MISQUOTING JOYCE

Familiarity with this popular operetta would not be unusual for Bloom, though we are more accustomed to his appreciation of Italian opera. [...]Bloom generally seems to think of men in uniform as music hall characters: he is titillated by a tune of the Tilley Sisters in "Calypso" - "O please, Mr Policeman, I'm lost in the wood" (Í/4.179) - and, again thinking of The Pirates of Penzance, he casts his father-in-law as a modern Major General [U 15.779]). In their 1989 boar slaughter entitled They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions, Paul F. Boiler, Jr., and John George report that Wellington's phrase "Up, boys, and at them" (sometimes given as "Up, guards, and at them") was denied by the Iron Duke himself, who claimed to have instead barked the far more prosaic "Stand up, Guards!" before the ultimate charge at Napoleon.19 By contrast, Wikipedia's vast "Wikiquote" index acknowledges "Up Guards and at them again" ("often misquoted as 'Up guards and at 'em'") as an "attributed" rather than a "sourced" quotation, but not as a "misattribution".20 Wikipedia, recently characterized by Jaron Lanier as a distressing form of online collectivism, tries to be a "meta" reference, all too often at the expense of accuracy and, as Lanier despairs, context.21 Finnegans Wake is a similar enterprise that engenders similar anxieties. [...]it might be more "meta" than Wikipedia in that the Wake cheerfully admits all doubtful, even erroneous attributions into its folds. Finnegans Wake goes further: [...]in the compressed gyre of the Wake, where opposites meet, to quote someone else is also to quote oneself, and unlike the reader of Shakespeare, who reverts to Shakespeare, we readers of Joyce find that Joyce - ahead of us, as usual - has already been us, and is now someone else again.