's defense lamely brings up the rear. And the clarity of the underlying story is further compromised later when the "Chee chee cheers for Upkingbilly" paragraph (FW: 53.36-54.06) is added at level 8 before the miniature, further distancing that from what it reflects on and putting HCE's defensive remarks almost unrememberably far from what they respond to.

My point is not that we ought to cluck our tongues at the fact that something went wrong which we ought to rethink into its original form. This is only a sort of limiting case of what is generally true of the Wake's development, that Joyce's additions and elaborations, as they push the pieces apart which surround them, have the effect of focussing us on the parts. I hazard a generalization: Joyce drafts for the context and revises for the content. Any unit, no matter how tiny or how large, is first-drafted for good grammatical and logical fit with what surrounds it, but in the process of expansion the tight composition loosens up, and the parts (often right down to the sentence or even to the complex word) stand more and more on their own. And this is one of the reasons we think of the book as "decentered" from conventional narrative form.

To look at a few examples of textural enrichment chosen from the second elaborations, in which I give the full genetics of all these passages so you can notice the very similar changes within them at earlier levels:

The priest "was undereared, poul soul", to match that he was "overheard" in the line above and also for the L/R motif.

38.27-8: was overheard ^[4 , ^{4] [3 A>}in his secondary personality as a Nolan ^{[5 TD} <,> ^{5] [4} and ^{4] 3] [10 A>}undereared, poul soul,^{<A 10] A>}by accident

Next, "fishabed story" becomes "fishabed ghoatstory", for a little joke to match that the Enkelchums are "in their Bearskin ghoats" (which had been "ghosts" until level 5).

51.13-15: ^A>that ^[3 bedtime^{<A A>}fishabed^{<A 3] [9} story ^A>ghoatstory^{<A 9] [4} <.> ^{4] [3} {^A>Lord} ^[4 <^B>God^<B> ^{4] [8+ A>}of the haardly creditable edventyres^{<A 8+]} of ^{[5 A>}the Haberdasher and ^{[6 TD} , ^6] the two Curchies and the three Enkelchums in their ^[7 bearskin^{<A A>}Bearskin^{<A 7] 5] [5} ghosts ^A>ghoats^{<A 5]} . . .^{<A 3]}

Surely the always-puzzling goats are larded in here too, since the matching pigs appear when level 9 adds that the cad "had made" the " pats' and pigs' older inselt" (i.e. England) his home:

51.30: had made ^{[9 A>}, pats' and pigs' older inselt,^{<A 9]}

And this is tightened further in the next pass through the galleys when a bit up the page the phrase "(in Loo of Pat)" is added, where as well as "Pat" there again is the association of pigs with the toilet or Loo:

51.23-5: the request ^{[9 A>}for a fully armed explanation^{<A 9]} was put ^{[10 A>}(in Loo of Pat)^{<A 10]} to the ^[4 <party> porty ^4] (a native of ^[3 Ireland ^A>the sisterisle^<A . . . ^3]

as in, on a later page, level 3's "in loo of a gate" and "pigdirt hanging from the jags":

69.22-3: a bedstead in ^[3 lieu ^A>loo^{<A 3] [4} <of a gate> thereof ^4] to keep out donkeys ^{[3 A>}(the pigdirt hanging from the ^{[5 TYPO} <jags> jugs ^{TYPO] A>}jags^{<A 5]} to this hour makes that clear)^{<A 3]}

Next, "holidays" becomes "holedigs" with a nice entombment echo:

69.32-3: there was a ^[3 commercial ^A>northroomer^{<A 3] [8+T TD} , ^{8+T] [8 A>}Herr Betreffender,^{<A 8] [8+T A>}out for his zimmer ^[9 holidays ^A>holedigs^{<A 9]} ,^{<A 8+T]}

Next, in a clearly thematic dual change "Mr." becomes "Messrs or Missrs" for Earwicker, and after "his" is added "feminisible" before "name of multitude":

73.04-5: exhorting ^[2 him ^A>Earwicker or ^[4 , ^{4] [3 A>}in slightly modified phraseology,^{<A 3] [5 TD} <Mr> ^[9 Mr. ^A>Messrs or Missrs^{<A 9] 5]} Earwicker^{<A 2] [3 [4} <^A>, ^B>his^<B name of multitude,^<A> ^{4] 3] [5 A>}, Seir, his ^{[9 A>}feminisible^{<A 9]} name of multitude,^{<A 5]} to

Finally, to the fact that the weapon which falls is "uncertain" level 9 adds "but so evermore rhunanisant [with a couple of later changes] of a toboggan poop", a splendid visual image of a tobacco pipe and of a toboggan as a ship with its poop making it look curved, which reminds us that the cad's pipe, like HCE's repeater watch/revolver, is a form of the irreducible fender, and also (via "poop") that that fender is a form of the turd which HCE/the Russian General produces in the cad encounter and all its avatars:

84.05-6: hurlbat^{<A [1 [3} <,> ^{3] [2 A>}or other uncertain article ^[4 {arti} ^{4] B>}weapon^<B of lignum vitae ^[4 <,^<A> ^{4] 2] [9 A>}, but so evermore ^{[9T TD} <rhunanisant> ^[12* rhunamsant ^A>rhumanasant^{<A 12*] 9T]} of a toboggan poop,^{<A 9]} . . . ^1]

But as well as these (relatively) simple ones, a host of items in the second elaborations weave together meanings and connotations from different languistic and cultural sources so complexly as to make them seem qualitatively different from earlier levels-they alter what we might call the texture of the reader's involvement. Take the Polish and Basque additions on FW: 101-2 to the super-long sentence about the lounge lizards and ALP from which (keeping the grammar) I carve a bunch of clauses and show you the level 10 (second Wake galley) additions [see slide 16]] along with a table [see slide17] quoting the words, their notebook source, and their meanings. The lounge lizards jeered ", and pratschkats at their platschpails too and holenpolendom beside, Szpaszpas Szpissmas, the zhanyzhonies ". This is comprehensible enough in one sense, if you have the Polish: laundresses splashing away at their pails, zany wives, and indeed all Poland, maybe even in periodicals, jeered like the lounge lizards of the pumproom, inspiring ALP so that she then "stood forth . . . to crush the slander's head".

But after those first phrases we turn away from the jeerers to ALP herself, and the Basque begins to be sprinkled in, starting with "when izarres were twinklins". Again the pieces make sense, if you have the Basque (everybody has a little Basque, right?): "ur" and "uria", water and rain, exclaim about the ALP "sea", and, following "stood forth" (which is the verb of the long sentence), ",burnzburn the gorggory old danworld, in gogor's name, for gagar's sake". This suggests that ALP "stood forth, burying the hard old burning 'danworld' (world of the Danes, of males), in the name of and for the sake of that deaf and obdurate HCE": i.e., that she quenches his iron in her sea, that she redeems him and his kind. ⁽²⁾

The soft sea vs. hard metal terms , ALP vs. HCE, are both in Basque, and the Polish is therefore paired against the Basque not as her vs. him, but as the jeerers vs. them both. Moreover, "Christmas" is embedded in both passages. "Szpaszpas Szpissmas" is within the Polish, used here as an exclamation. And a few lines after the first Basque cluster, within the same sentence, Joyce adds that ALP is "a vaunt her straddle from Equerry Egon" (meaning Christmas day), with things "pelotting" in her bag "for Handiman the Chomp, Esquoro, biskbask". It's not that we're supposed to be stymied—Joyce tells us clear as day that it's Basque that's here—and it makes a wonderful climax, HCE anagram and all, for the chapter, but just why it should be Basque at all is not clear. (My hunch is that Polish vs. Basque is North vs. South, like languedoc vs. languedoil, banks of the Liffy, overworld and underworld etc. etc.) But this at least is clear: a few pages earlier, Festy King has ended his trial with an outburst through his interpreter within which level 10 adds "mhuith peisth mhuise as fearra bheura muirre hriosmas", which is "with best wishes for a very merry christmas" spelled as if it were Irish (FW: 91.04-5). That Festy has "become" HCE is reinforced here in these associations which put him, the jeerers and HCE into a set with a lightly suggested relation to ALP's givingness, her Christmas basket—we would be hard put to it to find a more Wagnerian use of motif.

For this sort of analysis we don't strictly speaking need genetics in the same way we need it for comparing where the text winds up with where it starts. But I think it does help us focus on the sets of interconnections which may have been in Joyce's mind to note the times when, as here, they get put into place pretty much all at once. If relatable connotations come in at roughly the same revision period, rather than at widely separated times in the long process, it at least gives a little more confidence to attempts to see them in each other's lights.

1. Note on the draft page that there is no opening parenthesis, though the last letter of "boing" looks like one and may have misled Joyce as he finished the miniature.

2. See also M.J.C. Hodgart, "Word-Hoard (Contd.)," AWN (Vol. I No. 2 April1964), pp. 9-10 (the first of the "Word-Hoard" articles is the very first AWN article), the result of early work on VI.B.46. Studying Basque dictionaries and noting that he cannot find Joyce's source, he suggests Basque urraide 'copper' as relevant to the "ur, uri, uria" sequence, listing also urre 'gold" for Joyce's "uria" and gives for Joyce's "burnzburn" "burni iron (4 metal-ages)" and zillar 'silver' as relevant to FW 102.03 "adazillahs" though there is no "zillar" notebook entry (and though McHugh citations to the wives of Lamech and of Cain and Abel would seem primary). Hodgart says that gogor alone means "hard" and behari gogor means "hard of hearing, deaf".