Joyce and the Building of Ithaca

Abstract

By the time most authors have collected and arranged their notes, struggled through the writing of rough drafts, and made a fair copy, their creative labor is usually nearly or entirely done. For James Joyce, completion of the first fair copy was just a good beginning. After finishing the basic version of an episode or chapter, he adopted what may be called an accretive method of composition. Each successive version became a new foundation on which to erect additional superstructure. The virgin margins of copybooks, typescript pages, and proofsheets were irresistible invitations to violation. Little was changed, still less was deleted; additions, usually flowering from seeds in his rough notes, filled those margins. Close inspection of this accretive process in any one episode, particularly in the later, more complex work, can be eminently rewarding. We may see not only how Joyce worked, but, far more important, why he worked as he did, for examination of his methods of composition throws new light on artistic purpose, style, humor, and symbolism. A good specimen for study is the seventeenth chapter of Ulysses, Ithaca -that seventy-two-page question-and-answer episode in which Leopold Bloom, at about two o'clock in the morning of 17 June 1904, returns home accompanied by his wonderful friend, as Joyce's notes refer to Stephen Dedalus. The building of Ithaca, Joyce's own favorite chapter and the last to be written (the concluding Penelope episode was completed several months earlier), went through at least nine successive stages. First there are the rough notes, a staggering accumulation of more than two thousand separate entries for this one episode alone, ranging from single words to short paragraphs, now in the British Museum and the Lockwood Memorial Library at the University of Buffalo. The initial rough draft is missing,