James Joyce: Notes (1) - Textual History

Textual history
Epiphanies [1] Conventionally dated 1901-1903; at least 71 written, of which 22 in Joyce’s hand are held in the Lockwood Mem. Library of Buffalo University. 18 more are held in in the Joyce Collection of Cornell Univ. Library, all of these being in Stanislaus hand with one exception. Some of these duplicate those at Buffalo. The holograph epiphanies are numbered, possibly in autobiographical sequence, but not their eventual order of use in the works. Their importance in Stephen Hero is indicated by Joyce’s comment on one of them as the transitional point between two sections of the novel (Letters, II, p.79.) Stephen Hero contains a lengthy explanation of the process of epiphanisation but the term itself is not included in the corresponding section of A Portrait of the Artist. The Buffalo epiphanies were edited and published by O. A. Silverman in 1956; later all forty were included in The Workshop of Daedalus, ed. Robert Scholes & Richard Kain (1965).

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Epiphanies [2]: See Robert Scholes & Florence L. Walzl, ‘The Epiphanies of Joyce’, in PMLA, 82, 1 (March 1967), pp.152-54 - an exchange in which Scholes argues that the term was never used by Joyce for Dubliners and facetiously suggesting - à la Yeats - that ‘there is more enterprise in walking naked’. Walzl seeks to broaden the term to include the ‘more general signification’ that Joyce attaches to it in his theory of epiphanies [SH188-89] where he relates it to the apprehension of whatness - or, as Walzl actually writes, ‘In the esthetic discussion of Stephen Hero, where the qualities of beauty are defined as integritas (wholeness) consonantia (symmetry) and claritas (radiance), he defines epiphany as an apprehension that radiance is quiddity.’ [sic] (p.152.) Scholes’ contribution to the article occupies only one column of the first page, the rest being devoted to Walzl’s argument.

Epiphanies/phainos: Joyce’s term epiphany derives from the liturgical calendar feast marking the presentation of the infant Jesus to the priests in the Temple at Jerusalem. Besides harping on the literal sense of epiphany as a “shewing forth” in the sense that the meaning of the thing seen is instantaneously perceived by the observer, Joyce’s abrogation - even theft - of the term carries with it a great deal of the theological sense that the saviour/messiah thus heralded is a type of the kind of artist that he intends to be and that the artists is, correspondingly, endowed with christological powers. In the Stephen Hero episode where the first literary epiphany is introduced and the term defined, the surrounding language echoes the Introit in the liturgy for the epiphany (Surge Illuminare ...; as infra.)

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Epiphanies [3] - Epiphany 21, 1903 (I.A.14) - written in Paris - reflects Joyce’s view of his mother’s funeral and was reworked for the Hades episode of Ulysses. (See Buffalo Library Exhibits, Bloomsday; online - accessed 29.12.2008.] Note: the Paris Bourse epiphany in “Proteus” stems from the same date.

Paralytic affections: In Stephen Hero, where he introduces the term “epiphany”, Joyce writes of Eccles Street as one of those Dublin streets of brown brick houses which seemed to him (Stephen) the “very incarnation of Irish paralysis” - an epithet that Joyce employed in several places, most notably in the opening paragraph of “The Sisters” in Dubliners. While the dominant context for the signification of the term is the medical one - particularly importing the symptoms of g.p.i., or “general pareisis [commonly paralysis] of the insane”, which was the tertiary and final stage of the syphilitic infection - the terms has also an Irish folkloric sense, as in the footnote to T. C. Croker’s story of a man who is “fairy struck” by a “good people” seeking to leand of the parish priest (who he is entertaining to dinner) if fairies can enter into Christian heaven. Croker explains:

‘The term “fairy struck” is applied to paralytic affections, which are supposed to proceed from a blow given by the invisible hand of an offended fairy; this belief, of course, creates fairy doctors, who by means of charms and mysterious journeys profess to cure the afflicted. It is only fair to add, that the term has also a convivial acceptatiion, the fairies being not unfrequently made to bear the blame of the effects arising from too copious a sacrifice to the jolly god. / The importance attached to the manner and place of burial by the peasantry is almost incredible; it is always a matter of consideration and often of dispute whether to deceased shall be buried with his or her “own people”.’ (“The Confession of Tom Bourke”, in Fairy Legends [... &c.; (London: John Murray & Thomas Tegg 1838): p.49, n.; my italics [BS].)

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Epiphanies [4]: James Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce (Stannie): ‘Words cannot measure my contempt for AE at present … and his spiritual friends. I did well however to leave my MSS with him for I had a motive. However I shall take them back as my latest additions to “Epiphany” might not be to his liking …’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.14; quoted in John Barger’s “Joyce Portal” [online; 19.02.08].)

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Epiphanies [5]: Lines engraved on the memorial stone of Ted Hughes bear lines fr“That Morning”, a poem recollecting the epiphany of a huge shoal of salmon flashing by as he and his son Nicholas waded a stream in Alaska: ‘So we found the end of our journey / So we stood alive in the river of light / Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.’ The memorial service was accompanied by readings by Seamus Heaney and the actress Juliet Stevenson. (Cited thus on the Wikipedia page on Hughes - online; accessed 18.01.2012.)

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“Portrait of the Artist” (1904; aka “The 1904 Portrait”) - I: The holograph draft written in a Vere Foster Ruled Exercise Book bearing the name of Mabel Joyce is held at the Buffalo Univ. Library Joyce Collection as Buffalo II.A, wherein the notice: Joyce wrote this brief, quasi-autobiographical sketch for the magazine Dana, although the editors declined to publish it. One editor, John Eglinton, explained “I can’t print what I can’t understand.” (Irish Literary Portraits, 1935, p.136.) In this piece, Joyce combines a fictionalized autobiographical narrative with philosophical exposition in order to describe the evolution of artistic sensibilities in an unnamed young man. Joyce subsequently expanded upon the ideas expressed in this piece in his aborted novel Stephen Hero and, ultimately, in the second version of that novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which ironically reprises and rephrases the title of this essay. Many of the incidents found in that novel can be traced back to this earlier essay. This draft is written in an exercise book that belonged to Joyce’s sister Mabel (1893-1911). Joyce dated it January 7, 1904. Joyce subsequently used this exercise book to write notes for Stephen Hero, which occupy the later pages. In 1928 he gave this document to Sylvia Beach. (See Buffalo Library Exhibits, Bloomsday; online - accessed 29.12.2008.] See full text version in RICORSO Library, “Irish Classics > Major Authors > James Joyce” [infra].

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“Portrait of the Artist” (1904; aka “The 1904 Portrait”) - II: Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver on 8 Nov. 1916 outlining on a ‘enclosed slip’ the publishing history of his works. Under A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man he wrote: ‘I began this novel in notes before I left Ireland and finished it Trieste in 1914. Before I left I offered an introductory chapter to Mr Magee (John Eglinton) and Mr Ryan, editors of Dana. It was rejected.’ (Letters, Vol. I, 1966, p.98.)

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Stephen Hero (1944) - [1]: Theodore Spencer, Introduction, Stephen Hero [1944] (London: Triad 1977, 1986): ‘There is some confusion about the date of this manuscript. In her catalogue Miss Beach, to whom Joyce originally gave it, says that it dates from 1903, and adds the following sentence: “When the manuscript came back to its author, after the twentieth publisher had rejected it, he threw it in the fire, from which Mrs. Joyce, at the risk of burning her hands, rescued these pages.” This story is to some extent supported by Mr. Herbert Gorman, who says in his life of Joyce, writing of the year 1908 [James Joyce, NY 1940, p.196]: “Joyce burned a portion of Stephen Hero in a fir of momentary despair and then stared the novel anew in a more compressed form.” No surviving page of the manuscrip shows any sign of burning. / Joyce himself was not very communicative on the subject. When the present writer wrote to him abot the manuscript at the end of 1938, he received a reply from Joyce’s secretary which said: “Apparently the very large MS. of about 1,000 pages of the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which he calls a schoolboy’s [11] production written when he was nineteen or twenty, has been sold in lots to different institutions in America. He feels that he can do nothing in the matter except to state this fact which he certainly can scarcely be blamed for not having foreseen at the moment of the presentation he made of it.”’ Spencer further quotes Joyce’s letter to Grant Richards of 13 March 1906 speaking of SH as half-finished: “You suggest I shuold write a novel in some sense autobiographcal. I have already written a thousand pages of such a novel, as I thnk I told you, 914 to be accurate. I calculate that these twenty-five chapters, abot half the book, run into 150,000 words. But is is quite impossible for me in present circumstances to think the rest of the book much less to write it.”’ (Spencer, pp.11-12.)

[See also Spencer’s further comments on Stephen Hero under Commentary, supra, and note Hans Walter Gabler’s corrections to the chapter-numbering of the 1944 edition of of the novel, infra.]

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Stephen Hero (1944) - [2]: Sylvia Beach received a portion of the MS as a gift from Joyce [in 1935], and sold it to Harvard College Library in 1938, these being pp.519-902 - the first 518 pages having apparently disappeared. The 383 extant pages have a kind of unity in themselves, the period covered by occupies the last 80 pages of A Portrait in the Jonathan Cape Edn. The text in the edition of Stephen Hero published in 1963 [London 1969] consists of a total of 391 MSS pages, comprised of those given to Sylvia Beach together with 25 more bought acquired from Stanislaus Joyce by John Slocum for the Yale Univ. Library in 1951 [Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library]. These latter - being pp.477-78, 481-89, 491-97 and 499-505 of the original MS - were added out of chronological order to the edition of 1959 [that is, made to follow the originally pubished text]. The last 5 pages are held in the Cornell Collection. In the 1977 edition, edited by Slocum and Cahoon, those sold by Sylvia Beach appear as pp.27-208 and are followed by additional MS pages, now pp.208-20, being 477ff. of the MS original. (See Thomas E. Connolly, ‘Stephen Hero’, in Bowen & Carens, eds., Companion to Joyce Studies, 1984, p.245).

Stephen Hero - [3]: Joyce had the left the bulk of his library, left in Trieste in the care of his brother Stanislaus, forwarded by him to Paris when he settled there [1919]; among the papers were the MSS pages of Stephen Hero which Joyce in time gave to Sylvia Beach; but Stanislaus ‘retained a certain number of manuscript items including twenty-five additional pages of Stephen Hero which were purchased by John J. Slocum in 1950’ - and are included in the 1956 revised edition of the novel (ed. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon). The additional material material discontinous with the pages held by Sylvia Beech, and begin ‘nations. They were held out to say: We are along - come: and the voices said to them: We are your people: and the air greq thick with their company as they called to him, their kinsmen, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.’ (1956 edn., p.240.) Written here between paragraphs in blue crayon is the holograph line: ‘Departure for Paris’ - and this is followed by the Mullingar episode, which is clearly a unified episode in spite of two, one and one pages being missing at different points. (See Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, Foreword to Stephen Hero, Jonathan Lane 1956 edition [and reps.]; Grafton edn. 1977, & eds. 1982, 1984, 1986, [pp.7-9], pp.7-8.

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Stephen Hero (1944) [3]: Joyce wrote to Stanislaus (10 Jan. 1907, Via Monte Brianzo 51, IV°, Rome): ‘The other day I was thinking about my novel. How long am I at it now? Is there any use continuing it? Everyone appears to think I am behaving very well better than they expected. But it’s not pleasant behaiv well to please people. I understand Nora is about to have another child. [...] ’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.143.)

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Stephen Hero (1944) - [4]: Slocum and Cahoon, Foreword to the Revised Edition [1956] (London: Jonathan Cape 1969): ‘[...] The words “ Departure for Paris”, words that mark the end of A Portrait, have been written by Joyce in blue crayon across the page at the conclusion of ht first eight lines [of MS p.477 destined to become the last part of the diary entry of 16th April at the conclusion of A Portrait]. It is probable, though by no means certain, that the pages preceding page 477 were discarded as they were used [9] in the creation of A Portrait. It is also probable that the missing pages from this episode included descriptions or dialogues that eventually found their way into A Portrait. Joyce’s known economy of episode and phrase was such that even the rejected portions of his manuscripts usually contributed heavily to the published work.’ (pp.9-10.)

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Stephen Hero (1944) - [5] - Slocum & Cahoon write: Joyce’s copy of D’Annunzio’s The Child of Pleaure bears Joyce’s signature and the words ‘Mullingar July.5.1900’ the manuscript of his translation of Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang is inscribed ‘Summer, 1901. MS/Mullingar. Westmeath.’ Joyce altered the acutal events considerably in representing Mullingar as the home of Stephen’s godfather Philip McCann, who had no connection with Mullingar and had died in 1898.) This fiction is continued in the pater pages of Stephen Hero, where Mr. Fulham is mentioned repeatedly as the source of money for Stephen’s university expenses. It is conceivable that an undiscovered patron is represented by the figure of the godfather. [...; p.10] There are also hints that he originally intended to give Mr. Fulham a more important role in his book; when his plans changed, the episode became a little irrelevant.’ (p.11.) [See Stephen Hero, rev. edn., Jonathan Cape 1969, p.10.)

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Stephen Hero (1944) - [6]: Hélène Cixous writes, ‘Stannie characterises this novel as a mendacious autobiography and a keen satire. The victims of the satire were at this stage simply everyone Joyce knew, and the Catholic Church; the work was an obvious reply to the editors’ rejection [i.e., the eds. of Dana].’ She goes on to quote the Complete Dublin Diary (p.12), as cited in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959, p.152; Cixous, p. 230) - viz., ‘[...] It is to be almost autobiographical, and naturally as it comes from Jim, satirical. He is putting a large number of his acquaintances into it, and those Jesuits whom he has known. [...; &c.]’ (The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce [Cornell 1962], ed. George H. Healey, Anna Livia Press, Dublin 1994; p.12.) The chronology is briefly summarised by Cixous in these terms: ‘In September 1907, [Joyce] decided to move on from Stephen Hero to the Portrait, a work which was not finished until 1913. On the other hand, he was already planning to turn the novella [sic] “Ulysses” into a book.’ In a footnote she quotes Joyce’s remark to Stanislaus [as infra]. (Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce [trans. Sally Purcell], London: John Calder 1972, p.228.) Note: the date of Stanislaus’s entry is 2 Feb. 1904; the version given here is taken from the Complete Diary, 1994 Edn. [BS].

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Stephen Hero (1944) - [7]: Hans Walter Gabler, Preface, A Portrait [ … &c.]: A Facsimile Manuscript of the Manuscript Fragments of ‘Stephen Hero’ (James Joyce Archive, Vol. 8), consists of extant portions of Stephen Hero beginning with Chapter IX at MS p.477 and dealing with Joyce’s student days at the Royal University. On chapter numbers in Stephen Hero (ed. Spencer 1944; rev. edn. John J. Slocum [see infra] & Herbert Cahoon, 1955 & 1963), Gabler explains that ‘the 11 chapters of the University College episode in the MS are numbered [XV] to XXV. Spencer’s edition mistakenly counts 12 chaps. and numbers them XV to XXVI. The editorial error arises in Chap. XVIII. Halfway through MS Chap. XVIII, at the bottom of p.610, appears the note ‘End of Second Episode of V’ …] these [i.e., this and others like it such as ‘End of First Episode of V’] as we now know, are markings related to the composition of Portrait [… U]nfortunately Spencer assumed a revisional new chapter division and, introducing XIX, renumbered all subsequent chapters […] Correctly speaking] Chaps. XVIII and XIX are one chapter, [being] Chap. XVIII; and Chaps. XX to XXVI should be correctly numbered XIX to XXV.’ (See John Paul Riquelme, ‘Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait’, in Attridge et al., eds., Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, 1990, p.129.)

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Stephen Hero (1944) - [8]: Stanislaus pronounces Mary Sheehy the object of Joyce’s attachment and notes that ‘[s]he wants Hero’-meaning a man of heroic mould rather than the hero of Joyce’s draft novel (already under way). She also perceives that ‘those who do not work’ are wrong for ‘the purposes of her and her kind.’ (See The Complete Dublin Diary [1962], Dublin: Anna Livia 1994, p.23.) Peter Costello has suggested that the real Emma was a contemporary student called M[ary] E[lizabeth] Cleary, later Mrs. Meehan. When asked by her son, Prof. James Meehan of UCD, ‘she said she had known James Joyce [...] but had found him to be a common, vulgar person’ and further admitted that he ‘had been keen on her’. (See Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth 1882-1915 , London: Kyle Cathie; NY: Roberts Rinehart 1992, p.189.) It is probable that the character is composite since some episodes concerning her in A Portrait - notably the circumstances surrounding the “Vilanelle” - are clearly associated with Mary Sheehy in Stanislaus’s account of Joyce’s relations with that family in My Brother’s Keeper (1958).

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Chamber Music (1907): The title was apparently inspired by the sound of a prostitute urinating in a brothel during a reading of the poems given by Joyce in her room while he and Gogarty were attending a brothel. In Ulysses, Bloom reflects: ‘O, look we are so! Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustic that is. Tinkling. empty vessels make most noise. […] the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water.’ Bodley Head Edn., 1967, p.365; quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.160 & ftn.) When it came to preparing it for publication in autumn 1906, Joyce repudiated the title as ‘too complacent’ saying, ‘I should prefer a title which to a certain extent repudiated the book, without altogether disparaging it’, but was persuaded back to it by Stanislaus (Ellmann, op. cit., p.241; see longer extract, infra.). Note however that Stanislaus makes a denial of the origin of the poem-collection’s title in this scatalogical context: ‘I have already suggested that Jim had accepted the title Chamber Music for the colection. Another version of the original of the title is given in Herbert Gorman’s biography of my brother, but the story there told, which seems to have tickled the fancy of American critics and been the occasion of at least one book, is false, whatever its source.’ (Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 1958, p.209.)

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Chamber Music (2) - Joyce wrote to Stanislaus: ‘The reason I dislike Chamber Music as a title is that it is too complacent. I should prefer a title which to a certain extent repudiated the book, without altogether disparaging it.’ (Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, 18 Oct. 1906; Letters, II, p.82; quoted in Stephen Heath (‘Ambiviolences: Notes for reading Joyce’, in Attridge & Ferrer, eds., Post-structuralist Joyce, Cambridge UP 1984, p.45.)

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Dubliners (1914) - Chronology of composition: “The Sisters” (Irish Homestead, 13 August 1904, uniquely signed Stephen Daedalus); “Eveline” [events of 1894] (Irish Homestead, Sept 10, 1904; rev. Oct. 1905); “After the Race” [based on an interview by Joyce, Irish Times, 7 par. 1903] (Irish Homestead, 17 Dec. 1904). Following revisions from June 1905 involving a pause in writing Stephen Hero after 25 chaps., Joyce supplied Grant Richards with the following stories in December 1905: “Araby” (begun 18 Oct. 1905); “An Encounter” [events of 1895] (rev. by 18 Sept. 1905); “The Boarding House” (rev. by 13 July 1905; MS dated 1 July 1905); “Counterparts” (rev. by 15 July 1905), “Clay” [begun late Oct. 1904 as “Christmas Eve” [abandoned]; completed Jan 1905, offered to Irish Homestead; rewritten spring 1905]; “A Painful Case” (orig. named “A Painful Incident”, rev. by 8 May 1905; MS dated 15 Aug 1905); “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” (fair copy dated 29 Aug 1905); “A Mother” (rev. Oct. 1905); “Grace” (rev. Oct 1905 [?err: early version 27 Nov. 1905; vide Groden in Bowen, Companion, 1984]); added in 1906, “The Two Gallants” & “A Little Cloud”; added in 1907, “The Dead”. Dubliners was turned down by Richards, 1906; accepted by Maunsel, 1909; printed in 1910; destroyed in 1912; finally published by Richards, London, 15 June 1914, using proof sheets as copy-text. (See Micheal Groden, Pref. to James Joyce, Dubliners, A facsimile of Proofs for the 1910 Edition, NY: Garland 1977.) See also “Christmas Eve” [abandoned story], in James Joyce Miscellany, ed. Malaganer, 1962, pp.3-7. [See also fuller “Chronology of Composition and Publication”, attached.]

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Dubliners - epicleti [1]: Poss. an invocation to the Holy Ghost (epiklesis), still used in the Eastern Church but not in Roman Catholic ritual, related to the transubstantiation insofar as the Holy Ghost is called upon to transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ by invocation (epiklesis). Joyce’s use of the term to describe the Dubliners stories in a letter to Con Curran of early July 1904: ‘I am writing a series of epicleti- ten - for a paper [...] to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city’ (Selected Letters, 1976, p.22). This is commonly placed in relation to his remarks recorded by Stanislaus: ‘there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the mass and what I am trying to do. [...] to give people a kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own. [...] for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.’ However, a cognate term epikleitos is used to refer to someone summoned before court possibly suggesting the intention to put Dublin on trial. [Q. source.]

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Dubliners - epicleti [2]: And alternative reading of ‘epicleti’ as ‘epiclets’ [i.e., little epics] is advanced by Wright who quizzes the transcription Letters (Vol. 1), and Selected Letters, pointing out that Constantine Curran gave epicteti in place of the form of the word that occurs uniquely in the letter to him which Stuart Gilbert had copied - or miscopied - for Letters and which Ellmann followed in the Selected - along with the original footnote about the Greek liturgical meaning of epicleti. In James Joyce Remembered, Curran writes of quizzing Joyce about the meaning of the word though no answer was forthcoming, or has survived. In any event, the term appears to have been abandoned by Joyce immediately after and interpretations based on the Greek epiclesis (invocation) of the liturgy are now considered unfounded (See David Wright, ‘The Curious Language of Dubliners’, in James Joyce, ed. Sean Latham (IAP 2010), p.48ff. for longer extracts, go to RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Major Authors”, via index, or direct.)

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“The Sisters” was first published in Irish Homestead (3 August 1904) in a version commissioned for a ‘simple’ and ‘rural’ readership intended to appeal to ‘the common understanding and liking’ it contains no reference to the motif of paralysis, simony, confession, the Persian motif, or the boy’s dreams. All the passages which connote ‘vacancy’ are late additions. It ends: ‘God rest his soul!’ The foregoing all stated in an appendix Hélène Cixous, ‘Joyce: The (r)use of writing’, in Derek Attridge & Daniel Ferrer, eds., Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (Cambridge UP 1984) - with bibl. refs. to Marvin Magalaner, Time of Apprenticeship, The Fiction of Young James Joyce (New York: Abelard & Schuman, 1959), Chapter 3 & Appendix C; Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956), pp. 50-53.

See also note on the use of the term paralytic affections in T. C. Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland 1834 Edn.), under Epiphanies - supra.

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“Araby” - vide the title-song is by W. G. Wills: ‘I’ll sing thee songs of Araby / And tales of far Cashmere, / Wild tales to cheat thee of a sigh, / Or charm thee with a tear. // And dreams delight shall on thee break, / And rainbow visions rise, / And all my soul shall strive to wake / Sweet wonder in thy eyes. [...; see further under Wills, infra.]

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“Eveline”: ‘The lass that loves a sailor’ is a line in a popular song by Charles Dibden (1745-1825) in which the love of sailors for lasses is not represented as a very trustworthy article - viz.,‘The gay jolly tars passsed the word for a tipple / And the toast, for ’twas Saturday night. / Some sweetheart or wife he lov’d as his life, / Each drank and wish’d he could hail her; / But the standing toast that pleas’d the most, / was “The wind that blows, / The ship that goes, / And the lass that loves a sailor.” (See Gifford, op. cit., p.51.) The meaning and connotation of Derevaun Seraun are still unknown, in spite of several conjectures. For remarks on Eveline’s income and the economics of the Hill household, see Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait [... &c.] (California UP 1982), Introduction, p.13-14 - or extract in RICORSO Library, “Major Irish Writers > James Joyce”, via index or direct.

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“Eveline”: St Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-90), member of the Visitation Order in France, experienced visions leading to a crusade for public devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus; beatified 1864, canonised 1920. Don Gifford assumes that the coloured print in the story would depict the Sacred Heart and list the promises made through her to those who display it in their homes, enumerating 12 such promised (Gifford, op. cit., 1982, pp.49-50.)

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“Eveline”: The ‘terrible Patagonians’ of whom Frank speaks are identified in Gifford (op. cit. p.51) as the Tehuelche of southern Argentina, a tribe said to be the tallest of the human races in Victorian travellers’ lore. Hugh Kenner has somewhere identified his story with that told by Othello to Desdemona during his wooing of her, speaking of those men ‘men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’. Kenner draws the inference that Joyce intended us to see that Frank’s story is unreliable and similarly pointed out that the route from Dublin to Rio de Janeira would necessarily involve embarkation on a liner from Liverpool where prostitution was a desperate resort for stranded Irish women. [Kenner memorably used the Shakespearean allusion to explicate the story in an MA seminar at UCSB in 1973: BS].

The Frank-Othello connection has been explored by Myron Taube in ‘Joyce and Shakespeare: “Eveline” and Othello’, James Joyce Quarterly, 4, 2 (Winter 1967), pp.152-54 [available at JSTOR online; accessed 15.11.2010.]

“Eveline”: See the epigraph to the second set of stories in T. C. Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, Pt. II (1828) - viz., Fairy Legends / The Dullahan: “Men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” Shakespeare; “Says the Frair, ’tis strange headless horses should trot.” Old Song. (p.83) [BS]

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“After the Race” [1] is based on the career of Jimmy Fields, son of Wm. Field, butcher and Nationalist MP up to 1918, who established a chain of shops in Dublin and supplied on contract to the police; called ‘merchant prince’ sent his son to English public school and Cambridge; divided time between musical circles and motoring. (See Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1992 , p.106.)

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“After the Race” [2]: Cadet Roussel was a French army marching song originating in the 1790s, and endlessly improvised, concerning a cadet who is unfairly derided and bears his lot with heroic stoicism. The phrase ‘Ho! Ho! HoHé! vraiment!’ belongs to the two-line refrain, of which the second is ‘Cadet Roussel est un bon enfant [i.e., a good chap]’.

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“The Two Gallants” is roughly based on case of Brigid Gannon, a housemaid found in the Dooder at Newbridge Rd., on 23 Aug.; body identified by a policeman called Henry Flower who had actually been with her on the night of her death; tried with his associate Sergeant Hanily, who subsequently cut his own throat in Irishtown barracks; acquitted on ‘No True Bill’ resigned and emigrated; confession made by another servant-girl in the 1940s that she drowned Brigid Gannon. (See Costello, op. cit., pp.168-69.)

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“The Boarding House” [1]: Joyce wrote to Stanislaus - ‘There is a neat phrase of five words in “The Boarding House”: find it.’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.63.) Ellmann endorse Robert Adams’ suggest that it may be the description of Polly as being ‘like a little perverse madonna’ (ibid., p.63.) Further, on the word ‘bloody’, Joyce wrote to Grant Richards at the time when the publisher was intent on terminating the contract in view of the printer’s misgivings about the stories: ‘the exact expression I have used, is in my opinion the one expression in the English language which can create on the reader the effect which I wish to create. Surely you can see this for yourself? And if the word appears once in the book it may as well appear three times [viz, also in “Two Gallants” and “Ivy Day”]. Is it not ridicilous that my book cannot be published because it contains this one word which is neither indecent nor blasphemous?’ (Letter of 31 May, 1906; Selected Letters, 1975, p.85.)

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“The Boarding House” [2]: Polly’s song, “I’m a naughty girl, you needn’t sham: You know I am” includes the lines: ‘Sometimes I’ve had the fun / I repent of what I’ve done, / But not for long! / But not for long!’, and ‘If some youth with manners free / Dares to snatch a kiss from me, / Do I ask him to explain? / No, I kiss him back again! ... I’m a naughty girl, &c.’ (Quoted in Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated [... &c.], California UP 1982, pp.64-65; rep. from Zack Bowen, Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce, NY 1974.) Reynold’s Newspaper was a radical London-based political scandal-sheet of the period (fnd. 1850).

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“Clay” is probably based on character of Maria O’Donohoe, a guest at John Murray’s Hallowe’en part in Drumcondra;; diagnosed with inoperable tumour; living at Flynn’s home, 15 Usher’s Island; d. Hospice, Harold’s Cross, 8 Dec. 1899; associated in Joyce’s mind with the superstitious “clay” tradition of the season. (Costello, op. cit., 1992, p.163.) Note that Maria cannot remember the second stanza of her party-piece “I dreamt that I dwelt ...”. [For ful-text version, see under Balfe, supra.)

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“The Dead” [1]: When Gabriel sees Gretta listening to “The Lass of Aughrim” on the stairs, he he contemplates a possible painting: ‘Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter’. The title-phrase derives from a contemporary song: “I Hear You Calling Me” by Harold Lake, a journalist on the Daily Express who gave expression to his feelings about the death of a girl he loved from tuberculosis [vide Raymond Foxall, John McCormack, London: Robert Hale 1963, p.56], set to music by Harold Harford and published in London on 11 Feb 1908. John McCormack soon afterwards adopted the song as his signature - with one note changed - singing it first a month after publication and twice again in the same year. The three verses read:

Note: The song is quoted in full in Séamus Reilly, ‘Rehearing “Distant Music” in “The Dead”’, James Joyce Quarterly, 35, 1 (Fall, 1997), pp.149-152, p.149 [online; accessed 21.11.2010]. See also Thomas Moore’s “Oh Ye Dead!” from Irish Melodies, under Moore, Quotations, supra.

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“The Dead” [2]: Of “The Lass of Aughrim”, the song that Michael Furey, Quinn remarks: ‘Could Gretta, listening to distant music from her dead lover be a symbol of Ireland, a bereft Ireland still in love with its former Gaelic cultural identity that has died?’ (Quinn, op. cit., p.119.) Quinn further quotes Joyce’s poem, “She Weeps over Rahoon” [as in Quotations, infra], whose implied speaker - in his reading - is Nora Barnacle-Joyce. Quinn notes further that Joyce went to Galway in Aug. 1912 when, with Nora, he visited both the fictional grave of Michael Furey at Oughterard and the actual grave of Sonny Bodkin (his original) at Rahoon. Finally, Quinn compares the phrase ‘falls softly, softly falling’ with the last sentence in “The Dead”: ‘snow was general all over Ireland [...] falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, to, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.’ (Ibid., p.121.)

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“The Dead” [3]: Joyce wrote to Nora on 22 Aug. 1909, ‘Adorn your body for me, dearest. Be beautiful and happy and loving and provoking, full of memories, full of cravings, when we meet. Do you remember the three adjectives I have used in The Dead in speaking of your body? they are these: “musical and strange and perfumed. / My jealousy is still smouldering in my heart. Your love for me must be fierce and violent and make me forget utterly.”’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.163.)

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“The Dead” [4]: Bret Harte’s novel Gabriel Conroy (1875) tells of a silver-mining community and the part played by the central character in take the blame for a murder he supposed to have been committed by his wife, the inheritor of the rights to the mine; in that story the wife has a child with him and briefly loves him though her original motives for marrying him were entirely selfish. The novel opens with a description of snow which matches the final paragraph of “The Dead”:

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“The Dead” [5]: Is there a de Quincey connection?

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) - 1: Joyce resolved to rewrite in Sept. 1907 while working on ‘The Dead’ he conceived an entirely new structure for the material developed in Stephen Hero; ‘he told me he would omit all the first chapters and begin with Stephen, whom he will call Daly, going to school and that he would write the book in five chapters - long chapters’ (Diary entry [unpub.] quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, [1965 Edn.], p.274); first chapter finished by 29 Nov., 1907 [‘which is to say the material from Stephen Hero had been reformed as an opening’, Ellmann]; 3 chaps. complete by April 1908; JAJ then discontinued the novel; JAJ encouraged by Italo Svevo to continue (Letters, II: 227, 8 Feb. 1909). According to Hans Walter Gabler [contra Ellmann], changes were then made in the first chapter [vide Gabler, ‘Lost Years’], based on study of holograph fair copy in NLI]. Gabler emphasises a revision-genesis, ‘an additional stretch of narrative [may] have been the early part of Chap. IV’; parts of MSS completed Sept. 1907 to April 1908 were first drafts of a first half and do not survive as such; Chap. IV complete and work on Chap. V, 1909 to some time in 1911, when the MS was thrown on the fire and rescued; kept wrapped in newspaper for some months; after 1911 work resumed on Chap. V, constructed ‘by intercalation of a contrasting episode into a homogeneous stretch of narrative’.

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) - 2: Gabler notes evidence that the opening and concluding pages of the novel were ‘genetically interdependent’; A Portrait finished in 1913, when title page of National Library of Ireland MS is dated; JAJ offered first refusal to Elkin Mathews, Easter Day 1913 [though unfinished]; literary agent James B. Pinker fails to place the MS; serialised in The Egoist, established by Harriet Shaw Weaver for the purpose and ed. Dora Marsden, [2 Feb. 1914 to 1 Sept 1915]; Joyce was sending finally revised MS to Pound from Jan. 1914; Ellmann considers that the hiatus in Egoist serialisation after Chap. 3 arose because Joyce had not written the following chapters, but Hans Walter Gabler [holds] that the final shape was essentially resolved by 1912-13]; T. Werner Laurie refused to publish the whole text without major alterations. Further rejections by Richards, Martin Secker, and Duckworth; published by The Egoist (1916); Benjamin W. Huebsch published the first American edn. [otherwise, the second edition]), New York (29 Dec. 1916); The Egoist Press edition of A Portrait appeared in London in February 1917, using Huebsch’s sheets. Huebsch later brought out Dubliners, using sheets from England, Dec. 1916, importing sheets from Grant Richards. Note that the MS of A Portrait [not Stephen Hero] was given to the National Library by Miss Weaver. (See David Norris, “What Lies in Joyce’s Pandora’s Box”, in Irish Times, 12 Jan. 1999.)

See also remarks in Danis Rose & John O’Hanlon, The Lost Notebook (Edinburgh: Split Pea 1989) - citing the notebook entry “arrest 1902/1904”, which “signalled what appears on the surface to be Joyce’s revision of the time co-ordinates of Stephen’s movements in the interval between A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. According to both the manuscript draft V.A.3 and the base text of the Rosenbach faircopy of “Proteus”, Stephen was in Paris, in irrational fear of being arrested on a charge of murder, in February 1902. This surprisingly early date has been noted by Gabler (1980) who argues that “the events of the final chapter of A Portrait occur in the spring in term-time of what could be conceived of as Stephen’s first and only year” at University College. Thus, it would have been Spring 1901 “according to A Portrait’s overall implicit chronological framework ... permitting Stephen to be thought of as living in Paris in February 1902”. This thesis is convincing and, as we shall show, is supported by further argument and evidence. Continuing his argument, Gabler contends that the manuscript year “1902” may well be “a vestige of an abandoned time-scheme linking A Portrait in progress with the opening of a proto-Ulysses for which the date 16 June 1904 was not fixed”. What needs further clarification here is (a) the precise status of the proto-Ulysses envisaged; (b) when and why the time-scheme was introduced; and (c) if, when and why it was abandoned.’ (Rose & O’Hanlon, p.xv.)

See longer extracts in RICORSO Library > “Criticism > Major Authors” > James Joyce, via index or direct. - and see also remarks on the hiatus in the time-frame of A Portrait discussed in Hugh Kenner, "The Date of Stephen's Flight", in Ulysses (George Allen & Unwin 1980), [Appendix 1], pp.161-63. (Kenner's appendix is referenced in Rose and O'Hanlon, op. cit., 1989, supra.)

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A Portrait [... &c.] (1916) - 3: Stephen’s motto, ‘silence, exile and cunning’ [AP312] derives from Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisane (1847), in which Lucien de Rubempré says: ‘J’ai mis en pratique un axiome avec lequel on est sûr de vivre tranquille: Fuge ... Late ... Tace.’ (See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.365, with note to the effect that Stuart Gilbert brought the quotation to Ellmann’s attention.) Note also Oscar Wilde’s remarks on the same: ‘A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.’ (“The Decay of the Lying”, in The Works of Oscar Wilde, Galley Press 1987, p.915; for full text, go to RICORSO, Library, “Irish Classics”, as attached.) See also Franco Moretti’s remarks note on Lucien de Rubempré in Notes, infra.

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A Portrait [... &c.] - 4: Stephen’s remark that ‘Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow’ bears some similarity to the ambiguous sentence that Mr. Daly poses to the eldest of his many children (called here “North-east”) in Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians (1829): Give me the construction of this: Mater mea sus est mala’ - to which the child replies, ‘My mother is a bad sow’, but is corrected by his father: ‘Mater, mother, mea, hasten, est, eats up (edere, my boy, not esse), mala, the apples.’ (Gerald Griffin, The Collegians, 1829; 1918 edn., intro. by Padraic Colum, Talbot Press [1918], pp.37-38.)

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A Portrait [... &c.] - 5: Stephen recites the line, ‘Brightness falls from the air / He had not even remembered rightly Nash’s line.’ (Portrait, Chap. V., corr. edn. 1967, p.238) - having a little earlier misremembered it as ‘Darkness falls from the air’ (ibid., p.237). The same line, with others surrounding it, is quoted by W. B. Yeats in his essay ‘What is ‘Popular Poetry’” (1901; in Ideas of Good and Evil, 1903) - where he writes: “[...] go down into the street with some thought whose bare meaning must be plain to everybody; take with you Ben Jonson’s “Beauty like sorrow dwelleth everywhere,” and find out how utterly its enchantment depends on an association of beauty with sorrow which written tradition has from the unwritten, which had it in its turn from ancient religion; or ake with yo these lines in whose bare meaning also there is nothing to stumble over, and find out what men lose who are not in love with Helen - “Brightness falls from the air, / Queens have died young and fair, / Dust hath clos’d Helen’s eye.” I pick my examples at random, for I am writing where I have no books to turn the pages of [...].’. (Rep. in Essays and Introductions, 1961, p.3-12; p.7; also in Richard Finneran, ed., The Yeats Reader [...], NY: Scribner 1997pp.345-51; p.348.) Note that Joyce makes similar use of Ben Jonsonœs “I was not wearier where I lay in A Portrait (Chap. V, corr. edn. 1967, p.178.)

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Giacomo Joyce [written 1911], partially quoted in Ellmann’s 1959 biography and published in full, ed. Richard Ellmann, in January 1968; the 2nd edn., May 1968, contains revised and reset preface identifying Amalia Popper as the female student who inspired it, already identified as such in the biography. Ellmann considerd the 16 page MS a novel (Giacomo Joyce, Intro., p.xxv), but Hans Walter Gabler suggests that it is in a real sense a second series of Joyce’s Epiphanies (see Garland Archive 2, p.xxx). According to Ellmann, the events and moods collocated in Giacomo Joyce took place between late 1911 and the middle of 1914; Gabler argues that Joyce probably began writing in 1913 or 1914, and added to it in the next few years (Archiv., idem). Once he had decided not to publish it separately, he incorporated phrases and passages into Chap. 5 of A Portrait and in Ulysses. He mentioned it implicitly to Pound when he answered his query about publishable writings with an additional note about ‘some prose sketches, as I told you, but they are locked up in my desk in Trieste’ (Letters, I: 101). Note that Joyce recorded Signorita Popper’s father’s cautionary remark to him, ‘Mia figlia ha una grandissima ammirizione per il suo maestro inglese’, noting its mixture of ‘courtesy, benevolence, curiosity, trust, suspicion, naturalness, helplessness of age, confidence, frankness, urbanity, sincerity, warning, pathos, compassion: a perfect blend.’ (Letter to Frank Budgen.)

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Exiles (1918): Richard Rowan and his wife Bertha - returned from Italy; Robert Hand (in love with Bertha), and his cousin Beatrice; Archie, son of Richard and Bertha, and Brigid, the maid; called by Joyce a play in ‘three cat and mouse acts’ (Exiles, Granada Publ. 1979, Notes, p.155). The play reflects Joyce’s jealousy of Nora triggered by Vincent Cosgrave who told her that Joyce was mad and that his love wouldn’t last (Ellmann, James Joyce, 1966, p.144), and whom intimated to Joyce that he had had an affair with Nora. Robert and Richard have previously shared a cottage in Ranelagh as young men; both loved Bertha. Robert and Beatrice briefly engaged after Richard’s departure. Also reflects Joyce’s attempt to thrust Nora into a relationship with Roberto Prezioso (‘the sun shines for you’), a Venetian journalist whom they knew in Trieste and whom Joyce ultimately subjected to public humiliation, reducing him to tears. Joyce wrote: ‘Everyman is Robert … and would like to be Richard’ (Exiles, 1979, Notes, p.148.) Further: ‘The bodily possession of Bertha by Robert, repeated often, would certainly bring into almost carnal contact the two men. Do they desire this. To be united, that is carnally through the person and body of Bertha as they cannot, without dissatisfaction and degradation - be united carnally man to man as man to woman?’ (Ibid., p.156.) See also remarks of An Saddlemyer, in Commentary, supra.

Exiles (Cat. of Univ. of Buffalo “Bloomsday” Exhibit, 8 June - 22 Sept. 2004): Joyce made copious notes on Exiles as he was writing it that are unlike the extant notes for his later works. His Exiles notes are more like a commentary on his play. Some of the material in these notes seems to directly feed into Ulysses. For example, he discusses the 19 th Century French writer Paul de Kock, who is mentioned in Ulysses. More significantly, Joyce’s characterizations of Bertha here clearly anticipate Molly Bloom. A transcription of these notes was first published in 1951 along with the play.

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Before Sunrise [trans. of Michael Hauptmann, Vor Sonnenaufgang: For Joyce’s MS, see The James Joyce Archive, Vol. 2: Notes, Criticism, Translations & Miscellaneous Writings, ed. Hans Walter Gabler & Michael Groden (NY: Garland 1979), pp.332-530) - ref. in Ann Saddlemyer, ‘James Joyce and the Irish Dramatic Movement’, in James Joyce: A Joyce International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Benstock (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1982, p.192, & n.16 [p.208].

Ulysses (1922)

“Telemachus”: the first chapter of Ulysses ends with a quotation from the liturgy for the dead: Liliata rutilantium. / Turma circumdet. / Iubilantium te virginum - being the Ordo Commendationis Animae [Recommendation of a Departing Soul] and meaning: ‘May the crowd of joyful confessors encompass thee; may the choir of blessed virgins go before thee.’

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“Proteus”: ‘signature of all things I am here to read’: Stephen’s phrase reflects the title of Jacob Boehme’s work, The Signature of All Things, a copy of which Joyce held in his [Trieste] library (see Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959, p.794.) In Dublin’s Joyce (1955), Hugh Kenner argues that “signature” is a reference to the role of signate matter in St. Thomas’s hylomorphism which he identifies as the underlying epistemology of the Joycean epiphany and the rule of Joycean style. (See also Weldon Thorton, Allusions in Ulysses, N. Carolina UP 1961, 1968, p.41 - where both of these are cited.

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See Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition : Studies in Western Esotericism, translated by Christine Rhone (SUNY Press 2000). [Originally published as Acces de l’esoterisme occidental, Tome II, 1996 Editions Gallimard]: ‘With Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) the theosophical current acquired its definitive characteristics, the Boehmean work representing something like the nucleus of that which constitutes the classical theosophical corpus. One day in 1610, while contemplating a pewter vase, Boehme had his first “vision”, a sudden revelation, through which he gained at one stroke an intuitive awareness of the networks of correspondence and of the implications between the different worlds or levels of reality. He then wrote his first book, Aurora, which I am inclined to see as the definitive birth of the theosophical current strictly speaking. This book was followed by many others (all written in German), and in turn, by those which numerous other spiritual thinkers wrote in the wake of Boehme’s thought.’ (p.7; in “the Birth of the First Golden Age of Theosophy ... &c. / Genesis and Appearance”.)

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“Proteus”: Don Gifford, annotating the same phrase [‘signature of all things I am here to read’] quotes Boehme in The Clavis (p.19), where he writes that Mercury, ‘the word or speaking’, means ‘the motion and separation of nature, by which everything is figured with its own signature’, and further quotes from his Signatura Rerum, Chap. 1, beginning: ‘All whatever is spoken, written or taught of God, without the knowledge of the signature is dumb and void of understanding; for it proceeds only from an historical conjecture, form the mouth of another, wherein the spirit without knowledge is dumb; but if the spirit opens to him the signature, then he understandss the speech of another; and further, he understands how the spirit has manifested and revealed itself (out of the essence through the principle) in the sound of his voice.’ (Gifford and Seidman, Ulysses Annotated, California UP 1989, p.45.)

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“Proteus” - George Berkeley: The allusion to Berkeley’s Idealism in the “Proteus” episode is concentrated in the phrase ‘coloured signs’, which Gifford ascribes to a passage in An Essay Towards a the New Theory of Vision (1709) to the effect that we do not ‘see’ objects as such; rather we see only coloured signs and then take these to be objects. Gifford, Allusions in Ulysses, California UP 1988, p.44-45. However, the section from the Theory of Vision that he actually quotes - i.e., sect. 46 - deals with the different ‘ideas intromitted by each sense’ in response to a passing carriage, and from which we infer a carriage having seen them associated before, but does not actually involve the phrase ‘coloured signs’ at all. (See Gifford, p.45.) There is no entry on ‘coloured signs’ in Weldon Thornton’s Allusions in Ulysses (1961, 1968) - though Berkeley is the subject of a note in the course of which he writes that “Stephen’s statement about the veil and the shovel hat means that Berkeley found reality inside his head”. (Allusions, p.63.).

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“Aeolus”: The Penguin edition of Ulysses omits the section heading “ORTHOGRAPHICAL” (p.122), as noted by Fritz Senn in ‘Righting Ulysses’, in James Joyce: New Perspectives, ed. Colin MacCabe (Harvester 1982), p.7.

“Lestrygonians” [on the sentence, ‘Perfumes of embraces assailed him. His hungered flesh obscurely, mutely craved to adore’, Joyce said: ‘No, … I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate.’ (Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses”, OUP 1972 Edn., p.20; quoted in Fritz Senn in ‘Righting Ulysses’, in James Joyce: New Perspectives, ed. Colin MacCabe, Harvester 1982, p.27 [n.4.]) [The sentence is quoted from Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, 1975, p.15.]

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“Oxen of the Sun” [1]: The models for the stylistic parodies of that chapter in Ulysses (1922) are: Primitive chant [‘Deshil holles …’]; Sallust & Tacitus [‘Universally that person’s …]; medieval chronicle [‘it is not why therefore …’]; Anglo-Saxon prose [‘Before babe was born …’]; Middle-English prose [‘Therefore everyman …’]; Travels of Sir John Mandeville (14th c.) [‘And whiles they spake …’]; Sir Thomas Mallory (Morte D’Arthur) [‘This meanwhile this good …’]; Elizabethan chronicle [‘About that present time …’]; John Milton, Richard Hooker & Sir Thomas Browne [‘To be short this passage …’]; John Bunyan [‘But was Boatshard’s …]; John Evelyn & Sam. Pepys, diarists [‘So Thursday sixteenth …’ Daniel Defoe [‘With this came up …’]; Jonathan Swift [An Irish bull in …’]; Joseph Addison & Richard Steele (18th c.) [‘Our worthy acquaintance …’]; Laurence Sterne [‘Here the listener who …’]; Oliver Goldsmith [‘Amid the general vacant …’]; Edmund Burke [‘To revert to Mr. Bloom …’]; Richard Sheridan [‘Accordingly he broke his mind’]; Junius (18th c.) [‘But with what fitness …’]; Edward Gibbon [‘The news was imparted …’]; Sir Horace Walpole [‘But Malchias’ tale …’]; Charles Lamb [‘What is the age …’]; Thomas de Quincey [‘The voices blend and fuse …’]; Walter Savage Landor [‘Francis was reminding …’]; T. B. Macaulay [‘However, as a matter of fact …’]; T. H. Huxley [‘It had better be stated …’]; Charles Dickens [Meanwhile the skill …’]; Cardinal Newman [‘There are sins or …’]; Walter Pater (‘The stranger still regarded …’]; John Ruskin [‘Mark this father …’]; Thomas Carlyle: [‘Burke’s, Outflings my lord …’]; US slang and assorted colloqualisms [‘All off for a buster …’]. See letter to Frank Budgen, for Joyce’s account of these styles: ‘until it ends in a frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel. This progression is also linked back to each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general. […] Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo / how’s that for high?’ (Letter of 20 March 1920, in Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, 1975, p.252; see longer extract under Quotations, infra.)

Joyce on “Oxen”: ‘[...] a nineparted episode without divisions [...] linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of development of the embyro and the periods of faunal evolution in general.” (Letters, 1, 139-40; quoted in Maria Tymoczko, ‘Joyce’s Postpostivist Prose Cultural Translation and Transculturation’, in Irish Studies in Brazil, ed. Munira H. Mutran & Laura P. Z. Izarra, Associação Editorial Humanitas 2005, p.263.)

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“Oxen of the Sun” [2]: Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, 1959) writes that Joyce kept before him a diagram showing the ontogeny of the foetus during nine months, and also studied Saintsbury’s A History of English Prose Rhythm, quoting extensively from his letter to Frank Budgen describing the stylistic effects of the chapter [see under Quotations, infra.]

Ellmann writes further: ‘The intricacy of this scheme should not conceal a fact about all Joyce’s writing which he had mentioned to Budgen, that his complexity was only in his means. “With me,” he said, “the thought is always simple.” [Interview with Budgen, 1954.] T. S. Eliot read the episode as a revelation of the “futility of all the English styles” [Virginia Woolf, Writer’s Diary, ed. L. Woolf, 1954, p.50; 26 Sept.1922] but it is likely that Joyce intended the desecration of style to suit the mood of desecration which pervades the episode and is implicitly condemned in it. He worked 1,000 hours by his own calculation on the episode; his mind was so possessed by his theme that he felt as though he were himself eating himself the oxen, as though they were everywhere. It was hard to sit down to a meal without having his stomach turn. He was relieved to be able to write to Budgen on May 18: “The Oxen of the bloody bleeding Sun are finished.”’ [Letter, in Cornell Library]. Miss Weaver’s comment on it was, “I think this episode might also have been called Hades for the reading of it is like being taken the rounds of hell.” [Letter, 30 June 1920.]

“Oxen of the Sun” - Ellmann concludes: Joyce had not intended anything so infernal, but was interested and asked her, “Do you mean that the Oxen of the Sun episode resembles Hades because the nine circles of development (enclosed between the headpiece and the tailpiece of opposite chaos) seem to you to be peopled by extinct beings?” [Letter, 16 Aug. 1920.] No, Miss Weaver replied [...; Letter, 25 Aug. 1920]’ (Ellmann, op. cit., p.490; 1982, p.475ff.) See following note on other sources.

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“Oxen of the Sun” [3] - in Joyce’s incorporation of literary sources in “Oxen of the Sun”, Sarah Davison writes: ‘Saintsbury was only the tip of the iceberg. In addition to editions of primary material, we now know that Joyce also raided several other prose anthologies to construct his parodies, including: William Peacock’s English Prose from Mandeville to Ruskin (1903); A.F. Murison’s Selections from the Best English Authors (Beowulf to the Present Time) (1901); and Annie Barnett and Lucy Dale’s An Anthology of English Prose, 1332 to 1740 (1912). (See Davison, ‘Joyce’s Incorporation of Literary Sources in “Oxen of the Sun”’, in Genetic Joyce Studies, 9 (Spring 2009) [online; accessed 21.05.2010].

Davison references in particular Robert Janusko, The Sources and Structures of James Joyce’s “Oxen” (Epping 1983), pp. 79-82.

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“Oxen of the Sun” [3]: Fritz Senn ‘Righting Ulysses’, in MacCabe, op. cit. (1982): ‘We still have not yet assimilated a performance like “Oxen of the Sun”, a jerky array of fake-historical re-rightings modelled on the style of particular authors or periods, but with anachronistic checks working against facile systematisation.’ (p.15.) Viz., examination of the Notebooks and the text reveals that Joyce did not exclusively - or even very largely - embody phrases from a given author in the parody assigned to each in this listing but employed a much more heterogeneous conception of stylistic normalcy in striking the dominant note of each section.

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“Sirens” [2]: Joyce writes out a musical structure of this chapter, which he defines as ‘fuga per canonem’, on the inside cover of a draft of “Sirens” which was part of the 2002 NLI manuscript acquisition - having been discovered in a Paris flat at the turn of the millenium, 2000:

[ See Joyce’s own remarks on the “Sirens” episode under Quotations, supra. ]

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“Nausicaa”: ‘Nausikaa is written in a namby-pampy jammy marmalady drawerys (alto là) style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter’s palette, chit chat, circumlocution, &c., &c.’ (Letter to Frank Budgen, 3 Jan. 1920; Letters, I, p.135; quoted in quoted in Stephen Heath, ‘Ambiviolences: Notes for reading Joyce’, in Attridge & Ferrer, eds., Post-structuralist Joyce, Cambridge UP 1984, p.64, n.40.)

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“Circe”: Bloom’s button - cf. Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncover’d body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? … Thou are the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art. Off, of, you lendings! Come, unbutton here.’ (King Lear, III.iv; quoted in Vicki Mahaffey, Reauthorizing Joyce, Cambridge UP 1988, p.162.)

“Circe”: Stephen’s sentences, ‘What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself. […; &c.]’ (Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., 1967, p.606, are indebted to Benedetto Croce’s: (See Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.351 ftn.; and see further from Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959, under Croce in Notes, infra.)

“Eumaeus”: Gilbert wrote: ‘The Eumaeus episode - I remember Joyce insisting on this point - was meant to represent the intercourse and mental state of two fagged out men.’ (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982 edn., p.362n.; cited in Maria Tymoczko, ‘Joyce’s Postpostivist Prose Cultural Translation and Transculturation’, in Irish Studies in Brazil, ed. Munira H. Mutran & Laura P. Z. Izarra, Associação Editorial Humanitas 2005, p.263.)

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Finnegans Wake (1939) - (1): begun in 1922 by accumulating material, chiefly in the form of isolated phrases, in a large notebook, Buffalo Notebook VI.A, which has been published as Scribbledehobble (1961; see extract). On March 10, 1923, Joyce wrote a draft of the episode called “King Roderick O”Conor” (380-82), and followed quickly with “Tristan and Isolde” (384-86), “St. Kevin” (604-06) and “The Colloquy of St. Patrick and the Druid” (611-12). Reshaping the “Tristan” episode, he produced “Mamalujo” (383-99; 2.iv). The eight sections of Book I were written more or less consecutively in 1923, excepting 1.i and 1.vi which were added during 1926-7. From 1924 to 1926, he worked on the “four watches of Shaun” (3.i, ii, iii and iv.) The writing of Book II was long drawn out (1926-1938), due to Joyce’s increasing eye-trouble, the mental ill-health of his daughter Lucia, and his discouragement at the poor reception of “Work in Progress”. Book IV, the “Ricorso”, was completed fairly rapidly in 1938. Some parts of the book came into existence easily and were published in preliminary form in magazines, Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review (April 1924). Parts of Finnegans Wake published in Eliot’s Criterion (July 1925), Adrienne Monnier’s Navire d”argent (October 1925); Ernest Walsh’s This Quarter (Autumn-Winter 1925-26), and then in Eugene and Maria Jolas’s transition (April 1927-April/May 1938). 12 instalments were published between 1928 and 1937, mostly in the literary review transition; other parts appeared as separate publications, viz., Anna Livia Plurabelle (1928, FW 1.viii); Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (1929) - which includes “The Mookse and the Gripes” (FW 152-59) and “The Ondt and the Gracehoper” (FW 414-19), as well as the core of III.2; “The Muddest Thick That Was Ever Heard Dump” (FW 282-304); Haveth Childers Everywhere (1930, FW 532-54); The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies (1934, FW 2.i), and Storiella As She Is Syung (1937, FW 260-75 & 304-08). The first copy reached Joyce from Faber and Faber on January 20 1939 in time for his birthday . Joyce’s brother denounced the “drivelling rigmarole” as early as 1924, while Ezra Pound wrote on 1 Nov. 1926 that he could make nothing of the new work. Miss Weaver wondered on 4 February 1927 if he were not wasting his genius while Wyndam Lewis published an attack on all his writings later in that year. See also Oliver St. John Gogarty [q.v.]. See chart of extract publication, Appendix [infra].

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