Shifting Boundaries
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One of the great pleasures of being a lifetime reader of
Ulysses
or
Finnegans Wake
is singling out one episode and treating it as a relatively independent work; many of these chapters are, after all, as long as a medium-sized novel. As a way of freeing oneself from too rigid a notion of the organic and self-sufficient work of art (a notion that Joyce expounds but also ironically exposes in
A Portrait), it is sometimes worth trying to think of Joyce as the author of around sixty distinct works--with interesting interconnections--that happen to have been bound together as the chapters of a number of differently-titled volumes.
Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland (Lawrence Collection, R.703)
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Dublin's River Liffey and O'Connell Street in the early twentieth century provide the backdrop for all of Joyce's writings.
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Equally, the unpublished and the published texts of Joyce interlock in ways which make the separation between these categories somewhat artificial (and render the notion of a "definitive" edition an impossible one). Thus, for example, a kind of "Greater
Finnegans Wake" is emerging, consisting of the final text and the mass of notebooks from which it was drawn, carefully preserved by Joyce so that they could be read by posterity and now widely available in the facsimile edition of the
James Joyce Archive. To give another example, the reader who reads
A Portrait
together with
Stephen Hero, the surviving fragment of its predecessor which Joyce abandoned, has a complex experience that cannot simply be described in terms of "preliminary" and "final" versions of the same text. One way of approaching
Stephen Hero, in fact, is as an addendum to
A Portrait
exemplifying the type of novel that the Stephen of the end of
A Portrait
would have written--and then, by the time of
Ulysses, abandoned.
might suggest, there is a similar fluidity at the borderline between fiction and biography; the various Stephens of
Stephen Hero,
A Portrait, and
Ulysses, together with the Shem of
Finnegans
Wake, are related in interesting (and ultimately unspecifiable) ways not only to one another, but also to the consciousness we perceive--with increasing difficulty--as the "author" in each of these books, as well as to the individual named "James Joyce" whom we meet in the biographical accounts by, say, Stanislaus Joyce or Richard Ellmann. (We might recall that Joyce's early pen-name was Stephen Daedalus.) And the Dublin in which most of Joyce's fictions are set is neither wholly identifiable with nor wholly distinguishable from the real city, just as the 16 June 1904 we encounter in
Ulysses
is and is not a day in history of which the newspapers bearing that date provide some record.
Yet another permeable boundary is that between the works as published and the commentary which Joyce deliberately circulated to guide early interpreters. For instance,
Ulysses
carries no chapter-titles, but the reader who is aware of the titles which Joyce gave to friends, knowing they would be made public, and which have become standard in commentaries on Joyce, will have a different experience from the reader who has not come across them. We cannot say whether or not these "are" the titles of the episodes, however; all they offer us is a possible way of reading the book, one which is based on a decision to ignore the striking blankness at the top of the initial page of each chapter. (Accepting the titles does not lead automatically to a single interpretation of the chapters that follow, however.)
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