Ulysses/Motifs/Newspapers

Majority of notes are from James Joyce: The Lost Notebook. This covers the first of a series of notebooks that Joyce used to keep notes for both Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.

(Work utilized the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses (1984), ed. Gabler.)

Ulysses in Progress

Much critical attention has been brought to focus on the manifest change which affected the nature of Ulysses quite late in the course of its development; a change whereby Joyce phased out the so-called 'initial style' (whose best-known feature is the famous interior monologue of both Stephen and Bloom) and introduced in its stead the exploitation of 'style' itself as an integral part of the narrative strategy: in other words, when the information was carried not in the content alone, but also in the form.

The Two Transitions

Groden (1977) introduced the idea of a transitional middle period (by chance, coinciding with the "middle period" of the book, Ulysses/Wandering Rocks through Ulysses/Oxen of the Sun. These intermediate the extremes of the "initial" and "final" styles.

In this sense, Ulysses becomes a mosaic of the changes it underwent from 1914 to 1922.

Groden's idea is to divide Ulysses into three phases:

• First: 1914 to end of 1918
• Seocnd: 1919 to mid -1920
• Third: mid-1920 to 1922

There is another, equally turning point in the genesis of Ulysses - one that is readily discernible in the published text - namely, at some point while writing Ulysses, Joyce was no longer writing Ulysses to be a sequel to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

This was when Joyce introduced a more grounded, more down-to-earth, less intellectual and abstract character - Leopold Bloom. The change was less a stylistic change, and more a worldview change - from intense, serious, anxious, to resigned, comic, affectionate.

During the 7 years he was composing Ulysses (1914 to 1922), this change coincided with Joyce being in Zürich in 1917.

Important Events in the History of Ulysses

1906:

• Joyce, living in Rome, entertains notion of writing a short story to be called "Ulysses"
• The story is based on an incident when a putative Dublin Jew (Alfred Hunter) had picked him up inebriated out of a gutter somewhere in the metropolis
• in orthodox Samaritan fashion, he had taken Joyce home with him and generally bucked him up with a restorative cup of cocoa or something

1914-1915:

• Joyce began writing Ulysses as a "sequel" to Portrait
• Tenuous connection to the Odyssey - Stephen acts out an intellectual Telemachus, his mother plays a not very convincing Penelope, Mulligan and Haines the baleful suitors
• Martello Tower becomes Ithaca
• Joyce was experimenting with a lukewarm correspondence with the Homeric prototype, different from the final shape (which was dominated by it)
• Joyce had not decided what to do with the Hunter character, what to make of him
• Vague idea to have him rescue Stephen from predations of usurpers, restore him as prince
• This concept of Ulysses as Portrait sequel was consistent with how Joyce described the work in letters from 1915

October 1916:

• Joyce had written versions of Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus, Hamlet (Scylla and Charybdis), Eumaeus (brief sketch) - the Stephen-oriented episodes
• "As he wrote principally out of his own character and experience, he had, in short, to invent himself anew."
• Around this time he had what his physician described as a nervous breakdown
• He embarked on a course of research - starting with the Greek language
• compiling loose sheets, small notebooks, with lists of words/short sentences
• transcribed bits and pieces from newspaper reports, simple business letters, examined aspects of grammar,
• (was this how he taught English to students?)
• latest entry is dated April 1917
• the Greek is modern, but clear that intent was to facilitate study of the Odyssey
• transliterate Homeric quotations, ideas about mistranslations

April 1917

• Anonymous benefactor, paying 50 pounds quarterly, (ended up being Harriet Waver)
• impeccable timing - cash in his pocket, assurance of more, freedom transformed him
• "Much of what we have come to know and love about Ulysses, we contend, has its source in that happy event."
• Joyce's change in circumstances, coupled with realization through his studies that Homeric myths could lbe viewed as concerning real men in real times
• Joyce prepared to reconstruct the real Dublin on a real day - Thursday, 16 June 1904
• For this purpose, he began to assemble specific material about that day and about the everyday language spoken on the street at that time
• In contrast to Stephen, who lives in melancholy limbo, Joyce wanted to create a world for Leopold Bloom to live in

Fragments for Proteus

It is of interest to record here thatJoyce went to Marsh's Library in Dublin on the 22nd and 23rd October, 1902,shortly before departing for the libraries and the cheaper eating-places of Paris, and that he signed his name in the visitor's book (McCarthy, 1980). The particular scholastic tome which he fingerpondered is still there today; it is part of the Bouhéreau Collection and boasts the sesquipedalian title of Vaticinia, sine Prophetiae Abbatis Joachimi & Anselmi Episcopi Marsicani, cum adnotationibus Paschalini Regiselmi, Latine et Italice, printed in Venice in 1589.

Joyce must have had his copy of the June 17, 1904 Irish Independent to hand by, at the latest, not June, but rather February 1919, at which time he was completing (by dictation to Frank Budgen) the (Rosenbach) faircopy of "Wandering Rocks."

Scholarly and sensitive readers of that estimable episode will be pleased to learn that the description there of the onset of the now imfamous bicycle race is a rendering, hardly altered (apart from Mr. Budgen's idiosyncratic orthography), of the account of the conclusion of the same as it appeared in the said newspaper and no other. The Irish Times omitted J. B. Jones; the Evening Telegraph omitted W. C. Huggard but included a J. J. Comyn, and so on...

...It may be a coincidence but, on the (microfilmed) copy in the National Library of Ireland that we consulted, there is a mark (bitched type?) just above the "n" of Jones which makes it appear to the casual or, perhaps, weak eye as "Joffes", which, spoken aloud, may have occasioned Mr. Budgen's "Joffs", later altered by Joyce to "Jeffs".

- Danis Rose, John O'Hanlon / July 4, 1989