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Sat 05 May 2007The foul and fair of 'Finnegans Wake' A far-reaching study of Joyce's early drafts and notesJoyce StudiesAs well as being an important contribution to James Joyce studies, How Joyce Wrote 'Finnegans Wake' is also, more broadly, an important contribution to genetic textual scholarship, the study of the process of a writer's production.Genetic studies are not geared, as textual scholarship normally once was, to the production of a definitive text - a concept that is now under heavy suspicion. Instead, geneticists study the writing process for its own sake, in order to see what can be learned about the work's origins and development from the shifts and deviations, the visions and revisions, that occur in the course of the writing. One side-effect of this has been a curious reversal of value: where Joyce himself and his contemporaries believed that the only valuable manuscript was a "fair copy" - a perfectly written, error-free, totally legible document (Joyce wrote out some such manuscripts in his best hand expressly and solely for sale) - now the greatest monetary and other importance is attached to what the Shakespeareans endearingly call "the foul papers", the writer's first and second thoughts, the earlier and more chaotic the better.