A. Walton Litz - The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

First draft of the opening to Finnegans Wake
(Courtesy of the British Museum)

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Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4
GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI KUALA LUMPUR
CAPE TOWN IBADAN NAIROBI ACCRA

Oxford University Press, 1961

Manuscript material first published in this volume is copyright 1961 by Harriet Weaver and F. Lionel Monro, as administrators c.t.a. of the Estate of James Joyce

Printed in Great Britain

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WHEN I first undertook this investigation of Joyce's methods of composition, and began to examine the drafts and proof-sheets of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, I was confident that these sources would ultimately provide me with a thread for the labyrinth. Like most critics of Joyce, I had been lured by the multiple designs of his art into believing that somewhere there existed one controlling design which contained and clarified all the others. For a time it seemed as if this might be true. Joyce's incessant revisions present a clear record of his evolving artistic aims, as well as incidental clues to the meaning of specific passages; and in the case of Finnegans Wake the early drafts are often the best running commentary on the finished work. But somehow the controlling design that I sought eluded me, and I have long since relinquished the comforting belief that access to an author's workshop provides insights of greater authority than those produced by other kinds of criticism. The irreducible gap between the creator and his work faces one at every turn. Indeed it now seems to me that the controlling design--the 'figure in the carpet'--lies always in plain view, not in the dark corners explored by the genetic or biographical critic. Therefore I claim no special authority for this study, although I have tried to found my conclusions on a factual survey of the manner in which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake achieved their final forms.

The obvious limitations of the present study were inherent in my purpose. It was my intention to write a 'biography' of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, tracing the growth of each work and using this evidence to document Joyce's shifting artistic ideals. My main interest was in technique, and I sought to discover how the methods of the Wake developed out of those of Ulysses. During the seven years he spent in writing Ulysses and the sixteen

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years devoted to Finnegans Wake Joyce's techniques underwent radical changes, yet when the various stages of composition are examined we receive an impression of gradual evolution in method and design which is not conveyed by the finished works. This study should supply further proof of the essential unity in Joyce's achievement.

I have focused my attention on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake for several reasons. Joyce's poetry and his one play, Exiles, are not considered because they stand outside the main stream of his technical development and present special problems peculiar to their genres. The exclusion of Dubliners, Stephen Hero and Portrait of the Artist may seem less defensible, but in all these early works Joyce was accommodating his art to techniques that were already characteristic of advanced English and French fiction. His unique contribution to modern literature is found mainly in his last two works, where new techniques are introduced in an effort to express areas of consciousness previously unexplored. Furthermore, information on Joyce's earlier works is readily available, and anyone who wishes to assess his stylistic development between 1904 and 1914 can do so by comparing Stephen Hero with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Although I have aimed at a fusion of critical and scholarly methods, hoping that they will support each other, some chapters are necessarily quite factual. The opening chapters of Parts I and III, which trace the evolution of Ulysses and the Wake, are primarily concerned with the details of composition, and their chronological structure may strike some readers as excessively detailed; but without the evidence provided by these chapters the conclusions put forward elsewhere would have little validity. I hope that the book will be read as a unit since it was written with a single intention, to record and assess Joyce's artistic development between 1914 and 1939. If any further justification for my strategy is needed I can only plead, with Dr. Johnson, that 'it is

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pleasant to see great works in their seminal state' and 'to trace their gradual growth and expansion'.

This examination of Joyce's mature techniques is somewhat specialized, and for that I am sorry. It was written for the reader who knows Joyce's work and some of the major critical positions, but I have tried to avoid unnecessary reliance on the minutiae of a critical literature which has reached appalling proportions. In recent years the need for general surveys of Joyce's art (such as those of Stuart Gilbert, Harry Levin and W. Y. Tindall) has been filled, and Joycean criticism has entered a phase of consolidation distinguished by a number of specific studies. My work belongs to this phase, and like most special studies it is dependent on the accomplishments of earlier scholars and critics.

In a somewhat different form this book was a dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Oxford University. For assistance in preparing that early version I am indebted to H. V. D. Dyson, of Merton College, Oxford, and M. J. C. Hodgart, of Pembroke College, Cambridge. I am also greatly indebted to the following for information and encouragement: John Bryson, Balliol College, Oxford; Frank Budgen; Thomas Connolly, University of Buffalo; Richard Ellmann, Northwestern University; Fred Higginson, Kansas State College; Marvin Magalaner, City College of New York; Joseph Prescott, Wayne State University; Lawrance Thompson, Princeton University; the staff of the British Museum, especially George Painter and Julian Brown; the Cornell University Library; the Lockwood Memorial Library, University of Buffalo, especially Miss Anna Russell; the Princeton University Library; the Philip and A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation, Philadelphia; and the Yale University Library. Parts of this book originally appeared in PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, Philological Quarterly, and A James Joyce Miscellany: Second Series. I am indebted to the James Joyce Estate and the Society of Authors for permission to quote passages from the Joyce manuscripts. I am deeply grateful to the

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Research Council of Princeton University for grants which supported much of my basic research and aided in the publication of this study.