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Introduction to Joycean genetic studies

by Jorn Barger, revised May 1998

I'm writing this:

1. as a way to get others up-to-speed, on the more-the-merrier principle,
   
2. as a way of testing for gaps in my understanding, by opening myself to constructive criticism, and
   
3. as a way to collate a lot of reference materials into one convenient file.
   

I'm going to try to spell out the basics of studying Joyce's notes and manuscripts, as best I know them. Unfortunately, most of the material I'll be referring to is out of print, and much of this is currently unavailable to me, and there are still some things I've never even seen! So I welcome constructive feedback on these notes...

Quite a lot of Joycean materials have survived, starting chronologically with school essays and including epiphanies, early notebooks, occasional draft fragments, and then, with the late episodes of Ulysses, a much richer record of notes and drafts, and finally with FW an essentially complete record of the entire composition process.

Almost all of this material was published in facsimile in 1978 by Garland Publishing as the James Joyce Archive (JJA)-- 63 large green volumes that sold for $150 per volume. Alas, only 250 (?!) complete sets were printed, and all but a few volumes are out of print now, and many universities apparently passed up the offer at the time, so you may have to do some searching to track down a set, and it will most likely be non-circulating...

The Archive's index is a smaller volume by Michael Groden, and there are still a few copies available from Garland for $30 (see below). If you're going to dive into 'genetic' studies you'll find it indispensible. For obscure publisher's reasons, the volume numbers of each volume are not printed on their spines. Fortunately, the James Joyce Quarterly (JJQ) includes a list of volume names and numbers on the last page of each issue-- I often find myself turning to this for ready reference...

The most significant item missing from the JJA (besides the many, many surviving letters) is the "Philadelphia manuscript" of Ulysses, which includes the earliest known drafts of most chapters. This is apparently still in print in facsimile at $200, though.

A lot of the JJA materials are in Joyce's handwriting, which is frequently difficult to read... although it gets much easier, as you become familiar with it. These have mostly been transcribed (with the highly significant exception of the FW notebooks!) but the transcriptions are not often easy to track down. Some sources:

Pre-Ulysses transcripts:

James Joyce "The Critical Writings" Viking 1964. This includes early school essays and later critical writings and notes that are useful for their insights into Joyce's esthetics.

The Viking Critical Library Edition of "A Portrait" (Viking, 1968) includes some useful transcriptions: an important autobiographical fragment from January 1904 (also titled "A Portrait of the Artist"), 11 epiphanies, and selections from the "Trieste notebook" or "alphabetical notebook" for Portrait, from 1907. (The VCL of Dubliners includes a few epiphanies and early drafts, as well.)

Scholes, Robert and R.M. Kain, "The Workshop of Daedalus" Northwestern 1965. I don't have this, but it includes all 40 surviving epiphanies, and the full Trieste notebook.

A. Walton Litz, "The Art of James Joyce" Oxford 1964. Includes some interesting fragments that turned into Telemachus, with Mulligan being called Doherty! (In Stephen Hero he was Goggins...)

James Joyce "Giacomo Joyce" Viking 1968. This bores me so far, but I'll probably realize its importance eventually!

James Joyce Exiles ed by Padraic Colum, Viking 1951. Includes a very important notebook for Exiles.

Ulysses transcripts:

Phillip Herring "Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts for Ulysses" University Press of Virginia, 1977. Early drafts of Cyclops and Circe, and two Ulysses notebooks.

Phillip Herring "Joyce's Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum" UP of Va 1972. Thousands of fascinating notes for Ulysses, sorted (by Joyce) chapter by chapter.

Here's a Bibiofind search for the Herring volumes

Jorn Barger The New Game archive Heavily annotated transcript of the Circe draft, plus a partial Proteus transcript and hundreds of notes.

Michael Groden "Ulysses in Progress" Princeton 1977. This is by no means an exhaustive examination of Ulysses genetics, but it covers various aspects of that topic with much insight.

Robert Janusko, "The Sources and Structures of James Joyce's 'Oxen'" UMI Press, 1983. Not seen.

Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, "The Lost Notebook" Split Pea Press 1989. A superb (but not flawless) transcript-of-a-transcript, of a Ulysses notebook (VI.D.4) that got mixed in with Joyce's FW materials, and survives only in an execrable transcription by Madame Raphael. The facsimile is in JJA41, pp406-439.

FW transcripts:

Danis Rose "The Textual Diaries of James Joyce" Lilliput 1995. Rose's brilliant but obnoxious reconstruction of the notebook-sequence for FW.

David Hayman, "A First-Draft Version of FW" U of Texas 1963. Transcriptions of the oldest drafts of each chapter of FW.

Jorn Barger The New Game archive Heavily annotated transcripts of the early FW vignettes, plus thousands of early notes.

David Hayman "The Wake in Transit" Cornell 1990. The first published thematic study of the early FW notebooks.

Jorn Barger "A Dreadful Omen and a History of the World" a reply to Hayman's study, tracing a subtle line of thought thru the early notes.

Thomas Connolly "Scribbledehobble" Northwestern 1961. A mediocre transcript of an important early FW notebook.

Jorn Barger "A Preliminary Stratigraphy of Scribbledehobble" analyses the layered composition of Scribbledehobble.

Danis Rose "The Index Manuscript" Wake Newslitter Press 1978. An edition of VI.B.46-- a late, comparatively boring FW notebook.

Roland McHugh "The Sigla of FW" U of Texas 1977. A valiant early attempt to sort out Joyce's thinking about FW's characters, as reflected in the notes.

I'd recommend that everyone phone up Garland at 1-800-627-6273 (extension 2, for customer service) and order ISBN 028228, which is Volume 12 of the JJA. This is one of the last volumes still available, and it's a most excellent one for Ulysses-fans, with a very early draft of Proteus, and other drafts of most chapters up to Scylla, along with facsimiles of the Ulysses notebooks and notesheets. It's marked down from $150 to $30, and there are still about 100 copies left. If you want the Index, too, it's 095405, also $30. And there were lots of JJA53 left (028546), and maybe a few of JJA36 (02835X) as well, a couple of years ago.

Surprisingly, the FW notebooks have been delved into by only a handful of scholars, with David Hayman and Danis Rose being the leaders. There's a 'Dublin group' centered around Rose and Vincent Deane who are slowly publishing transcriptions of short sections of the notebooks in their "FW Circular" (FWC). They follow Rose in the belief that most FW notes were copied from external sources like books and newspapers, so most studies in the FWC are (exceedingly dry) identifications of these sources, with almost no thematic speculation. The Ulysses notes have been studied much more closely, but there are still tons of exciting discoveries waiting to made there. If you don't have the Herring volumes, though, you're pretty much out of luck right now, except for my partial New Game transcripts.

Getting a handle on the Ulysses notes seems to require that one have a bottomless respect for Joyce's meticulous methods, and an infinite faith in his psychological discernment!

Methodologically, Joyce seems to have pondered the structure of Ulysses almost unceasingly before setting pen to paper. He jotted notes everywhere, and probably began each chapter by collecting and copying these onto large notesheets, gradually fitting these hundreds of tiny potentialities into a coherent whole. Cyclops and Circe, at least, started as short lists of scenes that were drafted separately and then fused, with many other scenes added, and other entire scenes sometimes being dropped along the way.

Since Joyce exxed out each note, in crayon, as he put it to use, we can catch occasional glimpses of these lost scenes. The surviving draft fragments of Cyclops show how this was used, but later discarded:

Cyclops 5:1 "LB made up to mother-in-law." red

Clearly in 1919, as Joyce set to work on the Cyclops chapter, "Lunita Laredo" was still envisioned vaguely enough that Joyce had Bloom winning Molly by charming her. (This note-format says that this note appears on line #1 of Cyclops-notesheet #5, exxed in red.)

Other unexxed notes suggest scenes that were apparently never drafted, images never used, but they still shed light on the characters, and on Joyce's design:

Penelope 2:35 "LB late threw watch in pool." unexxed
Ithaca 10:75 "Dubliners wake + continue (Vesuvians)" unexxed
Eumeus 3:87 "SD shown letter he wrote drunk" unexxed
Circe 2:89 "LB hugs SD for wit" unexxed
Circe 11:14 "tyre explodes" unexxed
Circe 13:21 "Haines a soldier" unexxed
Circe 13:56 "SD wires for cash" unexxed
Circe 19:78 "Haines cleans teeth at ?night" unexxed
Oxen 4:90 "must cover my neck (SD)" unexxed
Oxen 5:32 "Hat left behind. S.D. shows LB personality of ?eve" unexxed jew? love?
Oxen 5:38 "LB + SD I'm experience he youth. What is wrong?" unexxed
Oxen 8:50 "SD attacks hellenism, appendicitus of Europe" unexxed
Oxen 8:99 "not leave clothing under moon" unexxed
Oxen 10:90 "fucked in ?sleep" unexxed
Oxen 15:117 "road sank into silence" unexxed
Oxen 19:43 "make light of smthg (Lenehan = burn)" unexxed
Cyclops 1:60 "Family: ?Stoer, Kubler, Virag(o)" unexxed No Virag in the mss, before Cyclops
Cyclops 8:56 "Kiernan's other proprietor" unexxed
A2.4 Penelope "MB mocks R.B german" unexxed [from notebook V.A.2, page 4]
A2.8 Penelope "MB pretends to read book" unexxed
A2.29 Ithaca "LB mislays bad letter" unexxed
A2.38 Penelope "asks re BB who is that cad?" unexxed

Others may have been used without exxing, but it's not clear:

Penelope 2:55 "MB detested LB" unexxed
Penelope 4:26 "odyss of Pen" unexxed
Penelope 4:102 "old gods slumber in her brain" unexxed
Penelope 7:35 "Her 24 hours" unexxed
Ithaca 1:27 "SD-- virtue is sterile" unexxed
Ithaca 1:44 "SD not in love [3 dots in triangle = therefore] trustable" unexxed
Ithaca 3:7 "LB no stick" unexxed
Ithaca 11:73 "Ul = W. Tell" unexxed
Eumeus 3:82 "supposition that sexual excess lead to wisdom" unexxed
Eumeus 5:7 "sea drowns body crowd ditto soul" unexxed
Eumeus 6:7 "SD + LB both lie" unexxed
Eumeus 6:255 "T + Ul embrace" unexxed [T for Telemachus]

Eumeus 7:72 "SD at first repelled then drawn" unexxed [by LB]
Circe 3:32 "dreams of seeing himself" unexxed (in SD-context)
Circe 19:103 "[LB] meets someone who ?not salutes" unexxed
Oxen 4:43 "Dixon warns SD" unexxed
Oxen 5:91 "SD would this interest a woman" unexxed
Oxen 5:96 "Urinal: 4 pissers: oxen in stall, hanging heads, jokes, epigraphs." unexxed
Oxen 8:91 "Fucker obliges God to create" unexxed
Oxen 13:10 "development of egotism in LB" unexxed
Oxen 15:7 "averted signs" unexxed
Oxen 15:20-23 "1) ?stains 2) trembled into terraces 3) we ?entire suburbs" unexxed
Oxen 15:113 "sad truths, elder truths" unexxed
Oxen 19:46 "Rudy = Mulvey" unexxed
Oxen 19:51 "imagination has a body to it" unexxed
Nausikaa 6:62 "Suicide (LB) must ask eternity first." unexxed
Cyclops 1:66 "Eng. work well [therefore] so bored by Sunday" unexxed
Cyclops 1:68 "Violence begets habit to lord habit to serve" unexxed
Cyclops 2:57 "Eng. afraid to commit themselves" unexxed
A2.3 Penelope "MB lady Hamilton" unexxed
A2.4 Penelope "MB tells bad episode upside down" unexxed
A2.38 Penelope "BB priest" unexxed

Many (or most) notes go into the text essentially unaltered, for example:

Oxen 2:9 "to buy a colour" red 14.654

Some shed a little light by the way they were changed [Herring's pagination is based on the 1934 edition (alas!)]:

Penelope 1:65 "Some dean or bishop was there & he tired me out with guns" blue 725.23-26
Penelope 4:10 "MB needless locking" red 751:1-3?
Ithaca 3:60-61 "SD sees face mirrored in LB Weeps over horns" blue 687.15?
Ithaca 4:18 "LB finds etwas done which he intended ?to" blue 690.19
Ithaca 12:29 "LB's favourite dream" blue 697?
Ithaca 14:14 "SD drunk lay open weakest" blue 15.4955?
Circe 1:110-111 "whore tell of a Mr Dedalus"
Circe 1:110-111 "sailor [tell of a] circus rider" red 607
Circe 2:2 "heart ?torn by grinning claws" blue 567.3
Circe 6:50 "Cunningham in mirror W.S." blue 554.18
Circe 10:31 "LB no face" blue 15.2837
Circe 17:37 "witch 3 tears from left eye" green 486.17 of Bloom
Oxen 5:55 "SD. paralyse Europe." unexxed, but in Circe cf. 'hellenise Ireland'
Oxen 7:1 "LB ?pays compliment" red 14.90
Oxen 18:17 "different appearance of nurse Callan" red 416.5
Nausikaa 1:42 "L.B. remembers dream / 5.p.m." red 364.23
Nausikaa 1:94 "Urinal before Nausikaa visits, Sings coming out" red 364.4
Nausikaa 2:51 "LB writes in sand. what?" red
Nausikaa 3:17 "LB's favourite dream" red 17.1499 see also Ithaca 12:29
Nausikaa 3:27 "Dialogue of signs, good as any other" red, 366.14? 13.944
Nausikaa 4:84 "Martha + BB synchronism" red 363.30-31 Mailed reply 4:30???
Nausikaa 5:12 "LB: magnet: tipped: fucked" red 367.28-34 (JJ's colons) In what sense "tipped"???
Nausikaa 5:68 "Metamorphosis-- transformation scene. petrified grief stonecold" red 13.583? 13.1119
Nausikaa 6:63 "Repetition ridiculous, circle. circus horse" red 370.41?
Nausikaa 6:107 "Martha gives virility to man" red 13.859
Nausikaa 6:108 "LB turns up piece of paper" red 374.32
Nausikaa 6:113 "certain positions of knife now if you tried you couldn't. Chance" 375.16

Some might have gone in in several possible places:

Penelope 2:73 "Pen wakes, prays" blue Cf. 726:32-36
Penelope 2:76 "Dreams BB in her bed" blue 739.22?
Ithaca 1:67 "forget street where smthg unpleasant occurred" blue denial motif, 1894-mystery
Ithaca 3:8 "Fuck creates love" blue
Ithaca 4:64:72 "Fuck only time people really sincere" blue
Ithaca 13:52 "LB dislikes meet Ithacans" blue
Ithaca 15:24 "LB in mask selling ads." exxed in blue ['mask' = metaphor]
Eumeus 1:38 "LB speaks to the Nox" red [why Eumeus not Ithaca???]
Oxen 5:78 "SD returns to thoughts of a.m." red
Oxen 5:92 "SD speaks to the unknown, unseen-- What?" blue
Oxen 6:86 "Ulysses projects envy at each chapter" red
Oxen 7:84 "Places remember events." 163.17??? Holles street!
Oxen 12:25 "LB depressed" red
Circe 1:41 "SD remembers falsely place not seen" green 507.25? 1.170
Nausikaa 6:82 "Friggers live by themselves." red
Cyclops 2:1 "L.B. Sexual impulse only the root of tree" red Cf 289.7
Cyclops 2:76 "Penelope-- ?her body possessed" red
Cyclops 5:29 "Technique: Sudden vituperation follows depression ferocity Iliad" blue 12.1805
Cyclops 7:15 "LB meets people from Eccles Street" red

Many times, it's unclear whether a note was later deleted, or just used in so symbolic a way that it's hard to identify (or in some obvious way that didn't show up via Herring's attack using the concordance-- please let me know if you recognize any of these!):

Penelope 2:1 "Pen wishes to excite them but with her two maids." blue (maids = breasts?)
Penelope 2:42-3 "Pen asleep during slaughter: she thinks god did it" blue
Penelope 3:48 "Fatigued by LB likes BB" blue
Penelope 4:92 "incestuous MB" green (Rudy/Narcissus/SD? or Hester?)
Penelope 4:105 "MB chooses chair to fall on" (at end of furniture arranging? leaving a discoloration???)
Ithaca 1:8 "why Milly fair?" blue 677.22?
Ithaca 1:29 "life = 2 T shite 2 ettol. blood." blue
Ithaca 1:45 "SD LB's vendetta" blue 712.35?
Ithaca 2:29 "hubby learns secret 20 yrs after" blue Gardner? D'Arcy?
Ithaca 4:49 "LB knows end of SD's sentences (mental arith)" red
Ithaca 4:67 "LB up when she down + vice versa" cf 1:50
Ithaca 5:80 "Woman fucked: cries fill space." red
Ithaca 11:62 "12 unchaste virgins swab up and are killed hanged all in a row" blue
Ithaca 11:76 "Tel tries bow, greased." blue
Ithaca 15:56 "LB-- letter from friend of Martha to say she is a cheat" blue 15.765?
Eumeus 6:165 "T to take away sooty arms which provoke rows" blue
Eumeus 6:200 "Ul. loses way in maze" blue
Eumeus 6:249 -250 "U looks young T fears him a god" slate
Eumeus 6:254 "double image (Sail + LB)" slate 616.1?
Circe 2:40 "Circe's web" blue
Circe 2:154 "?Memory hunts for vermin in her clothes." blue 505.13?
Circe 2:160 "erotic woman in photo eye on camera" blue
Circe 3:29 "Face transformed into landscape" slate
Circe 4:51 "incarnation, descent of man to dog" blue 701.22?
Circe 4:110 "LB bores whore with pessimism" blue
Circe 4:151 "LB/SD/wh = S/T/L" blue wh[ore] Sun/Terra/Luna?
Circe 8:119 "dog knows death barks" red 15.4945
Circe 9:60 "pretend whore is RL" blue Rich Lady?
Circe 9:66 "LB + the spinach with hemlock" blue 454.19
Circe 10:88 "all follow ?panther (?BM)" blue except initials
Circe 11:15 "LB boasts of successes (1 Waterloo)" blue
Circe 11:50 "LB thinks of Cycl & stumbles" blue 491.10?
Circe 12:33 "pass 5 pm accident 5:5" red

Circe 14:74 "LB steals" blue 531.20???
Circe 14:75 "LB forgets MB" blue 473.31?
Circe 14:107 "LB mad laugh" blue
Circe 14:125 "spirits sniff round MB & BB" blue
Circe 18:24 "LB + MB part after 1 year. 1st lap" last two words exxed in blue Cf 558.33
Circe 19:8 "Haines ?board arrow, flee from justice" blue
Circe 19:39 "ghosts of cats" blue
Circe 19:42 "LB found purse, don't warrant it held only 9 frs" blue
Oxen 3:5 "Jacob + Esau struggle in womb" red 403.29?
Oxen 3:102 "terror causing roaring" red 14.265
Oxen 4:78 "LB to study medicine" blue
Oxen 4:84 "SD's bridal rite" 386.24?? "Take hands, Stephen and Emma..."?
Oxen 5:14 "Dry nurse (OG for SD)" red
Oxen 5:15 "Learn what heart is + what it suffers" red
Oxen 5:16 "Who called you from Paris?" red (Si D, with telegram?)
Oxen 5:24 "Jesus Christ save Mary Magdalen, (Mac)" red
Oxen 5:56 "SD. laugh at funerals" red
Oxen 6:13 "SD address letters Paris" blue
Oxen 7:76 "S.D. forgets to pay." red 14.1500
Oxen 7:88 "O.G. patriot of solar system" red Also at Circe []
Oxen 8:30 "Mumchance hanged for saying nothing" blue
Oxen 8:121 "L.B. other son? (6th week)" red
Oxen 11:50 "thy son shall come from afar" red
Oxen 19:50 "drooping weight of thought" red 416.20?
Oxen 20:12 "wipe (handker.)" blue 398.17?
Nausikaa 2:66 "LB, good plan, talk to self." red Cf 364.6
Nausikaa 2:108 "There are (no lights) or colours" red 371.24???
Nausikaa 2:116 "loi des isthmes" red
Nausikaa 3:33 "In mirror left hand is right" blue
Nausikaa 3:34 "Divining rod: outsiders important in science why" blue Throwaway???
Nausikaa 3:70 "Devil + witches lefthanded" blue
Nausikaa 8:12 "that's a lie, J.J. + you know it" red JJ O'M?
Nausikaa 8:58 ""W. Tell" / dislike" red
Cyclops 1:31 "Troy: liege bailiff's LB got in wooden horse" blue
Cyclops 3:16 "Memory of LB-- a very long time I was going to bed somewhere and there was a squareshaped or was it when I was where was that" red (cf Proust???) Cf 15.539
Cyclops 4:98 "Contracts invalidated by violence done to 1 party [therefore] social contract no validity for individual constraint by violence of birth to enter the society of the living on their terms." blue
Cyclops 4:119 "Haines = ear of the world [bracketed with] S.D. = Horace's deaf donkey" blue
Cyclops 5:1 "LB made up to mother-in-law." red CY-draft, deleted. (Lunita!)
Cyclops 5:55 "?Eng. no music" blue
Cyclops 5:58 "S.D. tempted to drink" red 298.34? (LB? SD is well drunk!)
Cyclops 5:67 "Lie: S.D. receives 5[pounds]" red exaggerated amount
Cyclops 7:23 "SD forgets to pay: Penelope keeps room for days" red rm in Tower? at JSJ's?
Cyclops 8:55 "L.B. loss of maiden name" red
Cyclops 10:1 "Wooden horse (Hungary):" red 331.28 (Sinn Fein on Hung. system from LB = wooden horse from crafty Ul)
Cyclops 10.36 "State: monster fed with our blood, must be starved." blue
A2.1 Penelope "LB brought her home" green
A2.2 Penelope "LB sent her music she never played" red
A2.5 Penelope "1st death, = G.M'D + LD + MP + CC" blue Gertie, Lydia, Mina, Cissey

Some throw entirely new light on mysteries:

Cyclops 10.57 "Bantam Lyons buys flowers for girl: drunk fall about" all but last two words exxed in blue 14.1511!

Some clusters of notes seem to show ideas evolving, although we have no idea what order the sheets were compiled in :

Oxen 13:12 "Haines = dope" red 405.25
Oxen 15:12 "opium >< wine" unexxed greater than/less than
Oxen 15:15 "tootache (Haines)" unexxed
Oxen 20:97 "laudanum for Haines" red 405:25

Oxen 3:5 "Jacob + Esau struggle in womb" red
Oxen 14:126 "squabble in womb" red
Oxen 15:4 "Squabble STC + TdQ" unexxed
Some notes seem to introduce a theme, but evidence suggests they really date from much earlier than the notesheet:

Nausikaa 3:14 "Under cloudy sky thought dull," red Already in Calypso
Cyclops 1:42 "U.P. = up." red This motif was in LE typescript Oct 1918

Some seem to be recopied several times from notebook to notesheet or notesheet to notesheet. [examples to be added later]

Biographical mysteries:

Ithaca 5:30 "Bloom's Cranly - Budgen" exxed in red
Oxen 2:153 "J.B.'s salvation" unexxed
Oxen 2:155 "J.B.'s wish to be Judas" unexxed
Oxen 2:156 "[ditto = JB's] phthisis" unexxed
Cyclops 4:81 "Beran v. officer = two impostors" blue Felix Beran (see E2); cottonball officer?
Cyclops 10:10 "John Eglinton, tried criminal assault, 2 years 2 sec" blue, 718.8?

A serious mystery:

Circe 3:75 "Si.D. what's wrong. He sleeps in my bed." unexxed
Oxen 5:72 "SiD's <a fool's> advice re friends" blue 507.16 (Philip Sober in Circe) May continue with:
Oxen 5:73 "What's wrong: He sleeps in my bed" blue cf

A puzzle (with solution):

Circe 2:21-22 "Wom. autobiog. 22.14.7.18" blue Penelope's tale is all out-of-sequence, age-wise!

A nice peek behind the scenes:

Cyclops 5:18 "Cycl. Exaggeration of things previously given: Superlatives" last word only exxed in blue 312.3ff, 313.10?
Cyclops 5:23 "Objects: tram (crystal sliding ark)" unexxed, continues with:
Cyclops 5:23 "noserag (Irish history)" blue 326.4 ?!?!?
Cyclops 5:24 "shout (welsh mariner, Cambrian bear)" blue 337.12?
Cyclops 5:25 "market (crystal palace)" red 289.16 [end of series]

Joyce's process of composition in both U and FW seems to have begun, for most chapters, with an extremely messy first draft, which was then faircopied at least twice, with dozens of notes being harvested and worked into each page, each time. Small changes were often introduced during the copying process, including occasional deletions that may sometimes have been accidental. Intentional strike-outs after the first draft are extremely rare.

The second or third faircopy would be given to a typist, or possibly read to a typist by Joyce himself. Joyce would correct many (but never all!) of the typos on the doublespaced typescript, and then (at least with FW) work many more notes in, interlinearly and in the margins. If the result was too complex for retyping directly, Joyce might make a new faircopy.

Many sections of the manuscripts were typeset individually for publication in literary magazines, and new changes were made by Joyce in the process of proofreading these, which were not always worked back into his master copies. Carbon copies of the typescripts also came into play, leading to still more lost revisions.

The Philadelphia manuscript of Ulysses was assembled (for the most part) from the faircopies of each chapter that Joyce prepared for the typists between Nov 1917 and Oct 1921, as Ulysses was serialized in the Little Review. It was purchased by A.S.W. Rosenbach in 1924 for $1975... a price Joyce found deeply insulting. Because Rosenbach refused Joyce's request to buy it back at that price, I prefer to call it the 'Philadelphia manuscript' rather than the Rosenbach manuscript.

The Philadelphia ms. supplies the earliest surviving form of most Ulysses chapters, with the exceptions of Proteus, and Sirens thru Circe. An earlier version of Scylla was apparently stolen after 1948, and may someday turn up again. (Could it really have been casually lost? I find this hard to picture!) The earliest chapters changed very little after this level... but the later ones changed enormously.

A facsimile edition was published by the Rosenbach Foundation in 1975 (Clive Driver, ed.), and may still be in print.

The Buffalo collection

All the surviving FW notebooks, and many other items, were purchased in 1949 by Margaretta F. Wickser, and donated to the Lockwood Library of the University of Buffalo. They were catalogued by Peter Spielberg according to (first) which of Joyce's works they related to, and (second) what sort of material they were. The most interesting categories to me are:

V. Ulysses
V.A Holograph (handwritten) materials
V.B Typescripts

VI. FW
VI.A Scribbledehobble
VI.B Surviving pocket notebooks, numbered completely randomly by Spielberg
VI.C Mme Raphael's transcriptions of VI.B and VI.D
VI.D Lost notebooks transcribed by Raphael

VIII. Misc. notebooks
VIII.A Zurich notebooks

The strange case of "Scribbledehobble"

Scribbledehobble, or Scribble, (named, by its editor Thomas Connolly, after the first word among its notes) is a great fat notebook of more than 1000 pages. Joyce initiated it in late October 1922 by numbering the pages and dividing it into headings:

Ten pages each: 'Personal', 'Chamber Music', each of the 15 stories in Dubliners, and (at the end) 'Books' and 'Names' Twenty pages each: each of the five parts of PoA, and 'Words' Thirty pages each: each of the three acts of Exiles

The Ulysses chapters were allocated in order, but assigned irregular lengths: Telem (30 pages, originally 3% of Ulysses), Nestor (10, 2%), Proteus (30 2), Calypso (30 2), Lotus Eaters (20 3) Hades (30 4), Eolus (30 4), Lestryg (30 5), Scylla (20 5), WRocks (30 5), Sirens (20 5), Cyclops (40 8), Nausikaa (40 6), Oxen (20 8), Circe (60 14) Eumeus (50 9), Ithaca (50 10), Penelope (70 8). Some of these irregularities may be mistakes in counting, or misguided attempts to fill the entire 1000 pages, but Joyce seems to have had some idea of which categories were going to take the most notes. (Scylla, Sirens, and Oxen are especially puzzling.) Apparently he anticipated continuing to fill this book with notes over the following decade, without altering the scheme of headings at all. Not surprisingly, this didn't work out!

Between November 1922 and the following August Joyce entered some 3500 notes into Scribble. The greatest number were entered in the categories Words, Eumeus, Circe, Penelope, and Exiles2. The sections for Dubliners, PoA, and Exiles in general did very poorly, except for a few headings (Sisters, A Painful Case, Eveline-- not the ones he'd guessed). The lowest-ranking Ulysses headings were Calypso (least), WRocks, Telem, Proteus, Hades, and Lotus.

If these entries were copied systematically from left-over Ulysses notes, the originals did not survive. Only a tiny handful can be traced to the notesheets or notebooks, and these were often not under the same heading in Scribble as in their sources. A few at least can be traced to the notepads Joyce was carrying at the time, and some few others to books he was reading then.

Although Scribble continued to be used as a source for notes throughout the composition of FW, there is no strong correlation between particular headings and particular vignettes or chapters, so it's hard to guess why he bothered sorting them at all!

In 1926, struggling along with his failing vision, Joyce seems to have begun the process of recopying unused notes, in a larger hand, beginning with the earliest FW notebooks, using the blank opening pages of Scribble for the first time in three years. It may have been at this time that he tore out a few of the center pages of B10, but otherwise he left that book intact. The next notebook in sequence-- the hypothetical D8-- seems to have contributed the first 400 notes in Scribble under 'Personal'. He then skipped B3, and began copying from B25 and tearing out the exhausted pages... but for some reason stopped before he'd destroyed it completely. The surviving stubs allow enough identifications to be confident that 200 notes came from that book, and that only unexxed notes were copied, but that not all unexxed notes were saved.

It may be that he was covering his tracks, and destroying evidence about the earliest plans for FW, but more likely he was just sparing himself some eyestrain by getting rid of notebooks that were mostly played out. It was not until 1933, however, that he employed a secretary-- Madame France Raphael-- to take over this copying job. She processed 40 notebooks over the next three years, copying only the unexxed notes, and making a terrible hash of Joyce's difficult handwriting. Of these 40, only seven were destroyed or lost (D1 thru D7), so that her transcripts are all we have left. (See VI.C.2, C3, C4, C5, C7, C8, C9, C11, and C16.) The rest can be compared to her transcripts, and may offer clues for analysing how she tended to miscopy.

(A final batch of notes was entered into Scribble late in 1926, under the heading Circe. The source for these is unknown, but Joyce was composing FW's chapter one at the time, which he considered a summary of the themes of the book.)

Dating the FW notebooks

Speilberg's numbering of the FW notebooks gives no clue to the dates when any B-series notebooks were created, and his bibliography makes only the wildest guesses. McHugh published some more-principled guesses in the "Wake Newslitter" in 1972, and Hayman's JJA-introductions build on these. Danis Rose has only recently solidified these in his 'Textual Diaries of JJ', The following table also notes which drafts were begun at each point:

(x = lost notebook; b3 = bflo vi.b.3; c/d/raph = raphael transcription)

1922:   vi.a (Oct-Aug'23), vi.b.10 (Oct-Jan'23)
1923:   x1 (Feb), ROC, T&S;, b3 (Apr), Kev, b25 (Jul), B&P;, T&I;,
      b2 (Aug), HCE, Mmlj, b11 (Oct), Cad, x2 (Dec)
1924:   Rev, I.5, b6 (Jan), I.7, I.8, b1 (Feb), b16 (Apr), III.1-2,
      b5 (May), b14 (Aug), d3 (c4-5, Dec), III.3
1925:   b7 (Mar), d2 (c3, c15, Apr), d1 (c2, May), b9, b8, b19,
      III.4, vi.a, b13
1926:   b20, b17, b12, II.2, d5 (c8-9, c10, c16), b15, I.1
1927-29: b18, I.6, x3, d6 (c1);  b21, b22, b26, eyes, b23;  b4, b27, b24
1930-32: b29, b28a, b32, II.1, x4;  b28b, b33, vi.a, b31;  b35, sheets.i
1933-34: b34, II.2, sheets.ii, b43?, raph.i, sheets.iii;  b36
1935-36: b40, sheets.iv, raph.ii; sheets.v, b38, II.3, b39, b37, raph.iii
1937-39: b44, b42, sheets.vi, b46;  b45, IV, x5, b41, b47, b30;  b48
1940:   c2, ?rumor.i

The most relevant question for dating a notebook is: what was the earliest draft to which this notebook contributed notes? It matters not at all to the dating, whether the book also contributed to much later drafts-- it's just the earliest draft usage that counts here. (This is surprisingly hard to conceptualize!)

Since Mme Raphael only copied unused notes, this technique is useless with her VI.C books. One sort of useful clue there, though, is the presence of Joyce's ideograms, or sigla, for the main FW characters, because these evolved significantly thruout the early years of the book's composition.

Characters, initials, and sigla in Joyce's notes

Even in the Ulysses notes, many characters were assigned abbreviations that can sometimes give one pause: SD, SiD, LB, MB, BB, BM, GMcD, RB(loom- Rudolf), DD, DWD(edalus- Dilly), AB(ergan- Alf), MP(urefoy), CC(affrey), LD(ouce), ABS(eaman- Able Bodied), CK(elleher), PD(ignam), JJO'M(olloy), DB(reen), Mac(intosh??? MacHugh?), BC(ohen- Bella), GD(easy), Cowl(ey), GC(onroy- Gabriel?), RG(oulding)

Many of these persisted well into the FW notebooks, as did a few of their Homeric identities: Ul, Od, Pen, Telem, Tel, T, N(ausikaa), OS (Oxen of the Sun), Eol, Cycl, Eum, Pseud, PsUl (Pseudangelos), Eurym(achus), Men(elaus), Ach(illes), Megap(enthes), Anti(nous), Ag(amemnon)

Joyce himself, his family and his friends, both from his youth and from his present are also mentioned in both series of notes: (These can sometimes offer dating-clues.) JJ, JAJ, JSJ, NB(arnacle), JFB(yrne), JB(yrne?), OG(ogarty), CPJ(oyce- Charlie), AM(urray- Alice), GC(lancy?), AC(onnolly- Albrecht), JMSJ (Fr Joseph McDonnell), HW, HSW(eaver), EP(ound), SB(each), CB(each- Cyprian), LW(allace- Lillian), OW(eiss- Ottocaro), FMH(uebner- Ford Maddox), MN(utting- Myron), HN(utting- Helen), HBP(rice), JR(odker), DSy(kes- Daisy)

These public-figure abbreviations offer little dating-help: JC(hrist), BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary), RC(atholic), SP(atrick?), SJ(esus- Society of), TMH(ealy- Timothy Michael), CSP(arnell), JHP(arnell), WS(hakespeare), OW(ilde), WBY(eats), WB(lake), GM(oore), ACS(winburne), AE, GBS(haw), STC(oleridge), TdQ(uincey), JHN(ewman), RW(agner), OW(esendonk- Otto), MW(esendonk- Mathilde) [The last three formed an adulterous triangle.]

Nor do these generic terms: PP (Phoenix Park or parish priest), DBC (Dublin Biscuit Corp.), EK (Erin's King), MD(octor), DMP (Dublin Municipal Police), HM(ajesty- Her/His), PC (Police Constable or privy counsellor), wh(ore), MP(arliament- Member of), K(ing), Q(ueen), HS (High School), WC(loset- Water), Ir, I(reland), E(ngland? Europe? Earth), T(erra?), S(un), L(una, the moon), AS (Anglo-Saxon)

For dating FW notes, though, there's an extremely important sequence in the early notebooks, as the generic human roles begin to take on personal identities. (Hayman was the first to point this out, in "Wake in Transit".) The following abbreviations appear even in the Ulysses notes, and persist in the earliest FW notes: M(an), W(oman), H(usband), W(ife), OGG (Old Gummy Granny), RL (Rich Lady?), OM (Old Man)

In the spring of 1923, characters from Wagner's Tristan suddenly predominate: Trist, T, I, Is, Brang(aene), M(ark) ...along with P for Patrick and K for Kevin. Mark's identity is extended to make him Isolde's father, and his name changes to 'Pop'. His wife appears briefly as Mop. By autumn 1923, Pop has become Earwicker or HCE or E, and his wife ALP soon after.

Tristan and Isolde are usually T+I, and the idea that they're mirror images probably led to the adoption of an inverted-T siglum for Issy. Then quite suddenly in B1, a whole range of sigla are introduced, including most of these:

888888  8888888888   888888   88  88  88          _8_
88      88  88  88       88   88  88  88         88 88
888888  88  88  88   888888   88  88  88        88   88
88      88  88  88       88   88  88  88       88     88
888888  88  88  88   888888   8888888888      88888888888
 
$E HCE  (M for Mark?)        HCE 'interred      $A ALP
                           in the landscape'




88888       _8_            888888      88         88   88
88         88 88          8888         88         88   88
88        88   88        88 88         88    8888888   8888888
88       88     88      88  88         88         88   88
88888   88       88    88   88888   88888888      88   88
 
$[ Shem   $/\ Shaun    $/[ Tristan  $I.1 Issy  $I.2 the Maggies

(The '$' form is a compromise designed by the FW Circular people.)

Most of the others are just capital letters:
$P for Patrick (just the letter P, used as a siglum)
$T as an earlier alternate for Tristan
$S for the serpent, or Sigurdsen/Sackerson, the old butler
$K for Kate, the old gummy granny (or for Kevin)
$X for the four masters Mamalujo
except:
$[] for FW-the-book (a square)
$I.3 for Issy's mirror-twin (a sideways T)
$I.29 for the 29 rainbow girls (an oval)
$O for the twelve citizens (a circle)

McHugh's analysis of these in "The Sigla of FW" is a raw first approach,
well worth reading, but to be taken with a grain of salt.

The British Museum

Joyce gave most of his other notes and manuscripts to his patroness Harriet Shaw Weaver (HSW), who donated them en masse to the British Museum (BM). This includes thousands of letters, many still unpublished except on microfilm. The letters contain many important direct clues to the evolution of Joyce's writings, especially major structural rearrangements. (There's a great need for a new, complete edition of the letters, especially since Ellmann's casual editing-standards have become recognized.)

The Ulysses notesheets

Also in HSW's BM-bequest were the surviving notesheets for Ulysses, and most of the drafts of FW. Joyce apparently hung onto the Ulysses notesheets until FW was entirely done, in March 1939. (Was he continuing to exx out notes all that time, for FW? Someday we may know!) Probably there were many more sheets that didn't survive, especially from the earlier episodes.

It appears that as he set to work on each episode (at least from Cyclops on), Joyce went thru a huge (but carefully ordered?) pile of notebooks and other scraps, copying everything he thought might be useful onto large sheets that would serve as the basis for the episode. One might have guessed that these collations would have been begun years in advance of actually drafting the episodes, and updated continually thereafter, but the appearance of the sheets seems to deny this-- in particular, all the sheets for Cyclops (the oldest episode for which we have any notesheets) share an orderliness that none of the later sheets share: in the later sheets, the columns of notes all show a diagonal displacement as one moves down the column, an effect that would seem slow-witted except that Joyce hews to it with almost superstitious dedication! It seems impossible that this pattern should appear in none of the Cyclops sheets, and all of the post-Cyclops sheets, unless there were a clean time-break between them.

There's a conspicuous pattern that applies to all the notesheets, however, which is that each chapter seems to cluster all the Homeric parallels in one or a few sections of the sheets. Probably these were being copied from one or two notebooks, dating to the earliest period of Ulysses' composition.

Most of the analysis of the Ulysses notes is available only in journal articles... and I haven't seen any of it yet! [insert refs as acquired :^] Robert Janusko "Another Anthology in the 'Oxen'" JJQ, Winter 1990 "Yet Another Anthology in 'Oxen': Murison's Selections" JSA, 1990 "A Grave Beauty: Joyce's Newman" JJQ, Spring 1991

Also in the BM are all the surviving drafts of FW. The greatest difference between the Ulysses composition and the FW may be that there's much less evidence for false starts and floundering within the FW drafts...

Conspicuously missing in all this are Joyce's working copies of his schemata for any of his works. Some have wondered if Joyce, expecting to survive at least another decade, planned to leak hints about FW's structure once some time had passed. (Whenever I feel guilty for 'peeking' into the notes, I reassure myself with this argument!)

The JJA archive reproductions

In using the JJA, not only do we have the handwriting to struggle with, but also the crayon exxings, which can be seen thru much more easily in the originals than in these reproductions.

The colors of the crayon exxings are summarized at the end of each JJA volume (except where the reproductions are in color). The consensus is that Joyce picked a crayon-color randomly at the beginning of every session of 'harvesting', so the same red color can often indicate many different harvesting-sessions. The most promising color information must therefore be for the less-frequently used colors (eg, slate and green in the notesheets).

The Ulysses-pagination problem

Almost every Joycean's favorite feature of the Gabler Ulysses is its convenient system of line-numbering, unanimously embraced by post-84 critical works. Alas, that edition now seems destined for the secondhand stalls, and we can be sure that Kidd's Ulysses will reject Gabler's numbering system in favor of the original 1922 pagination, with no auxiliary indices. So we'll then have JK22 along with RH84(86), ML61, and ML34 as the competing standards.

Herring, for example, gives only ML34, while others give only ML61 or RH84. Conversion tables are awkward, and having to count lines is a pain. I'm finding that the easiest solution is to keep all three editions handy!

But it seems to me that the only long-term solution is to hash out a scheme that's tied to subsections, paragraphs and sentences (which are effectively independent of a given edition), rather than page numbers (which aren't).

So a reference might be "Ith-bed-8" for the Ithaca chapter, the bedroom subsection, question 8.

Out of respect for Joyce's typographic esthetics, these could be unobtrusively added with the page numbers at the bottom of each page, perhaps with tick-marks in the margin for counting down from the page's top paragraph or sentence...

The Ellmann papers at Tulsa

The University of Tulsa (Oklahoma, USA) has all of Ellmann's notes for the bio, as well as Stannie's Trieste diary. (Revisionists take note! ;^)

Tulsa inventory

Ulysses:
chapters: summary : anchors : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12a 12b 13 14a 14b 15a 15b 15c 15d 16a 16b 17a 17b 18a 18b
notes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
reference: Bloom : clocktime : prices : schemata : Tower : riddles : errors : Homeric parallels : [B-L Odyssey] : Eolus tropes : parable : Oxen : Circe : 1904 : Thom's : Gold Cup : Seaside Girls : M'appari : acatalectic : search
riddles: overview : Rudy : condom : Gerty : Hades : Strand : murder : Eccles
maps: Ulysses : WRocks : Strand : VR tour : aerial tour : Dublin : Leinster : Ireland : Europe
editing: etexts : lapses : Gabler : capitals : commas : compounds : deletes : punct : typists
drafts: prequel : Proteus : Cyclops : Circe
closereadings: notes : Oxen : Circe

Finnegans Wake:
txt: [I.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 II.1 2 3 4 III.1 2 3 4 IV] : [HTML]
shorter: main : I.1-4 : 5-8 : II.1-2 : 3-4 : III.1-2 : 3 : 4 : IV
reference: thunder : Quinet : waves : [MP3 ALP] : FrALP : ItalALP : ch4 digest : Finn's Hotel : JAJquotes : search
drafts: NewGame : ROC : Kev : B&P; : T&I; : HCE : Mmlj : Cad : Rev : Pacata
closereadings: notes : ROC : T&S; : Kev : B&P; : T&I; : HCE : Mmlj : Cad
theory: AI : archetypes : WakeOS : notes : origin : Scribble

Portrait:
ref: main : ch1 : ch1 notes : ch2 : 3 : 4 : 5a : 5b : Pinamonti : [notes] : [Cave] : [Gabler]

SHero: outline : quotes : PoA04

Dubliners:
etexts: Sis : Sis04 : Sis05 : Enc : Araby : Evel : After : 2Gall : Board : LitCl : Cntr : Clay : Pain : Ivy : Moth : Grace : Dead
guides: main : [Cave] : [Peng]

Other:
Exiles: Ex1 : 2 : 3

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