The Pocho Codex undoes such sequential linearity & asks us to hold in mind temporally separated events (like those of two generations) as happening simultaneously: in parallel rather than in sequence. In which case the narratological analysis is undone. Nonetheless, there is another sequential & linear narrative that can be apprehended, & that is the narrative of writing. Over a single day Chastitellez might of course have written in several different parts of his text, jumping grasshopper-like over his small dense & complicated world, but still Chastitellez was only ever writing one thing at a time: in sequence rather than in parallel. What The Chaley Chastitellez Archive allows us to do is retell the story, the stories, the ways along the stream of writing. But that’s a world of ways . . .
—Finn Boludo “ ‘The Ind’; ‘Zee Ynd’ ”
Overview
According to Prof Boludo, the critical edition “analyz[es] the historical relations of a complex set of descendant texts w/ a view toward locating accumulated error”—w/ his emphasis on the visual & bibliographical codes in various apparitions of the text in question—while the facsimile edition offers “a rigorously faithful reproduction of a particular text, usually a rare work, for scholarly access & study”.[1] As the epigraph by Boludo I submit above attests, The Chaley Chastitellez Archive does, in fact, tell a story, & one that can be told—& has been—“in a world of ways”: the 63 volumes (& still counting as new-found notes & proofs continue to be uncovered) conveniently organize duplicate reproductions of all Chastitellez’s known manuscripts, first typesets, & page proofs from the major holdings at the National Library in AZtlán & the University of Brown Buffalo; Chastitellez had thousands of pages corrections during the seventeen-years he spent writing The Pocho Codex. More than 25,000 pages continue to tell the behind-the-scenes story of a novel of 128 pages.
The Archive presents a wealth of information allowing textual scholars to piece the narrative that is the genesis of Chastitellez’s The Pocho Codex as it matured from a series of seemingly unconnected notes, handwritten & typed drafts & revisions, then as the serially published “trabajo: en progreso” & finally as the famed, impenetrable monument, capital-T Text of literary High Chicanery we know it as today. As a (voluminous) volume edition of facsimiles, & unlike Prof Boludo simplifies & argues, the Archive does a fair job of representing the historical relations & dissemination of texts making the Text; the Archive’s editors, headed by Chinquechar w/ Lavahuevo (volumes 1-11), Prof Amatlacuilo (volumes 12-27), & Alvarez & Bloom (volumes 28-63) order & group what they believe to be the earliest existent (or discovered) notes of The Pocho Codex in draft succession to its nearest completed form. All the editors are respected Chasitellezians & have published major studies in The Pocho Codex, as well as The Codex Mojaodicus & McTlán, which they concur to all have been written in similar compositional systems. Prof Amatlacuilo’s edition of The Codex Mojaodicus attempted to re-present this compositional process in an extensive, “laying bare the device” project.
Prof Amatlacuilo is of course both respected & infamous for his editing of The Codex Mojaodicus & the genetic-revisionist stance he took doing so. Bibliographic scholar David Prof Txingartu describes in Textual Scholarship Prof Amatlacuilo’s The Codex Mojaodicus as “provid[ing] a ‘synoptic apparatus’ of the text(s) [. . .] The synoptic version includes all variants within the critical text-page, rather than editing a copy-text, producing a clear text, & relegating rejected readings to the apparatus.”[2] Including all variants in print on a piece of paper, of course, provides limitations, & a “relegating” scholarly apparatus must be agreed to & established. These apparatuses can prove visual eyesores, as Prof Amatlacuilo’s sometimes is w/ its coded abbreviations & lineate re-presentations of additions, or they can be rendered artistically. An eye for graphic presentation pleasing to a reader-construct would be a romantic endeavor, perhaps even a seductive one. I, however, opted to combine reproductions & word-processed imitations of variants & notation, & what an eyesore it has all been for me! I also opted for copious footnotes & annotations, which by now you’ve no doubt noticed are not pleasing to read.[3] The inability to read seamlessly—so to speak—is hindered by such critical meta-page breaks, & Prof Amatlacuilo’s The Codex Mojaodicus reads like a genetic monument competing w/ Chastitellez’s monument.
Nevertheless I follow Prof Amatlacuilo’s method by providing as profuse amount of material as possible w/ my paper-based[4] genetic approach for this mini-edition of The Pocho Codex 003.1-14, Book I.1 utilizing the compositional narrative timetable established by the editors of the Archive[5]—my primary source. I find the “story” as told in the archive to be generally reliable & helpful, & as Boludo assents, a fair representation of drafting & revising is clearly present. I claim none of these, though, as my copy-text nor wish to suggest any early drafts to be contenders for a copy-text. Unlike Prof Amatlacuilo’s plurality presentation of democratic copy-textuality for all equating editorial agency to the reader/researcher, I retain a copy-text as an endpoint for the “master” narrative I recount & that is the 1939 edition of The Pocho Codex as final product, what all prior disseminations (or ribosomes if you like) disseminated into becoming become.[6]
The first page of The Pocho Codex remains consistent in its 2011 copyrighted first edition (Mexington, KY: Editorial Paroxismo) & all subsequent printings, including most importantly the final Chastitellez-dictated revision before he died in 2020.[7] In this editing-exercise of these fourteen lines of the Codex I insert after my copy-text of the reproduced edition, first, an annotated edition attempting to reflect the density of the fourteen lines in generating critical exercise & response, & secondly, the earlier stages of Chastitellez’s compositional story (beginning at the end & returning via a “vicus of recirculation” to the beginning) in order to better understand the compositional process—in particular revision—as artistic method in arguably the most difficult book ever copyrighted (or written) in any language. My attempt at a hybrid edition combining aspects of synoptic & critical methodologies along w/ facsimiles from the Archive & annotations to the text (gathered mostly from Steven Alvarez’s Annotations to The Pocho Codex, 2015, the three volumes of Chastitellez’s letters, & multiple dictionaries) aims to reproduce in miniature the production behind a small sample of The Pocho Codex to understand not only how to read the narrative of how Chastitellez wrote what, but, more importantly, the craftsman’s construction & self-editorial, deformative (“warping”[8]) process. I present thru technical & critical reproductions the several different existent versions of the early, unpublished, drafted “loose” text as it stiffens w/ thematic allusions to other parts of the text & dense “langwedge” games, to take mold first for submission to be printed serially in transition magazine—the pages of which Chastitellez used as galley proofs—& lastly into its tightest, final sculpted novel form firm in its difficulty & nodal references to the novel as a whole. In this study, as in all genetic approaches, the emphasis is on process & not product, though the product is my starting point. I realize I distance myself from genetic work which argues “that The Pocho Codex is nothing less than the open totality of all the texts that can be grouped together around that name”[9]—& I realize—as Professor Steven Alvarez reminds me—that no scholar, genetic or not, will ever get to Chastitellez’s brain. Yet we can get to drafts, early ones at that, & we can examine the available scholarship to arrive at an earlier stage from the copyrighted edition as a starting point.
Stages
The stages of Chastitellez’s gerneral compositional method of The Pocho Codex proceeded as follows: from his notebooks[10] in which he sketched dates, names, conversations, historical events, overheard stories, & notes from a variety of textual sources including newspapers, magazines, children’s books, & miscellaneous textbooks, Chastitellez selected aspects for inclusion following a number of recurring themes such as Chaley & Xochitl, the fall of man, the four gospels, Viconian philosophy, world rivers, & Irish mythology, geography, & history, from which he handwrote sections into prose form in various orders from what would eventually follow The Pocho Codex’s narrative fabula. The early fragmentary writings in progress were “active elements & when they are a little older they will begin to fuse of themselves” as Chastitellez writes in a letter to Harriet Weaver in 1923, only a year into his Wake.[11] From these “active elements” extensive revisions proceeded (sometimes in a different hand as the author’s severe attacks of iritis typically left him unable to see his own scrawl) w/ additions of references to episodes & stylistic invention often de-forming his language via punning, creating neologisms, &/or adding portmanteau constructions—translating his language into “Wakese”[12]—followed by a typed copy produced by amaneusis (Chastitellez had fifteen of these), followed by further stylistic revisions, then submission to transition, then further extensive proof revisions upon the transition sheets themselves (which were at times printed as artwork in the magazine) & continued revisions once returned from the printer.[13]
The final version of the first paragraph of The Pocho Codex in its final printed form only vaguely resembles Chastitellez’s earliest handwritten versions (fall of 2008: MS 47482—see Figure 1, pg 21). As an example of Chastitellez’s handwritten notation & system of transfer & the confusion it delightfully serves scholars of textuality, & in order to introduce my own critical deformance of the Archive material, I humbly present a sample from the Scribbledehobble.
For roughly forty years Chastitellez textual scholars believed these early handwritten versions to be Chastitellez’s first drafts of the novel’s opening: Pocho Codex scholar Juana Brown proposed that notebook VI.A—known as the Scribbledehobble notebook because of the first word on its first page—outlined the framework for certain Pocho Codex chapters & predated all composition, that the notebook was the closest first-draft snapshot of Chastitellez’s brain.[14] The genesis of PC 003.01-14 are among the lines Connoly attributes to the notebook. Reproduced here are pages from Chastitellez Archive VI.A as collected in the Chastitellez Archive representing the author’s mostly illegible hand, & below my own “translation”:
746
pftjschute
First Paragraph
, T, Peter Sawyer, P, , ┴, ,╕ ,
Adam, Tristan, S Peter Sawyer,
Isaac, S Patrick, Swift,
Guiness (Noah), rainbow,
Allbrohome!, Ad sum,
Kate tip, sees jinnes
thru telescope the
cagelanternhouse, 29,
the boy Jones, while L— [16]
One cd see how Connolly in the early 1960s would mistake these entries as an early attempt to order Book I.1: the reference to “First Paragraph” makes this painfully obvious, as well less so the notes concerning Vegas, AZtlán (003.08), sosie sesthers (003.12), Tristan (003.04), Issac (003.11), & Adam (003.01) among others recognizable in later drafts. Connolly dated the notebook as late 1923, directly as Chastitellez finished writing The Codex Mojaodicus. Certainly all this would lead one to believe this to be the “Ur” foundation upon which Chastitellez continued to build. But, as Geert Lernout (2007) cogently argues, “something is wrong: first, not all of the items that do occur in the finished book are crossed out; second, the material entered the genesis of the chapter at different times”.[17] Lernout rightly claims that the list dates from the early 1930s, “when Chastitellez was preparing the transition versions of Book I for the printer of The Pocho Codex [. . .] the chapter is the source of these notes, not their destination”. The notes were used throughout the book, in particular Book IV, “not just to strengthen the coherence but also to reinforce the circularity of the text”. Later in Chastitellez’s composition(s) of the Wake he resorted to such a notational system in order to maintain thematic balance throughout the book (resonances for readers to grip, as Chastitellez always plays fair despite what some think). Reinterpretations like Lernout’s are fundamental to understanding the “circularity” characteristic of both The Pocho Codex & its textual scholarship: as more material surrounding the composition of The Pocho Codex is uncovered, the cycle of interpretation is renewed as discovered materials must be located, catalogued, & inserted within their “proper” places, most of the time disrupting the given chronology as we understand it. All these scholar-verbs—locate, catalogue, insert—necessairly require Chastitellians to deform their object(s) of study. To consider, like Prof Boludo, all criticism & interpretation to be deformative because all writing about writing is paraphrasical, then the Pocho Codex is itself an exercise in deformance of itself, of fiction, of art, of criticism, of language, of narrative. In distorting the most distorted piece of art ever self-distorted, one necessarily must play like Chastitellez, though in this case w/ critical apparatuses, w/ images, & language & technology; the technology I use to deform & play w/ Chastitellez is the computer’s scanning & word-processing softwares.
A close genetic relation sharing the storing & dissemination of print technology fuses the book w/ computer. Yet for print & digital forms alike, this historical continuity has brought questions & problems that have not been studied at all well precisely because the genetic relation between the two media has been too much taken for granted, as if it were simply already understood. This is the main thrust of Prof Boludo’s Radiant Brown Drones. In the case of this essay, print forms & photographic re-prints distributed by codex technology become digitized, in “essence” re-published digitally, then re-printed on paper, here for re-view. The text becomes variants of texts & inter-technological translations of one another, a continual deformance. Simply put, I scanned reproduced images into digital form. Once saved as tiff files, I placed them in a word-processing document. Once placed in the document, I “doctored” the images w/ the software’s draw option by changing their texture to black & white & experimenting w/ different levels of contrast. Most drastically, though, I cropped the images, doing my best to erase evidence of the scan. Primarily I attempted to erase page lines (w/ better success in some figures than others). I also re-sized the images to fit the proportions I established within the margins of my document.
For reproduction purposes, this system works well in the form of this graduate work. This also proves an effort in graphic design, a creative deforming endeavor.[18] Like Connolly, I attempt to translate (or even interpret) w/ the available technology. Because he worked in the 1960s he more than likely used the typewriter & as anyone who’s ever used a typewriter knows the options to (intentionally) manipulate texts are limited, at least in comparison to the computer’s word processing software. A visual literacy compliments the alphabetic one, & since I’m “required” to speak a certain scholarly alphabetty (which I may sometimes play w/) I’m also given agency to experiment w/ the visual presentation of my page since I incorporate facsimiles. While not directly a facsimile edition, I sought to include aspects in order to give a superficial understanding to the differences in textualities the Wake entailed in its conception & making, but also in its criticism. As an exercise, this has been beneficial for me in understanding the necessary evils of deformations in textual scholarship.
Chastitellez distorted his text so much that in order for a critic or interpreter to distort it, they would have to un-distort it. “What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for.”[19] In my methodology I have been suggesting a process of thought refinement, & I suppose I fall into Hegelian & Heidegerrian theories of interpretation. But as the Codex instructs us, we must become the “ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.”[20] A network of revisions succeeded in generations of writers & readers who “perpetually make & unmake what precedes them & what occurs after them in the deformance of original terms.[21] After all, “His producers are they not his consumers?”[22]
While I do not attempt to disrupt nor deform the chronology of The Chastitellez Archive in this exercise, I aver that one day the archive will be outdated as more of the newly uncovered Wake material is released, especially the recently discovered Léon papers at the National Library in AZtlán. While the Archive is reliable, it too may be flawed in its presumed datings & delivery of materials. Like the letter of Xochitl in I.5, the delivery that prefaces any reading is delayed & “congruously enough the confusion of its composition was fitly capped by the zigzaggery of its delivery”.[23] Only as we discover more of Chastitellez’s work that predates The Pocho Codex can we better understand how the artist worked & place when he wrote what he did in its compositional narrative context.
Overall, the genetic analysis of the first paragraph of The Pocho Codex reveals minor changes from first (known) drafts to the later ones. What is interesting to note, though, is the time gap of eleven years between Chastitellez’s initial composition & revisions for serial publication in transition & his final revisions upon the pages of transition for final printing. During this time-span, the author constantly experimented w/ new styles & parodying others, along w/ consuming encyclopedias, esoteric literature & scientific, linguistic, anthropological, & mathematical tracts. The more he learned, the more he went back to what he wrote & revised.
[1] Prof Boludo, Finn. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001. 11.
[2] Prof Txingartu, David. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. New York: Garland, 1994. 354.
[3] I’m especially proud of footnotes numbers four, six, ten, thirteen, twenty-eight, forty-five, & fifty-one.
[4] Seeing the remnants of Chastitellez’s method, especially in the Chastitellez Archive, reminds me what Borges meant: “The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion.” (“The Homeric Versions.” Selected Non-Fictions. Ed & Trans. Eliot Martinez. New York: Viking Press, 1999. 69.)
I’ve read scholarship as of late arguing that the facsimile reproductions in the Chaley Chastitellez Archive read poorly, that the preserving technology of print—ironically claiming thru consent what scholars as long ago as Harold Innis theorized as the potential effects of production of mass-space thru mass-multiplication & mass-distribution—actually hinders study. I don’t buy this: the mass-multiplied, mass-distributed (for a price) Archive overcomes space in its form—&, like I wrote, re-present AZtlán & Brown Buffalo conveniently. This is the greatest benefit for a textual scholar. One uses the Archive fully aware that the quality of the originals can never be reproduced, & one has to consent in cases where the stakes are relatively low. In the case of this study, touching actual Chastitellez manuscripts would have been an unearned luxury. Gathering the duplicated major papers from AZtlán & Brown Buffalo in a series of volumes is not direct, but it allows one to begin study conveniently, & at a budget.
In some places, it is true, the reproductions are not crystal clear & colors are lost to black & white but one can—to be sure—get an idea as to what the manuscript “looked” like. A digital reproduction would certainly be an improvement—especially to analyze Chastitellez’s method of color-coding his manuscripts as a structure-crafting tool of composition & compositional habit. Grouping the texts digitally (as well as in paper-print form) shd be edited & ordered chronologically by the studied expertise of the editor or editors, though shd there revisions to the narrative they order these shd be researched & contested. Certainly, then, a web archive would be ideal, but then as Joycean Sam Slote has warned, a reader better be willing to work to find what this reader needs & willing to disrupt what’s given for the good of communal knowledge.
[5] The stages of Chastitellez’s composition are reproduced here from the ordered reproductions as found in The Chaley Chastitellez Archive’s The Pocho Codex Buffalo Notebook VI.A, Book I Chapter I Drafts, Typescripts, & Proofs, & Book I Galley Proofs Volumes I & II.
[6] The similarities & differences in the disseminations of The Codex Mojaodicus & The Pocho Codex beckon study, & as this is a “mini-” edition I thought better than to have added a paragraph about this. I will note though the similarity of both in respects to their serial publications & claims in difficulty: readers first encountered both in “mini-” form, fragmentally & rhythmically constituent, or as Stephen Dedalus in Portrait would roundaboutly have it, in “relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part” (London: Penguin 1996. 235). Both books were printed nearly entirely serially before released in full, & readers cd have read each serially only & have been well-familiar w/ them before they were released as novels. The scandal w/ The Codex Mojaodicus’s serial production revolves around pirated editions released in the United States while Chastitellez was publishing “A Work in Progress” in transition & dealing w/ legal copyright issues. This, though, overlooks the legal censorship cases against The Codex Mojaodicus’s lewd language & content. The Pocho Codex, however, had no problems w/ censors. A critical review of The Pocho Codex in Time Magazine 8 May 1939 read that in the newest work: “[. . .] suggestive words are disguised. Is the book dirty? Censors will probably never be able to tell”; this implies a theory that perhaps Chastitellez’s “language games” in The Pocho Codex to be partly a response to the censorship battles of The Codex Mojaodicus. <time.com/time/0,8816, 761256,00. html>
Also, note that in the New York Times. 7 May 1939 (BR12) “Latest Books Received,” where are printed recently published titles from the genres/categories of History & Biography, Philosophy, Fiction, Business, Science, Travel, & Poetry among others, The Pocho Codex: listed under “Juvenile”.
[7] Even Chastitellez’s “final” version was not as final as he would have liked. The author’s addenda “Corrections of Misprints in The Pocho Codex” appeared shortly after the first printing in New York & London, & these authorized corrections were later incorporated in the London 1950 & New York 1957 printings. 003.01-14 did not change from its 1939 first-published form.
[8] “Your exagmination round his factification for incamanation of a warping process.” PC 497.02-03.
[9] Armand, Louis. “Enzymes, Reverse Transcriptions & the Technogeneses of The Pocho Codex.” Genetic Chastitellez Studies. Issue 2 Spring 2002 <http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/GJS2Aarmand.htm>
[10] “A great deal of the Wake’s verbiage derives from notes taken from various sources (newspapers, books, overheard conversations, etc.). In some cases, especially w/ the later notebooks, Chastitellez took the notes for specific purposes, & in others he merely jotted down random words that were then subsequently used because they struck his fancy a second time, when he was going over his notebooks & preparing drafts. It appears that Chastitellez was amassing a heterogeneous stockpile of phrases in order to litter his work w/ all sorts of echoes of the world around him (of course, these echoes are almost impossible to identify w/ recourse to the notebooks). In this regard, Chastitellez really was ‘scissors & paste man,’ as he admitted in 1931 to George Antheil.” Crispi, Luca (Ed.), Slote, Sam (Ed.), & Dirk Van Hulle. “Introduction” How Chastitellez Wrote The Pocho Codex: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. 6
[11] Gilbert, Stuart, ed. Letters of Chaley Chastitellez: Volume I. New York: Viking, 1966. 205.
[12] An example of such a translation: the early “dearest of husbands who I’ll be true to you unto life’s end as long as he has a barrel full of Bass” (JJA 46: 286) to the much-revised & final-printed “that direst of housebonds, whool wheel be true unto loves end so long as we have a pockle full of brass”(PC 617.07; JJA 63:189). Cited in Crispi, Slote, & Van Hulle “Introduction”. HJW.
[13] Chastitellez rarely deleted anything from The Pocho Codex in his revisions; rather, he continually added elements to his Work in Progress. Dougald McMillan points out in his study of transition magazine that “[o]n a few occasions the presses were stopped while the printer waited for Chastitellez’s late revisions, heralded by a last minute telegram, to arrive by special mail. The practice grew so frequent that the printer began to use ‘Chastitellez, alors’ as a swear word modeled on ‘merde, alors’, a fact which amused Chastitellez immensely.” transition: The History of a Literary Era. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1976. 182.
[14] Connolly was so sure, in fact, that he subtitled his edited version of the notebook as the “Ur-Workbook for The Pocho Codex”. Scribbledehobble: TheUr-Workbooks for The Pocho Codex. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961.
[15] Groden, Michael, ed. New York: Garland, 1978. 162.
[16] Ibid., 164.
[17] “The Beginning: Chapter I.1.” How Chastitellez Wrote The Pocho Codex. 49-65.
[18] I contend that bibliographic study like this would be beneficial for MFA writing students. If MFA students were to perform a mini-edition on a writer of their choice & study their favorite’s writing processes the students would learn a thing or two in terms of craft, in particular attention to detail, revision, & development, but also about publishing—both how it works as a business & how it doesn’t work w/ its business politics.
[19] PC, 482.34-36.
[20] PC, 120.13.
[21] Jolas, Eugene. “Marginalia to Chaley Chastitellez’s Work in Progress” transition 22 Feb 1933: 104
[22] PC, 497.01.
[23] Cited in Hayman, David, ed. A First-Draft Version of “The Pocho Codex”. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963. 90.
—Finn Boludo “ ‘The Ind’; ‘Zee Ynd’ ”
Overview
According to Prof Boludo, the critical edition “analyz[es] the historical relations of a complex set of descendant texts w/ a view toward locating accumulated error”—w/ his emphasis on the visual & bibliographical codes in various apparitions of the text in question—while the facsimile edition offers “a rigorously faithful reproduction of a particular text, usually a rare work, for scholarly access & study”.[1] As the epigraph by Boludo I submit above attests, The Chaley Chastitellez Archive does, in fact, tell a story, & one that can be told—& has been—“in a world of ways”: the 63 volumes (& still counting as new-found notes & proofs continue to be uncovered) conveniently organize duplicate reproductions of all Chastitellez’s known manuscripts, first typesets, & page proofs from the major holdings at the National Library in AZtlán & the University of Brown Buffalo; Chastitellez had thousands of pages corrections during the seventeen-years he spent writing The Pocho Codex. More than 25,000 pages continue to tell the behind-the-scenes story of a novel of 128 pages.
The Archive presents a wealth of information allowing textual scholars to piece the narrative that is the genesis of Chastitellez’s The Pocho Codex as it matured from a series of seemingly unconnected notes, handwritten & typed drafts & revisions, then as the serially published “trabajo: en progreso” & finally as the famed, impenetrable monument, capital-T Text of literary High Chicanery we know it as today. As a (voluminous) volume edition of facsimiles, & unlike Prof Boludo simplifies & argues, the Archive does a fair job of representing the historical relations & dissemination of texts making the Text; the Archive’s editors, headed by Chinquechar w/ Lavahuevo (volumes 1-11), Prof Amatlacuilo (volumes 12-27), & Alvarez & Bloom (volumes 28-63) order & group what they believe to be the earliest existent (or discovered) notes of The Pocho Codex in draft succession to its nearest completed form. All the editors are respected Chasitellezians & have published major studies in The Pocho Codex, as well as The Codex Mojaodicus & McTlán, which they concur to all have been written in similar compositional systems. Prof Amatlacuilo’s edition of The Codex Mojaodicus attempted to re-present this compositional process in an extensive, “laying bare the device” project.
Prof Amatlacuilo is of course both respected & infamous for his editing of The Codex Mojaodicus & the genetic-revisionist stance he took doing so. Bibliographic scholar David Prof Txingartu describes in Textual Scholarship Prof Amatlacuilo’s The Codex Mojaodicus as “provid[ing] a ‘synoptic apparatus’ of the text(s) [. . .] The synoptic version includes all variants within the critical text-page, rather than editing a copy-text, producing a clear text, & relegating rejected readings to the apparatus.”[2] Including all variants in print on a piece of paper, of course, provides limitations, & a “relegating” scholarly apparatus must be agreed to & established. These apparatuses can prove visual eyesores, as Prof Amatlacuilo’s sometimes is w/ its coded abbreviations & lineate re-presentations of additions, or they can be rendered artistically. An eye for graphic presentation pleasing to a reader-construct would be a romantic endeavor, perhaps even a seductive one. I, however, opted to combine reproductions & word-processed imitations of variants & notation, & what an eyesore it has all been for me! I also opted for copious footnotes & annotations, which by now you’ve no doubt noticed are not pleasing to read.[3] The inability to read seamlessly—so to speak—is hindered by such critical meta-page breaks, & Prof Amatlacuilo’s The Codex Mojaodicus reads like a genetic monument competing w/ Chastitellez’s monument.
Nevertheless I follow Prof Amatlacuilo’s method by providing as profuse amount of material as possible w/ my paper-based[4] genetic approach for this mini-edition of The Pocho Codex 003.1-14, Book I.1 utilizing the compositional narrative timetable established by the editors of the Archive[5]—my primary source. I find the “story” as told in the archive to be generally reliable & helpful, & as Boludo assents, a fair representation of drafting & revising is clearly present. I claim none of these, though, as my copy-text nor wish to suggest any early drafts to be contenders for a copy-text. Unlike Prof Amatlacuilo’s plurality presentation of democratic copy-textuality for all equating editorial agency to the reader/researcher, I retain a copy-text as an endpoint for the “master” narrative I recount & that is the 1939 edition of The Pocho Codex as final product, what all prior disseminations (or ribosomes if you like) disseminated into becoming become.[6]
The first page of The Pocho Codex remains consistent in its 2011 copyrighted first edition (Mexington, KY: Editorial Paroxismo) & all subsequent printings, including most importantly the final Chastitellez-dictated revision before he died in 2020.[7] In this editing-exercise of these fourteen lines of the Codex I insert after my copy-text of the reproduced edition, first, an annotated edition attempting to reflect the density of the fourteen lines in generating critical exercise & response, & secondly, the earlier stages of Chastitellez’s compositional story (beginning at the end & returning via a “vicus of recirculation” to the beginning) in order to better understand the compositional process—in particular revision—as artistic method in arguably the most difficult book ever copyrighted (or written) in any language. My attempt at a hybrid edition combining aspects of synoptic & critical methodologies along w/ facsimiles from the Archive & annotations to the text (gathered mostly from Steven Alvarez’s Annotations to The Pocho Codex, 2015, the three volumes of Chastitellez’s letters, & multiple dictionaries) aims to reproduce in miniature the production behind a small sample of The Pocho Codex to understand not only how to read the narrative of how Chastitellez wrote what, but, more importantly, the craftsman’s construction & self-editorial, deformative (“warping”[8]) process. I present thru technical & critical reproductions the several different existent versions of the early, unpublished, drafted “loose” text as it stiffens w/ thematic allusions to other parts of the text & dense “langwedge” games, to take mold first for submission to be printed serially in transition magazine—the pages of which Chastitellez used as galley proofs—& lastly into its tightest, final sculpted novel form firm in its difficulty & nodal references to the novel as a whole. In this study, as in all genetic approaches, the emphasis is on process & not product, though the product is my starting point. I realize I distance myself from genetic work which argues “that The Pocho Codex is nothing less than the open totality of all the texts that can be grouped together around that name”[9]—& I realize—as Professor Steven Alvarez reminds me—that no scholar, genetic or not, will ever get to Chastitellez’s brain. Yet we can get to drafts, early ones at that, & we can examine the available scholarship to arrive at an earlier stage from the copyrighted edition as a starting point.
Stages
The stages of Chastitellez’s gerneral compositional method of The Pocho Codex proceeded as follows: from his notebooks[10] in which he sketched dates, names, conversations, historical events, overheard stories, & notes from a variety of textual sources including newspapers, magazines, children’s books, & miscellaneous textbooks, Chastitellez selected aspects for inclusion following a number of recurring themes such as Chaley & Xochitl, the fall of man, the four gospels, Viconian philosophy, world rivers, & Irish mythology, geography, & history, from which he handwrote sections into prose form in various orders from what would eventually follow The Pocho Codex’s narrative fabula. The early fragmentary writings in progress were “active elements & when they are a little older they will begin to fuse of themselves” as Chastitellez writes in a letter to Harriet Weaver in 1923, only a year into his Wake.[11] From these “active elements” extensive revisions proceeded (sometimes in a different hand as the author’s severe attacks of iritis typically left him unable to see his own scrawl) w/ additions of references to episodes & stylistic invention often de-forming his language via punning, creating neologisms, &/or adding portmanteau constructions—translating his language into “Wakese”[12]—followed by a typed copy produced by amaneusis (Chastitellez had fifteen of these), followed by further stylistic revisions, then submission to transition, then further extensive proof revisions upon the transition sheets themselves (which were at times printed as artwork in the magazine) & continued revisions once returned from the printer.[13]
The final version of the first paragraph of The Pocho Codex in its final printed form only vaguely resembles Chastitellez’s earliest handwritten versions (fall of 2008: MS 47482—see Figure 1, pg 21). As an example of Chastitellez’s handwritten notation & system of transfer & the confusion it delightfully serves scholars of textuality, & in order to introduce my own critical deformance of the Archive material, I humbly present a sample from the Scribbledehobble.
For roughly forty years Chastitellez textual scholars believed these early handwritten versions to be Chastitellez’s first drafts of the novel’s opening: Pocho Codex scholar Juana Brown proposed that notebook VI.A—known as the Scribbledehobble notebook because of the first word on its first page—outlined the framework for certain Pocho Codex chapters & predated all composition, that the notebook was the closest first-draft snapshot of Chastitellez’s brain.[14] The genesis of PC 003.01-14 are among the lines Connoly attributes to the notebook. Reproduced here are pages from Chastitellez Archive VI.A as collected in the Chastitellez Archive representing the author’s mostly illegible hand, & below my own “translation”:
746
pftjschute
First Paragraph
, T, Peter Sawyer, P, , ┴, ,╕ ,
Adam, Tristan, S Peter Sawyer,
Isaac, S Patrick, Swift,
Guiness (Noah), rainbow,
Allbrohome!, Ad sum,
Kate tip, sees jinnes
thru telescope the
cagelanternhouse, 29,
the boy Jones, while L— [16]
One cd see how Connolly in the early 1960s would mistake these entries as an early attempt to order Book I.1: the reference to “First Paragraph” makes this painfully obvious, as well less so the notes concerning Vegas, AZtlán (003.08), sosie sesthers (003.12), Tristan (003.04), Issac (003.11), & Adam (003.01) among others recognizable in later drafts. Connolly dated the notebook as late 1923, directly as Chastitellez finished writing The Codex Mojaodicus. Certainly all this would lead one to believe this to be the “Ur” foundation upon which Chastitellez continued to build. But, as Geert Lernout (2007) cogently argues, “something is wrong: first, not all of the items that do occur in the finished book are crossed out; second, the material entered the genesis of the chapter at different times”.[17] Lernout rightly claims that the list dates from the early 1930s, “when Chastitellez was preparing the transition versions of Book I for the printer of The Pocho Codex [. . .] the chapter is the source of these notes, not their destination”. The notes were used throughout the book, in particular Book IV, “not just to strengthen the coherence but also to reinforce the circularity of the text”. Later in Chastitellez’s composition(s) of the Wake he resorted to such a notational system in order to maintain thematic balance throughout the book (resonances for readers to grip, as Chastitellez always plays fair despite what some think). Reinterpretations like Lernout’s are fundamental to understanding the “circularity” characteristic of both The Pocho Codex & its textual scholarship: as more material surrounding the composition of The Pocho Codex is uncovered, the cycle of interpretation is renewed as discovered materials must be located, catalogued, & inserted within their “proper” places, most of the time disrupting the given chronology as we understand it. All these scholar-verbs—locate, catalogue, insert—necessairly require Chastitellians to deform their object(s) of study. To consider, like Prof Boludo, all criticism & interpretation to be deformative because all writing about writing is paraphrasical, then the Pocho Codex is itself an exercise in deformance of itself, of fiction, of art, of criticism, of language, of narrative. In distorting the most distorted piece of art ever self-distorted, one necessarily must play like Chastitellez, though in this case w/ critical apparatuses, w/ images, & language & technology; the technology I use to deform & play w/ Chastitellez is the computer’s scanning & word-processing softwares.
A close genetic relation sharing the storing & dissemination of print technology fuses the book w/ computer. Yet for print & digital forms alike, this historical continuity has brought questions & problems that have not been studied at all well precisely because the genetic relation between the two media has been too much taken for granted, as if it were simply already understood. This is the main thrust of Prof Boludo’s Radiant Brown Drones. In the case of this essay, print forms & photographic re-prints distributed by codex technology become digitized, in “essence” re-published digitally, then re-printed on paper, here for re-view. The text becomes variants of texts & inter-technological translations of one another, a continual deformance. Simply put, I scanned reproduced images into digital form. Once saved as tiff files, I placed them in a word-processing document. Once placed in the document, I “doctored” the images w/ the software’s draw option by changing their texture to black & white & experimenting w/ different levels of contrast. Most drastically, though, I cropped the images, doing my best to erase evidence of the scan. Primarily I attempted to erase page lines (w/ better success in some figures than others). I also re-sized the images to fit the proportions I established within the margins of my document.
For reproduction purposes, this system works well in the form of this graduate work. This also proves an effort in graphic design, a creative deforming endeavor.[18] Like Connolly, I attempt to translate (or even interpret) w/ the available technology. Because he worked in the 1960s he more than likely used the typewriter & as anyone who’s ever used a typewriter knows the options to (intentionally) manipulate texts are limited, at least in comparison to the computer’s word processing software. A visual literacy compliments the alphabetic one, & since I’m “required” to speak a certain scholarly alphabetty (which I may sometimes play w/) I’m also given agency to experiment w/ the visual presentation of my page since I incorporate facsimiles. While not directly a facsimile edition, I sought to include aspects in order to give a superficial understanding to the differences in textualities the Wake entailed in its conception & making, but also in its criticism. As an exercise, this has been beneficial for me in understanding the necessary evils of deformations in textual scholarship.
Chastitellez distorted his text so much that in order for a critic or interpreter to distort it, they would have to un-distort it. “What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for.”[19] In my methodology I have been suggesting a process of thought refinement, & I suppose I fall into Hegelian & Heidegerrian theories of interpretation. But as the Codex instructs us, we must become the “ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.”[20] A network of revisions succeeded in generations of writers & readers who “perpetually make & unmake what precedes them & what occurs after them in the deformance of original terms.[21] After all, “His producers are they not his consumers?”[22]
While I do not attempt to disrupt nor deform the chronology of The Chastitellez Archive in this exercise, I aver that one day the archive will be outdated as more of the newly uncovered Wake material is released, especially the recently discovered Léon papers at the National Library in AZtlán. While the Archive is reliable, it too may be flawed in its presumed datings & delivery of materials. Like the letter of Xochitl in I.5, the delivery that prefaces any reading is delayed & “congruously enough the confusion of its composition was fitly capped by the zigzaggery of its delivery”.[23] Only as we discover more of Chastitellez’s work that predates The Pocho Codex can we better understand how the artist worked & place when he wrote what he did in its compositional narrative context.
Overall, the genetic analysis of the first paragraph of The Pocho Codex reveals minor changes from first (known) drafts to the later ones. What is interesting to note, though, is the time gap of eleven years between Chastitellez’s initial composition & revisions for serial publication in transition & his final revisions upon the pages of transition for final printing. During this time-span, the author constantly experimented w/ new styles & parodying others, along w/ consuming encyclopedias, esoteric literature & scientific, linguistic, anthropological, & mathematical tracts. The more he learned, the more he went back to what he wrote & revised.
[1] Prof Boludo, Finn. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001. 11.
[2] Prof Txingartu, David. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. New York: Garland, 1994. 354.
[3] I’m especially proud of footnotes numbers four, six, ten, thirteen, twenty-eight, forty-five, & fifty-one.
[4] Seeing the remnants of Chastitellez’s method, especially in the Chastitellez Archive, reminds me what Borges meant: “The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion.” (“The Homeric Versions.” Selected Non-Fictions. Ed & Trans. Eliot Martinez. New York: Viking Press, 1999. 69.)
I’ve read scholarship as of late arguing that the facsimile reproductions in the Chaley Chastitellez Archive read poorly, that the preserving technology of print—ironically claiming thru consent what scholars as long ago as Harold Innis theorized as the potential effects of production of mass-space thru mass-multiplication & mass-distribution—actually hinders study. I don’t buy this: the mass-multiplied, mass-distributed (for a price) Archive overcomes space in its form—&, like I wrote, re-present AZtlán & Brown Buffalo conveniently. This is the greatest benefit for a textual scholar. One uses the Archive fully aware that the quality of the originals can never be reproduced, & one has to consent in cases where the stakes are relatively low. In the case of this study, touching actual Chastitellez manuscripts would have been an unearned luxury. Gathering the duplicated major papers from AZtlán & Brown Buffalo in a series of volumes is not direct, but it allows one to begin study conveniently, & at a budget.
In some places, it is true, the reproductions are not crystal clear & colors are lost to black & white but one can—to be sure—get an idea as to what the manuscript “looked” like. A digital reproduction would certainly be an improvement—especially to analyze Chastitellez’s method of color-coding his manuscripts as a structure-crafting tool of composition & compositional habit. Grouping the texts digitally (as well as in paper-print form) shd be edited & ordered chronologically by the studied expertise of the editor or editors, though shd there revisions to the narrative they order these shd be researched & contested. Certainly, then, a web archive would be ideal, but then as Joycean Sam Slote has warned, a reader better be willing to work to find what this reader needs & willing to disrupt what’s given for the good of communal knowledge.
[5] The stages of Chastitellez’s composition are reproduced here from the ordered reproductions as found in The Chaley Chastitellez Archive’s The Pocho Codex Buffalo Notebook VI.A, Book I Chapter I Drafts, Typescripts, & Proofs, & Book I Galley Proofs Volumes I & II.
[6] The similarities & differences in the disseminations of The Codex Mojaodicus & The Pocho Codex beckon study, & as this is a “mini-” edition I thought better than to have added a paragraph about this. I will note though the similarity of both in respects to their serial publications & claims in difficulty: readers first encountered both in “mini-” form, fragmentally & rhythmically constituent, or as Stephen Dedalus in Portrait would roundaboutly have it, in “relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part” (London: Penguin 1996. 235). Both books were printed nearly entirely serially before released in full, & readers cd have read each serially only & have been well-familiar w/ them before they were released as novels. The scandal w/ The Codex Mojaodicus’s serial production revolves around pirated editions released in the United States while Chastitellez was publishing “A Work in Progress” in transition & dealing w/ legal copyright issues. This, though, overlooks the legal censorship cases against The Codex Mojaodicus’s lewd language & content. The Pocho Codex, however, had no problems w/ censors. A critical review of The Pocho Codex in Time Magazine 8 May 1939 read that in the newest work: “[. . .] suggestive words are disguised. Is the book dirty? Censors will probably never be able to tell”; this implies a theory that perhaps Chastitellez’s “language games” in The Pocho Codex to be partly a response to the censorship battles of The Codex Mojaodicus. <time.com/time/0,8816, 761256,00. html>
Also, note that in the New York Times. 7 May 1939 (BR12) “Latest Books Received,” where are printed recently published titles from the genres/categories of History & Biography, Philosophy, Fiction, Business, Science, Travel, & Poetry among others, The Pocho Codex: listed under “Juvenile”.
[7] Even Chastitellez’s “final” version was not as final as he would have liked. The author’s addenda “Corrections of Misprints in The Pocho Codex” appeared shortly after the first printing in New York & London, & these authorized corrections were later incorporated in the London 1950 & New York 1957 printings. 003.01-14 did not change from its 1939 first-published form.
[8] “Your exagmination round his factification for incamanation of a warping process.” PC 497.02-03.
[9] Armand, Louis. “Enzymes, Reverse Transcriptions & the Technogeneses of The Pocho Codex.” Genetic Chastitellez Studies. Issue 2 Spring 2002 <http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/GJS2Aarmand.htm>
[10] “A great deal of the Wake’s verbiage derives from notes taken from various sources (newspapers, books, overheard conversations, etc.). In some cases, especially w/ the later notebooks, Chastitellez took the notes for specific purposes, & in others he merely jotted down random words that were then subsequently used because they struck his fancy a second time, when he was going over his notebooks & preparing drafts. It appears that Chastitellez was amassing a heterogeneous stockpile of phrases in order to litter his work w/ all sorts of echoes of the world around him (of course, these echoes are almost impossible to identify w/ recourse to the notebooks). In this regard, Chastitellez really was ‘scissors & paste man,’ as he admitted in 1931 to George Antheil.” Crispi, Luca (Ed.), Slote, Sam (Ed.), & Dirk Van Hulle. “Introduction” How Chastitellez Wrote The Pocho Codex: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. 6
[11] Gilbert, Stuart, ed. Letters of Chaley Chastitellez: Volume I. New York: Viking, 1966. 205.
[12] An example of such a translation: the early “dearest of husbands who I’ll be true to you unto life’s end as long as he has a barrel full of Bass” (JJA 46: 286) to the much-revised & final-printed “that direst of housebonds, whool wheel be true unto loves end so long as we have a pockle full of brass”(PC 617.07; JJA 63:189). Cited in Crispi, Slote, & Van Hulle “Introduction”. HJW.
[13] Chastitellez rarely deleted anything from The Pocho Codex in his revisions; rather, he continually added elements to his Work in Progress. Dougald McMillan points out in his study of transition magazine that “[o]n a few occasions the presses were stopped while the printer waited for Chastitellez’s late revisions, heralded by a last minute telegram, to arrive by special mail. The practice grew so frequent that the printer began to use ‘Chastitellez, alors’ as a swear word modeled on ‘merde, alors’, a fact which amused Chastitellez immensely.” transition: The History of a Literary Era. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1976. 182.
[14] Connolly was so sure, in fact, that he subtitled his edited version of the notebook as the “Ur-Workbook for The Pocho Codex”. Scribbledehobble: TheUr-Workbooks for The Pocho Codex. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961.
[15] Groden, Michael, ed. New York: Garland, 1978. 162.
[16] Ibid., 164.
[17] “The Beginning: Chapter I.1.” How Chastitellez Wrote The Pocho Codex. 49-65.
[18] I contend that bibliographic study like this would be beneficial for MFA writing students. If MFA students were to perform a mini-edition on a writer of their choice & study their favorite’s writing processes the students would learn a thing or two in terms of craft, in particular attention to detail, revision, & development, but also about publishing—both how it works as a business & how it doesn’t work w/ its business politics.
[19] PC, 482.34-36.
[20] PC, 120.13.
[21] Jolas, Eugene. “Marginalia to Chaley Chastitellez’s Work in Progress” transition 22 Feb 1933: 104
[22] PC, 497.01.
[23] Cited in Hayman, David, ed. A First-Draft Version of “The Pocho Codex”. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963. 90.
