Joyce's Creative Process and the Construction of Character in Ulysses by Luca Crispi

Abstract

Luca Crispi. Joyce's Creative Process and Construction of Character in Ulysses. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. xxi + 368 pp. 60.00 [pounds sterling]. ISBN: 978-0-1987-1885-7. Leopold Bloom leaves other Dubliners in Ulysses little confused about his identity. He does seem to fit neatly into clear racial or sectarian categories by which they are used to negotiate Irish society: Is he jew or gentile or holy Roman or or what hell is he? asks Ned Lambert. To which Martin Cunningham answers Lambert by describing Bloom as a perverted (12.1630-35). Bloom himself seems to hold contradictory views on this: in his public clash with the citizen, violent anti-Semite, he describes Christ as a jew like me (12.1808), but in private conversation with Stephen Dedalus, Bloom qualifies this, remarking though in reality I'm not (16.1084-85). One way to determine whether Bloom is Jew or just bit Jew-ish is to piece together what novel tells us about this character's history and family background, as Luca Crispi does in Joyce's Creative Process and Construction of Character in Ulysses. Much of this information is condensed in question and answer form of Chapter 17, Ithaca episode, where we learn that Bloom's father, Rudolph Virag, converted to Protestantism shortly after arriving in Dublin from Hungary and continent. So, in Dublin parlance, his son may be swaddler after all--except that we also learn that Bloom underwent conversion to Catholicism as part of his marriage to Marion (Molly) Tweedy in 1888. To irritation of his wife, by time of novel's events in 1904, Bloom seems to have lapsed from Catholicism into some sort of freethinking. Ned Lambert's confusion may be justified. In addition to complexities of his lived experiences and background, it can be difficult to grasp identity of this character because, instead of conventional novelistic exposition, such details from Bloom's past are dispersed throughout novel. Crispi's book goes beyond previous attempts to recreate history of characters in Ulysses by re-tracing how it was that Joyce determined release of this information during course of writing novel. Poring over Joyce's notes and drafts, Crispi is able to establish that, for example, date of Bloom's Protestant infant baptism can be found upon earliest surviving version of Ithaca (85), but Joyce added details about conversion of Bloom's father to subsequent draft of episode during late summer of 1921 (76). Joyce used Ithaca in this way to consolidate hints about Bloom and his background from gossip of Ned Lambert and Martin Cunningham that he had written two years previously. Joyce's Creative Process is triumph of clarity here, laying out complex and diverse materials in such way that reader can follow Crispi's reconstructions of Joyce's intentions and working processes. For, as Michael Groden has shown previously in Ulysses in Progress (1977), pattern of Joyce's work on his novel was far from linear. Joyce began writing Ulysses for serial publication at start of First World War, before prosecution for obscenity in 1920 forced serialization in Little Review magazine to stop. From that point up to publication of his book in February 1922, Joyce only completed chapters he had yet to write, he also radically revised chapters he had already published. In process, these revisions inspired him to further revise whole novel during proof stages of printing novel. While these complications delayed publication of Ulysses, overlap between Joyce's work on different parts of book facilitated interconnecting textual weave of published novel. In midmorning, for example, Bloom notices compositor at work in printing office of Evening Telegraph. The reversed letters of type prompt memory of his father: Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. …