Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury
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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 101,514 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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Site Last Updated: Dec 4 2025