“Circe” and the Genesis of Multiple Personality

Abstract

In this article, I propose a correlation between James Joyce's composition techniques that required multiple revisions and his interest in multiple personality, which eventually blossomed into that comedy of multiplicity, Finnegans Wake. The Wake's relation to multiple-personality phenomenon is well known through figure of Christine Beauchamp, who is associated with Issy,1 but theme of multiplicity and multiple personality emerges in early drafts of Wake independently of her character.2 Rather than provide details of this emergence or consider its meanings within Finnegans Wake, I will make case that it grew out of reflections on composition of Ulysses, in particular Circe, and experience of its composition. Such a thesis picks up on Michael Groden's suggestion that the processes by which [Joyce] wrote book cannot be separated from other aspects of its meaning.3 The result is an exercise in a form of biography that seeks to illustrate how, as Ford Madox Ford's biographer Max Saunders says, [t]he simultaneous processes of living and writing shape each other in complex and often surprising ways.4 While Joyce's characteristic methods of drafting, notetaking, redrafting, and revision had already been established before composition of Ulysses,5 one aspect of it-the revisions-intensified during composition of Circe. Through a genetic account of progress of Circe, it is possible to see that Joyce, even before he began its drafting, required a new intensification of method of multiple revisions he had already crafted. As he conceived, wrote, and rewrote book, and Circe in particular, events around him affected his method. These occurrences included strong responses of readers: enthusiasm of Little Review editors, refusal of United States Post Office to carry installments, burning of certain issues, action brought against Little Review in September 1920, and its trial in February 1921. Joyce's growing celebrity (or notoriety) and circumstances of writing itself affected his methods. Together these events intensified escalation of what can be called a strati-