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:

• Versions of Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus, Hamlet (Scylla and Charybdis), Eumaeus (brief sketch) - the Stephen-oriented episodes.

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