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Early Vestiges of Joyce's Ulysses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
No Writer ever revised more carefully or used his rough notes and sketches more economically than Joyce. Each work grows out of its predecessor and prepares the way for a succeeding work already contemplated. Ulysses was first conceived as a short story for Dubliners, the Portrait is a prologue to Ulysses, and many of the themes and characters of Finnegans Wake are adumbrated in the earlier works. Even Chamber Music, which appears to be unrelated to Joyce's great achievements, can be shown to foreshadow the action of A Portrait and to hold the key to many passages in Ulysses and the Wake. There is a sense in which one can say that James Joyce wrote only one book, a continuous effort to endow his own life and the Dublin of his youth with a universal significance. T. S. Eliot has emphasized this continuity in his foreword to the catalogue of the 1949 Joyce exhibition in Paris: “Joyce's writings form a whole; we can neither reject the early work as stages, of no intrinsic interest, of his progress towards the latter, nor reject the later work as the outcome of decline. As with Shakespeare, his later work must be understood through the earlier, and the first through the last; it is the whole journey, not any one stage of it, that assures him his place among the great.”
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956
References
1 Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, New Ed. (New York, 1948), p. 176.
2 See W. Y. Tindall, “Joyce's Chambermade Music,” Poetry, lxxx (May 1952), 105–116.
3 Bernard Gheerbrant, ed. James Joyce: Sa Vie, Son? uvre, Son Rayonnement (Paris: La Hune, 1949).
4 The Epiphanies are now in the Lockwood Memorial Library, Univ. of Buffalo. See John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, 1882–1941 (New Haven, 1953), p. 153, item a. x.
5 Gorman, James Joyce, p. 136.
6 Ulysses, Modern Library ed., p. 5. Throughout the remainder of this article page references to the Modem Library ed. of Ulysses will be inserted directly in the text, preceded by the letter “U” and enclosed in parentheses.
7 Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer (London, 1944), p. 119.
8 Stephen Hero, p. 106. Added in pencil at the end of Chapter xx of the MS.
9 For the dating of Stephen Hero, see Theodore Spencer's comments in his Introd. (Stephen Hero, pp. 5–6), and Joyce's letter to Grant Richards dated 13 March 1906 (Gorman, James Joyce, p. 148).
10 This passage, quoted on p. 137 of the Slocum and Cahoon Bibliography, is from a letter Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver on 1 Jan. 1920. Herbert Gorman says that in 1908 Joyce “burned a portion of Stephen Hero in a fit of momentary despair and then started the novel anew in a more compressed form” (Gorman, James Joyce, p. 196). Gorman may have mistaken the date, or he may, as Stanislaus Joyce suggests, have confused an attempt to burn Dubliners with the burning of Stephen Hero. We shall probably never know the exact details of this important event. The various accounts are summarized on pp. 136–137 of the Slocum and Cahoon Bibliography.
11 See Ulysses, p. 240.
12 The Essential James Joyce ed. Harry Levin (London, 1948), p. 355.
13 Quoted by Gorman, James Joyce, p. 176.
14 For Joyce's remarks on the “epiphany” and “stasis,” see p. 188 of Stephen Hero, and pp. 329–331 of The Essential James Joyce.