Joyce criticism has long since passed the point of supersaturation, with the result that many new books and articles reprise previously made but forgotten arguments and discoveries. In welcome contrast, Luca Crispi's new book is a rare beast, a thorough and thoroughly original analysis of Ulysses.
While not intended as an introductory study, Crispi’s book presents the cutting edge of Joyce scholarship in a manner that is accessible to non-specialist readers as well as indispensable for specialists.
Drawing on the vast range of Joyce's prepublication notes, drafts, typescripts, and proof pages, Crispi meticulously documents how Ulysses evolved over the course of its seven-year composition.
Though the manuscript archive for Ulysses is incomplete, there are tens of thousands of manuscript pages spread across a variety of institutions, including the National Library of Ireland's impressive holdings acquired about 10 years ago. Crispi cites and dissects these documents with peerless knowledge and insight.
The author's underlying point is that the Ulysses published in 1922 was not the Ulysses Joyce had in mind in 1914, when he first began his work.
Many aspects of the book that might seem fundamental are in fact relatively late conceptual developments, added as Joyce was finishing his book. For example, the detail of the suicide of Bloom’s father was devised only in 1921 and subsequently woven into various passages. It is one of many instances of Joyce amplifying Bloom’s backstory.
Like real people As indicated in the book's subtitle, Becoming the Blooms, Crispi takes as his focus the ways in which Joyce manufactured the main characters, Leopold and Molly Bloom. He endows these characters with so much detail and apparent depth that they seem like real people to many readers.
Indeed, Bloom is the subject of not just one but two "biographies" (John Henry Raleigh's The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom and Peter Costello's Leopold Bloom: A Biography) and a psychoanalytic study (Paul Schwaber's The Cast of Characters).
Of course, this verisimilitude of psychological depth and personal history is a product of Joyce’s writerly wiles and only came about through much work. The Blooms were not born out of Joyce’s vision but evolved gradually and sometimes awkwardly through his revisions.
Across many tightly argued examples, Crispi perspicaciously shows how Joyce “established many of the seemingly fundamental facts in the biographies of his characters at relatively late stages in the creation of the text”.
Without these layers of rich detail – many of which were only implemented in the final six months of the book's composition – it is perhaps unlikely that Ulysses would have garnered the reputation it enjoys.
As Crispi shows, Leopold Bloom’s backstory was only skeletal until Joyce began work on the “Penelope” episode in the second half of 1921, as if he only comes to the semblance of life through the construction of Molly’s memories.
As Crispi documents, the piecemeal disposition of the Blooms' detailed biographies throughout Ulysses illustrates how Joyce merged realist storytelling with more fragmented, Modernist narrative techniques.
Harking back As the details of the Blooms' backstories were being established, Joyce would revise earlier episodes to introduce foreshadowing. So his work of revision could be characterised as "harking back in a retrospective sort of arrangement," as he himself puts it in Ulysses.
In looking at Joyce's composition, we can see how he was his text's first reader and that, as its writer, he would only come to understand it through the very act of writing. But the author was also the first misreader of Ulysses (certainly the first of many).
As Crispi elegantly shows in a standout chapter, Joyce was inconsistent in establishing the details of the Blooms' courtship. The inconsistencies are so fundamental that they cannot be disentangled into a coherent narrative. According to details deposited in various parts of Ulysses, the Blooms could have first met as early as July 1886 or as late as May 1887, and this first meeting was either at Luke Doyle's home in Dolphin's Barn or at Mathew Dillon's in Terenure.
Over the course of various drafts of different episodes, Joyce successively elaborated upon two different and incommensurable “first” nights of Leopold and Molly. While other such confusions in the text can be attributed to the fallible memories of Bloom or Molly, this particular incongruity is demonstrably Joyce’s own mistake.
Joyce has created a text with so many details that even he could not quite keep them all harmoniously co-ordinated.
It is a challenge to write about Ulysses in a way that neither needlessly overstates its complexity nor neglects its subtleties and nuances. This challenge is exacerbated when one brings into the mix the wealth of Joyce's prepublication materials.
Investigating his compositional practices can enrich one's understanding of Ulysses, but it is also possible that such analysis might come across as too overwhelming.
Crispi's book juggles a complex thematic investigation of Ulysses through its prepublication manuscripts, using the latter to enlighten the former. Fortunately, his style of argumentation is neither overly general nor mired in technical minutiae. He provides rigorous and thorough appendices that describe the range of Ulysses's manuscripts.
In this, his book is a model defence and illustration of what is (perhaps unfortunately) called genetic criticism: that is, the study of prepublication manuscripts and their interplay with the so-called finished work.
It is testament to Joyce’s skills that he created the impression of fully articulated, complex human beings out of the careful deployment of words. This was no simple feat, and certainly not a rapidly achieved product. Rather, it was the result of a lengthy process of composition as well as strategies that Joyce learned as he was writing.
Peering through the published text to its prepublication materials with an expert guide actually enables a greater appreciation of Joyce’s talents. Crispi’s book serves as an object lesson in how scholarship can improve our understanding and enjoyment of literature.
Sam Slote is associate professor in the school of English at Trinity College Dublin. His most recent book is Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013)
