Arnotations: Arno Schmidt Annotates Finnegans Wake Friedhelm Rathjen It is quite a trivial fact that annotation depends on for whom and why it is done. Equally trivial, but sometimes forgotten is the fact that it also depends on by whom and why it is done. In the case of Arno Schmidt’s annotations in the margins of his copy of Finnegans Wake1 (and in particular of page 308) the authorship of the annotations is made quite clear by the fact that Schmidt signed several of his comments, using his short-handed abbreviation “Sch”. When annotating the Wake, Arno Schmidt was definitely no scholar—he was a writer himself, which means that he was Joyce’s competitor. The basic reason for his annotating Joyce’s novel at all, therefore, is that Schmidt felt the need to somehow get to grips with Finnegans Wake, somehow to work his way through the whole of the text. Consequently, his annotations to a certain extent are simply details of micro-understanding, e.g. the deciphering of “eneugh” (FW 308.2) as both “anew” and “genug” (enough) or of “youlldied” (FW 308.17) as “Yul=Tide”. Slightly different is the case where Schmidt finds Shakespeare’s Prospero in “preprosperousness” (FW 308.19) or Annie Besant (an English theosophist and birth control activist) in “beyant” (FW 308.19). It is obvious here that Schmidt was reading (and annotating) the text through a very personal lens: The Tempest was one of Schmidt’s favourites among Shakespeare’s plays, and Annie Besant had been praised by Schmidt in his novella Schwarze Spiegel, long before he read Joyce. All this means that Schmidt, while annotating the Wake, in a way translates this unknown text back into the world he already knows. Not only on a metaphorical level, but also in a literal sense Schmidt was working on a translation of (parts of) the Wake. Some of his annotations are preparatory work for this: e.g., “Pantocracy” (FW 308.L1) is deciphered as “Hosen=Verrückt” in the margin, and this is a first step on the way to Schmidt’s final translation “Hosen=Wildheit”. Surprisingly enough, Schmidt’s translation itself does not suffer from his theory that Finnegans Wake is all about the war of brothers James and Stannie Joyce over Nora Barnacle—but while reading and annotating the book, Schmidt was of course looking out for details supporting this theory. Some of his findings surface in the ‘variants and alternative readings’ column that he added to his translation. In the case of FW 308.5-14, where Joyce’s text counts from one to ten in garbled Gaelic, Schmidt even gives two versions in his translation: an honourable reading and an obscene reading. Even before Schmidt read the Wake for the first time in 1960, he already knew how to understand the text, for he had found his theory concerning the ‘real message’ of Finnegans Wake while translating Stanislaus Joyce’s My Brother’s Keeper in 1959. Consequently, when reading the Wake Schmidt annotated textual details that could be linked to Stannie’s books - Joyce’s drawing at the bottom of the Wake’s page 308, for example, is linked by Schmidt’s annotations to page 225 of Meines Bruders Hüter (Schmidt’s translation) and to page 55 of the Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce. Schmidt, however, did not only annotate links to Stannie ‘s books, he also recorded links to other passages in the Wake. It seems that he could never bear the accidentality of textual details - everything had to be ordered and grounded in some kind of deeper reason. Lots of his annotations to the Wake therefore can be seen as attempts to find the structure(s) hidden under the textual chaos of this book. Schmidt wanted to find the ‘real key’ to Finnegans Wake - for some time, he was planning to write a detailed non-mythological commentary, a ‘diabolical key’ as opposed to Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key which for Schmidt suffered from a tendency to find nothing but mystical mists in the Wake. The hard facts of a hidden superstructure were what he was looking for; in particular he noted numerous repetitions and variations in the text. Every hat and every stone in the text was noted by Schmidt and indicated in the margins (“Hut !“; “Stein !“); moreover, he found cross-references in abundance. To give just a few examples: Schmidt annotates “MAWMAW, LUK, YOUR BEEFTAY’S FIZZIN OVER” (FW 308.R1) as being repeated in “His Bouf Toe is Frozen Over” (FW 421.9), “Boox and Coox” (FW 308.L13) as reappearing twice in the text (see FW 409.35, 517.18) and “the free of my hand to him” (FW 308.N1) as finding an echo a dozen pages later (FW 320.8: “the big bag of my hamd till hem”). It seems that Schmidt had quite a good ear for all this, but obviously the flat pages of a book are not the best possible medium for marking such cross-references. Is not Hypertext the ideal medium for making the network that Schmidt was looking for visible? Where there are clusters of references from one piece of literature to other texts (say, from certain Schmidt texts to much-quoted Wake passages or from Ulysses to different versions of the Odyssey), Hypermedia editions could even include ‘background texts’ as a whole and introduce cross-connections that prepare a network for jumping from one textual level to another while at the same time enabling the user to discover something for him- or herself instead of telling him or her everything right away in an annotation—which either tends to narrow that focus by giving just one short quotation or else tends to widen the reader’s focus unduly by giving all too general explanations. Of course every reader (Arno Schmidt is a good example) overstates what he or she discovers. Surprisingly enough, Schmidt seems to have noted the questionable nature of many such discoveries, for there are lots of question marks in his handwritten annotations to the Wake. (Unfortunately there are no more question marks in Schmidt’s translation script—it seems that as soon as annotations become public, all healthy self-doubts are forgotten.) Shouldn’t it be vital to the usability of hypermedial annotations in particular that these “question marks”, indicating the questionable nature of certain suggestions is somehow communicated to the user? Annotations do not always define something once and forever—there is a certain suggestiveness to many annotations, which may even become free associations provoked by the text. It seems extremely important that annotators differentiate between established facts, tentative suggestions and mere possibilities, and maybe it is equally important that a good editorial apparatus should encourage the reader’s own associations: after all, every reader deserves a chance to be a bit like Arno Schmidt.  ——— 1 Published in full-colour facsimile form as Arno Schmidts Arbeitsexemplar von Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (Zurich: Haffmans, 1984); all my quotations are from p. 308 of this edition or from Schmidt’s translation of the same page (supplement to the Arbeitsexemplar).