JOYCE AS A READER

Geert Lernout

Lecture given at the 1996 James Joyce Summer School, Dublin.

The writerly text is a perpetual present for which there is no adequate word, because such a word would inevitably transform the text into a past. The writerly text is ourselves in the act of writing, before the infinite game of the world (the world as game) can be traversed, cut, arrested, frozen by one single system such as an ideology, a genre or one type of criticism) (Barthes, 11).

In this paper I will not address this confessional mode in contemporary literary criticism, nor will I argue for a return to a reader-oriented literary theory. Here I would welcome another shift in the interest of literary critics. Genetic criticism has followed poststructuralist theory in France and in many ways it takes its inspiration from the thinking of philosophers and psychoanalysts such as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. But it has become much more than a post-poststructuralist development. Many of the young critics interested in genetic studies did not pass through the thinking of Lacan and Derrida and the majority of the geneticists come from a decidedly non-structuralist background.

In order to explain what it is that geneticists do, I must briefly return to Barthes' discussion of readerly and writerly texts, which in a later book he turned into the readerly "texte de plaisir" and the writerly "texte de jouissance". Barthes always defined the second and "good" term in terms of the reader, who occupies only one of the two positions in the old communication model of literary communication (sender-message-receiver). It is the reader's presence, his present situation as a writer or re-writer of the work, that defines the writerliness, and therefore the value of the literary work. Of course we can have theoretical problems with this rather narrow view of the literary work, but the main difficulty is practical: it leads either to the confessional and autobiographical criticism in the later books of Roland Barthes or to a critical mysticism in which the true literary text always manages to escape all determination and thus to the end of all forms of literary criticism with the possible exception of an applied form of negative theology.

Genetic criticism concentrates its attention on what goes on at the other end of the communication model: that of the producer of literary texts. But geneticists are not, or not in the first place, interested in the writer as a person; they want to see the writer precisely in his capacity as a writer. A piece of genetic criticism is not a whodunnit but a how-did-he-or-she-do-it. The genetic critic asks himself the question how the writer managed to produce the work. This question can only be answered properly when we have more at our disposal than just the final text. Genetic scholars will first attempt to establish an archive which contains not just the final text of the work, but also earlier printings, drafts, schemes, manuscripts, typescripts, galley and page proofs (all of these geneticists call the "avant-texts" or "pre-texts"), but there are also later and variant printings to consider, and of course we can learn a great deal from the writer's diaries, his letters and witness accounts of friends and relatives.

The object of the exercise is not just to know exactly how, in our case, Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. The knowledge about Joyce's working procedures should help us read their most difficult works; genetic critics believe that by studying how writers have created their works, we can learn something important about the work, something that might well be inaccessible by other means. Needless to say, this does not mean that literary texts would be unreadable without genetic criticism, or that the findings of genetic critics have an ontological status that is far superior to that of all other approaches. But the findings of genetic critics do differ from the impressions or obsessions that other critics derive from or bring to the text. Genetic criticism is a historical approach and as such much less subjective than other forms of criticism. But of course genetic criticism can only do what it sets out to do if it is based on a careful pre-genetic reading and understanding of the final text. We can only begin to understand what Joyce is doing at a particular point of the genesis of the text, if we first have a pretty good idea what the finished product looks like. And, as I will try to show today, genetic criticism can be of geat help to liteary criticism.

One of the main findings of the genetic work on Finnegans Wake in Dublin, Paris, Madison and Antwerp, is that Joyce's last novel is even more intertextual than even the most poststructuralist critics think. Finnegans Wake is made up of bits and pieces that Joyce took from a wide variety of sources. It is therefore crucial that we should find out what bits went into the text and where they came from. The answers to both questions may be found in the Finnegans Wake Notebooks, a set of notebooks Joyce used between October 1922, when he began to use Buffalo Notebook VI.B.10, and February 1939 when Finnegans Wake was finally published. Close analysis of these notebooks has revealed that they are not so much compositional or private documents, but an in-between station that contains words and phrases which Joyce took from his reading and which he intended to use at some point in his new book.

Joyce was thus a reader before he became a writer and maybe that is a universal condition. Writers always start as readers, just as speakers have to be listeners first. We must begin by learning the conventions, before we can make use of them. Jacques Derrida's reversal of the historical and metaphysical primacy of the spoken over the written word is not relevant here: a child is exposed to spoken language which it acquires first by listening and then by imitating, and it learns to write by imitating the writing of others and thus by first being taught to recognize written signs. If you want to play a game, you must always begin by observing others playing it.

It is instructive to see how in his writing Joyce himself has explored the paradoxical nature of reading. Silent reading is an extremely private activity, it is something we cannot really share with anybody else. We can talk about a reading, but only when it is already over and then it is a post-factum description of the reading, not the reading itself. This may explain why there is very little reading in literature, except in postmodern novels where the reading by the reader of the text folds back on itself, as in One Hundred Years of Solitude where Aureliano Babilonia at the very end of the book begins to read the novel that we as readers have just read.

To what a shared reading can lead is explained by Dante in the Inferno when he tells the story of Francesca da Rimini, who, in the words of Dorothy L. Sayers, had committed "the least hateful of the deadly sins". In the second circle of hell, the circle of the lustful, Francesca tells Dante how she and her husband's handsome brother together read the story of Lancelot. When they read of a kiss, their own lips met. In Sayers' translation: her lover

Trembling all over, kissed my mouth. I say
The book was Galleot, Galleot the complying
Ribald who wrote; we read no more that day.
OR: quel giorno piu non vi leggemo avante (Inf v,138).

Another climactic reading scene can be found in another work of the Western canon: the famous conversion of Saint Augustine in the eighth book his Confessiones. After having lived an exciting life of wine, women and song, Saint Augustine is considering his options. Completely down and dejected he is sitting in a garden when at the deepest point of his depression he hears a young voice sing the words "Tolle, lege. Tolle, lege." Take up and read. After a moment's hesitation he picks up the Bible, opens it and reads a page at random. The text that he reads (in silentio Saint Augustine adds explicitly), is from the the fourth chapter of Saint Peter's first letter. "For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries" (for some reason this text has always reminded me of the James Joyce Summerschool) ... For this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit." This is the moment which Augustine had been waiting for and it signals his conversion. The song "Tolle, lege" (which Augustine sees as a command from God) and the reading of the Bible text lead to action. Both the experience of Saint Augustine and that of Paolo and Francesca represent a shared or random reading leading to action and in this way both are explicitly excluded from Stephen Dedalus's aesthetics, which believes that true art should aim at stasis not kinesis.

It is strange but when rereading Joyce's early works, one is struck by the emphasis on spoken language as opposed to written language, an emphasis on the sound of words and not on the way they appear on the page. The narrator of "The Sisters" for example is famously fascinated by the words paralysis, gnomon and simony. As he is gazing up at the window where the priest is dying, his linguistic impressions are exclusively auditory.

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

The priest's death only registers for the boy the next morning. Significantly after all the talk of the preceding evening, the realization follows reading. The house which was still nameless in the first paragraph of the story is now situated in Great Britain street and it is described as being registered under the name of drapery. Normally there should be a sign in the window saying Umbrellas Re-covered, but there isn't one now. Instead there is a crape bouquet with a card pinned to it; two poor women and a telegram boy are reading the card. This is the narrator reading the card:

"July 1st, 1895. The reverend James Flynn (formerly of S. Catherine's Church, Meath Street), aged sixty-five years. R.I.P."

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead ....

... he had taught me to pronounce Latin properly. He had told me stories about the catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte, and he had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest.

Here people are characterized both by their ability or inability to speak "proper English" as by their ability or inability to read or to know the difference between a "journal" and a "general". In the following story, "An Encounter", what the characters read or are supposed to read is a central issue. From the first lines of "An Encounter" we learn that Joe Dillon has a little library made of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel. That this kind of reading is not encouraged is clear from Father Butler's anger when he catches Joe Dillon with an issue of the The Halfpenny Marvel. The strange man that the narrator and Mahony meet on the banks of the Dodder is also very much interested in the boys' reading. He asks if they have read Thomas Moore, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Lytton. The narrator pretends that he has read every book the man mentions and this fact is then used to distinguish between the two boys: "'Ah, I can see you are a bookworm like myself. Now,' he added, pointing to Mahony who was regarding us with open eyes, 'he is different; he goes in for games.'"

Much more could be said about the role of reading in Dubliners. Almost every story defines characters by their reading. In "Araby" the narrator's interest in the bazaar and in Mangan's sister is explained by his reading: "At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me." Chandler in "A Little Cloud" is defined by the fact that he hasn't touched his poetry books since his bachelor's days and it is when he is trying to read Byron while holding his crying child that things go wrong. Mr Duffy in "A Painful Case" is a reader too. He lends his books to Mrs. Sinico and it is appropriate that he finds out what happened to her while reading the newspaper.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce to a large extent covers the same subject matter when he describes the powers and dangers of reading for his young autobiograpical hero. The beginning of the novel has little to say on reading. Like the young protagonists in the early stories of Dubliners, Stephen is attracted by the sounds of words much more than by the way they appear on a page. The first time that we are told that Stephen reads something, the first time that the word "read" or one of its derivatives is used in the book, is when Stephen reads something that he himself has written:

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was. Stephen Dedalus / Class of Elements / Clongowes Wood College / Sallins / County Kildate / Ireland / Europe / The World / The Universe.

Both in Dubliners and in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the act of "reading" is private and subversive. The word "reading" does have another connotation, that of having read a great deal and Stephen Dedalus, for one, is an extremely well-read youngster. He may well be the most well-read young man in literature. The intellectual all-roundedness of Joyce's autobiographical hero has had some impact on the impact we have of his creator: there seems to be a consensus among critics that Joyce was exceptionally well-read in at least five languages. Sometimes impartial observers could be deceived into thinking that James Joyce himself, like the artist according to Stephen Dedalus, is the God of Creation Himself. In a moment I will give some arguments for a correction of that rather flattering image of Stephen Dedalus and of James Joyce himself.

First I will briefly point out that reading is an important theme in Ulysses. In the beginning of Ulysses Joyce uses reading to distinguish between the two heroes of the book. In chapters 2 and 4, he has Stephen and Bloom read a letter. Stephen reads Mr. Deasy's letter about foot and mouth disease

May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of laissez faire which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old industries. Liverpol ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme. European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.
-- I don't mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.
Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch's preparation. Serum and virus. Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor's horses at Mürzsteg, lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous offer a fair trial. Dictates of common sense. Allimportant qestion. In every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking yo for the hospitality of your columns.
-- I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said.

Two chapters later, Mr Bloom finds a letter from his daughter in the morning mail. While making his breakfast, he begins to read it:

Then he slit open his letter, glancing down the page and over. Thanks: new tam: Mr Coghlan: lough Owel picnic: young student: Blazes Boylan's seaside girls.

While Joyce clearly uses the phenomenon of reading to characterise his protagonists, the act of reading itself is so dominant in the novel that it is impossible to ignore. Ulysses at times seems to have reading as a central theme. While Stephen Dedalus is supposed to be well-read and and well-educated, it is Leopold Bloom we see reading all day. In his first chapter, he reads Milly's letter and he later reads "Matcham's Masterstroke" when he goes to the toilet. In the next chapter he reads "the legends of leadpapered packets of tea" in the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company, he reads the advertising on the multicoloured hoardings, the letter from Martha Clifford, the notice on the door of the backdoor of All Hallows, he even reads the letters on the back of the priest's vestments and the labels on the bottles at the chemist's. And all of this just in one chapter: although it is Stephen who claims that he is to read "the signatures of all things," reading seems to be what Mr Bloom does most of the time. It is no coincidence that Joyce's Ulysses, with Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, is regarded as one of the great precursors of what Linda Hutcheon calls the narcissistic novel.

Reading is an important thematic part of Finnegans Wake too. We could discuss the importance of the letter, written on behalf of ALP by Shem about HCE and carried by postman Shaun, or we could discuss the description of the mamafesta in book 1, chapter 5. But in the case of Finnegans Wake, I would shift attention from thematic to actual reading practices, from characters reading, to what the author himself was reading while he was writing his last book. Strangely enough, this is a relatively unexplored territory. Of course critics have always been interested in the intertextual dimension of the Wake. In the book itself Joyce describes what he does as "the last word in stolentelling" and the earliest critics were all looking for the equivalent of Homer's Odyssey, the single key that would open this engimatic book. After the publication of the book, pioneering critics such as James Atherton did an amazing amount of work in identifying the major influences on the book. Since then we have had the publication of the complete and selected letters, of Joyce's correspondence with Sylvia Beach, and records of the cooperation with Stuart Gilbert and Paul Léon. Joyce's letters and the lists of books he wanted his friends to read or to order for him have been very helpful, but even more useful are the actual records of his work in the so-called Finnegans Wake Notebooks which are kept in Buffalo and which were published, with the drafts and manuscripts in 1977-1978 by Garland in New York. These notebooks contain not just titles and authors that Joyce may have been interested in, we can also find lists of words and phrases he took from the books, newspaper and encyclopedia articles that he thought he could use in writing his new book. In this way, the notebooks are the best tool we have if we want to determine what sources Joyce wanted to incorporate in his book. The work that has been done on the notebooks by genetic scholars in Dublin, Paris, Madison, Boston and Antwerp, has only managed to scratch the surface.

In the larger field of Wake studies, the notebooks are by and large an unexplored field and that is really curious. Why don't the adherents of current and recent paradigms not look into notebooks? There are so many things that can be said about Joyce's last book and so many things that have been said, that it is genuinely puzzling that so few people bother to check the notebooks for evidence about Joyce's reading habits during the seventeen years he was writing Finnegans Wake. Several books have been written about the influence of Sigmund Freud, but Daniel Ferrer and Wim Van Mierlo found proof that Joyce not only read some of Freud's case-studies, but that he made notes and then incorporated them into his "work in progress". Structuralist critics have made large claims about Finnegans Wake's affinity with structural linguistics: there are references in the notebooks to de Saussure and there is proof that Joyce read books on linguistics by I.A. Richards and Otto Jespersen.

For the rest of this talk I would like to look at three different schools of Joyce criticism that could benefit greatly from a close study of the notebooks. Feminism, post-colonial and political studies and cultural studies. I will deal only briefly with feminism because it does not have much to do with the subject of today's talk, Joyce's reading. Some genetic critics have put a great emphasis on the notebooks as repositories of Joyce's most intimate thoughts and dreams, which he then incorporated into the text of the Wake. The title of Danis Rose's recent book about the notebooks in which he calls them textual diaries may cause more confusion: they are not diaries in the usual sense of the word. Critics who want to use the notebooks to find evidence of Joyce's innermost thoughts or messages from his unconscious, should look elsewhere. And especially those critics who want to find evidence of Joyce's attitude towards his daughter, should read the notebooks with the greatest possible caution: for almost every seemingly clear-cut autobiographical item we might well find a clear-cut source in some book or article Joyce was reading. And anyway if it was a serious mistake when old-fashioned and naive critics confused characters in a novel with people in real life, I don't see why it would suddenly become alright to confuse HCE with James Joyce and Issy with his daughter. Feminist critics might concentrate their efforts on Joyce's real and documented interests in women's language and culture.

More relevant for a look at Joyce the reader is the political dimension. In the wake of the development of so-called postcolonial and political readings of Joyce and of the rediscovery of the theme of history in Joyce, quite a number of younger American Joyce-critics have become interested in Irish politics and Irish history. This used to be an area that distinguished American and British poststructuralism. As I wrote in my book The French Joyce: American poststructuralist tended to be purely philosophical whereas British and Irish adherents, such as Colin MacCabe, were on the whole more interested in the political implications of Joyce's work. MacCabe claimed that the absence of a truly revolutionary politics in Ireland after 1916 was responsible for Joyce's ostensible lack of political interest. MacCabe claims that "art can only participate in a revolutionary politics. If such a politics does not exist then the writer is inevitably condemned to be 'apolitical,' his or her political role reduced to a constant interrogation of the form of politics" (170-171) and Finnegans Wake is such an interrogation. American poststructuralists on the other hand were so bored by politics that one major critic was overheard complaining about the fact that the International James Joyce Symposium was going to be held in Dublin in 1992: "Oh no, then we will have to be historical again!" But she was already passé, because in 1990 the first panel on New Historicism appeared at the International Symposium in Venice and since then, history and politics have been here to stay, at least until the next fashion comes along.

In the past five years some rather extravagant claims have been made for the reinterpretation of Joyce as a postcolonial writer. In itself this is an interesting phenomenon in the history of Joyce criticism: for some inexplicable reason James Joyce always manages to be the writer who comes out well. Every intellectual fashion since new criticism has had Joyce as one of its heroes, even, for Joyce, such unlikely candidates as feminism or gay studies. But what concerns me here is that again the representatives of this way of interpreting Joyce do not bother to look at the notebooks for evidence. I will therefore do it in their place: Finnegans Wake is a postcolonial work in the strictest stense of that word, because Joyce began to work on the book at the precise moment in history when Ireland ceased being a colony. As luck would have it, we have a notebook that Joyce was using betwen October 1922 and February 1923. The Joyce family had had some first-hand experience of the Irish civil war. After some kind of marital crisis in March 1922, Nora Joyce took the children to her family in Galway. When fighting broke out there between Free State troops and the IRA, Nora was forced to come back to her husband in Paris. Both there and during visits in London and later in Nice, Joyce kept in touch by reading the Irish and London newspapers.

In order to understand what political developments Joyce was interested in, I must first give you a survey of what was happening in Ireland and in Europe. Ireland was torn by a civil war that turned increasingly bloody by the end of 1922. On January 9 of 1922 the new Dail had ratified the treaty with England that would give Ireland independence. In protest, Eamon de Valera resigned as president of the Irish republic. Arthur Griffith was chosen by the Dail the next day. On the 15th Michael Collins became the first Irish prime-minister. Two months later, de Valera founded the Republican Society which wanted to fight for complete independence from Britain and another month later, a group of republican soldiers under Rory O'Connor occupied the Four Courts in Dublin.

This marks the beginning of the civil war between the Free State government and the republicans. On Bloomsday of 1922, the general election is won by the Free Staters, which constituted a ratification by the Irish voters of the Treaty. At the end of the month, the republicans have to give up the occupation of the Four Courts. August 22: Michael Collins is murdered by republican soldiers. On September 9, William Cosgrave is elected his successor. On December 6, the House of Lords ratifies the Treaty and King George V proclaims the Irish Free State; the last British troops leave Dublin on the 17th. Although there are rumours of peace and secret negotations between the two parties, fighting, terrorism and retaliation continue.

The rest of the world is also in turmoil and some of the events during this four month period have far-reaching results: in September the Turks have defeated the Greeks in Smyrna and a process of ethnic cleansing is initiated. On the 11th of that month, the League of Nations accepts the British mandate over Palestine. A group of unemployed workers from Glasgow holds a hunger march to London in October, a Tory government is installed on the 23rd. Italy too is marching, on the 28th of October, Mussolini tells his followers to march on Rome, two days later he forms a fascist government. In the next weeks he will consolidate his powers and on the 24th of November, the Italian parliament gives him what amounts to a dictatorial power. In the same month the Tories win the election in Britain and the German government resigns because it has been unable to convince the allied forces to agree to a fairer settlement of Germany's reparation payments. A week later Germany gets a new and conservative government. Turkey and Greece become republics: the Turks get rid of their sultan, the Greeks send prince Andreas into exile. On the last day of November, the leader of a new German political party addresses a meeting in Munich: 50.000 party members come to listen to Adolf Hitler. At the end of December, the tenth congress of workers, farmers and soldiers' soviets proclaims the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics; the central executive committee is chaired by Kalinin; Lenin is reported to be gravely ill. In January the Baltimore Sun writes about the increasing influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the States. When Germany fails to pay the reparation payments, the French and Belgian armies move into the Ruhr and occupy Germany's industrial center, although Britain and the U.S. had refused to condone or support the action. When German workers go on strike, the right-wing government of Poincaré blocks off the Ruhr from the rest of Germany and sends French miners to break the strike. The leader of the French socialist party Léon Blum protests but to no avail. On January 29, the new party, the National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei holds another meeting in Munich.

From this quick survey it would seem that enough happened in these five months to hold the attention of even an apolitical Irish writer who had lived for quite a while in Italy and in German speaking Switzerland and who was so proud of his book with a Greek hero that he gave it the colours of the Greek flag. We know from the systematic presence of entries that he must have received the Irish Times regularly and rather quickly after publication, so that he could read all about these developments in Ireland and in the rest of the world, even if he chose not to read about them in French or British newspapers. Of course, I am not implying that the absence of references to events in this notebook proves that Joyce was not interested in them, but it seems possible to argue that at least during this period, they did not seem relevant to what he was going to write.

Before giving you some examples of the political news Joyce chose to ignore in the newspapers that we know he did read, we must first briefly introduce a third paradigm in Joyce-studies: that of cultural studies. Representatives of that type of approach try to deconstruct the gap between high and low culture, either by writing about works that represent lower cultural forms of expression such as popular literature, films, cartoon books etc, or by showing how texts that belong to high culture participate in lower forms of culture. For obvious reasons it is this second form of cultural studies that has received most attention from Joyce scholars.

But again the strange thing about these critics is that they do not venture into the Finnegans Wake notebooks and this is especially curious, because one of the first things you discover when you begin to work on the notebooks is that it is to a large extent in what is called "low culture" that Joyce finds his sources. This is evident in the notebook for the crucial period of the end of 1922 and the beginning of 1923. I will give you a few examples, in each case contrasting some of the political news of the day and the items that Joyce did choose to copy from the newspaper.

October 9: The Irish Times has an announcement by Liam T. MacCosgair, president of the Dail Eireann, offering an amnesty to all armed insurrectionists who surrender their arms before the 15th of the month. At the top of the second page of his new notebook, Joyce enters the word "Buttle." This entry is the first to be taken from The Irish Times and it comes from the first column of the first page of the issue of 9 October:

[ROLL OF HONOUR / (1914-1918) / IN MEMORIAM] Buttle- In proud and loving memory of Albert Edward Buttle, Lieutenant, Royal Irish Rifles, who died in France, October 2nd, 1919, of wounds received in action." Significantly, Joyce seems to be more interested in the personal tragedy of an Irish lieutenant who died after the end of an English war, than in the larger political problems of the day.

October 30: A headline in The Irish Times reads "Fascist Coup in Italy". Mussolini has been asked by the King, who had refused to proclaim martial law, to form a new government. On the same page, there is a "Proclamation by the IRA" which announces that de Valera will be President of the Republic and it names ten members of the Council of State. The letter is signed on behalf of the Army of the Republic.

James Joyce takes three items from this issue: The first is : "raffia allover pattern" and is taken, like the two others, from a regular section in the Times called "Woman and her Home." An article entitled NEWSPAPER HOLDER offers a handy solution for a problem we have all come across: "When he has read it, nearly every man drops his newspaper on the floor or throws it on to the chair instead of folding it and putting it away in the proper place. Thus the housekeeper's work is increased." The solution is a newspaper holder that can be made by the housekeeper herself: "The handle of the bag can be covered with ribbon or raffia twisted round and round, while the front of the bag should be decorated with raffia in an "allover" pattern of flowers."

The second item is a recipe: "Brown Betty / apples + breadcrumbs in layers" is based on the item: "BROWN BETTY. Butter a deep pie-dish, and place a layer of finely chopped apples on the bottom. Cover with a layer of fine bread crumbs, sprinkle with sugar, and spice and small bits of broken-up butter. Then add another layer of apple, and cover as before, and so on till the dish is full."

The third is still about apples: the notebook has "Windfalls (apples) / till it jellies" this derives from the following item in the Times: "There has been a wonderfull crop of apples this year, so large that great numbers of them have been pushed off the branches by their fellows, as well as those that have fallen off in the late storms. "Windfalls," when gathered fresh, may be used in making tarts or puddings, and the very small ones boiled down for jelly ... to each pint of fluid allow a pound of sugar, and boil till it jellies.

November 1: There are, according to the Irish Times, great rejoycings in Rome: the Italian nation is urged to return to work. In Ireland the nation is still divided: the irregulars explode a bomb in Oriel house in Dublin. James Joyce copies two names from the public announcement of deaths, births and marriages, and he notes that Father Vaughan, recently deceased, had been granted the privilege of a portable altar in 1916, as a special favour from Benedict XV.

On November 14 the Times reports of a group of Bavarian fascisti who want to wage war against unclean elements: "Bavarian 'Grey-shirts', corresponding to the Italian fasicti, also somewhat similar to the American Ku Klux Klain, are out to 'clear Germany of unclean elements, principally Jews and foreigners," according to Herr Hitler, leader of the Greyshirts in a long interview."

November 17: The results are in of the general elections in Britain, not without relevance to Irish affairs, and they do not confirm earlier reports that the Labour party has won. After an extra day of counting, the conservatives are declared winners with a considerable majority. James Joyce again notes elements of an article from the section "Woman and her home," entitled this time, "Underclothes. Small, but important points": "dear delightful firelit hours / shortest of culottes / woolback satin / sickabed". These are based on: "Since our sense of order is satisfied by having 'things to match', there is a nightdress, a petticoat, and the shortest of 'culottes', embroidered with white heather ... The dear delightful firelit hours can be doubly appreciated if one is the possessor of a becoming negligée. In wool-back satin or velveteen this garment need not be inordinately expensive, ... Short negligées, for those who are sick-a-bed and inclined to be luxurious, can be fashioned of scraps of georgette and lace, ... Another entry is taken from a book review of Animal Curiosities by W.S. Berridge: "One comes, for example, upon such items as the fact that a hundred thousand edible snails are used annually in London restaurants, mostly for glazing pastry and thickening mock turtle soup, and that the word "toucan" is a South American name, meaning "the bird that is smaller than his own beak."

November 18: The civil war enters a new stage when the Free State Government executes four republicans for the possession of fire-arms. For the first time, Joyce takes an item from a political commentary: "It was because these men were found under these circumstances, and with such intent, that it was necessary to execute them this morning. It is the old story: "Blood will suffer blood to die hungry; but blood will not suffer blood to be spilt."

And a little later: "not insult a priest by / asking him to take oath" is from a report of a sitting of the commission appointed by Dublin Corporation to investigate the treatment of republican prisoners: "Rev. Kieran O'Farrelly, Mount Argus, came forward to give evidence, and the chairman said they would not insult him by asking to take an oath." But in between these items Joyce has "(chrysanthe! Mum" which is based on an article about large cultivated chrysanthemums: "These Goliath "mums," as the trade hideously calls them." The flowers are followed by a headline from the economics section: "OIL SHARES CHEERFUL" and by the solution for what I have always thought of as a minor mystery: "frisky shorty" (tramp): In an article about "Literary Vagabonds" we read: "He [the author W.H. Davies] varied the monopoly of tramping by stealing free rides on freight trains with kindred knights of the road known as "Boston Slim" and "Frisky Shorty.""

December 2: In a special report from Cairo about the discovery on November 26 of the tomb of Tutankhamen in the Valley of Kings, we read that "the eminent archaeologist and Director-General of the Service of Antiquities" has claimed that this may well be the greatest discovery ever made. [By the way, his name is Dr. Lacan]. Joyce ignores all this and from this newspaper he takes two references to the civil war: "the 'boys' (I.R.A.)" is based on a report of an ambush of a group of National Troops by "Irregulars" on the border between Meath and Kildare] "The day ended disastrously for the "boys," they told us, and then, as if they were merely unimportant details--"22 prisoners captured, and one of our chaps killed." "Peter the Painter", also on p. 49 of the notebook, refers to an account on the same page of an ambush in Collinstown: "The attacking party were all armed with Service rifles, and some of them carried "Peter the Painters" and Smith and Wesson revolvers.

Other interesting items in the december issues of the Times: on the 6th of December, the Union ceases to exist and Ireland officially becomes part of the commonwealth of British Nations: the Times has a heading: "December 6: Birth of the Irish Free State". On 9 December the Times reports the execution, in reprisal, of Rory O'Connor, Liam Mellows, Joseph McKelvey and Richard Barrett. On the twelfth: a small article mentions "Fatal fall from ladder" and it specifies: "Death due to shock and hemorrhage, following fracture of the skull, ...". Isn't there an Irish-American ballad that has something about somebody falling from a ladder? December 16 has an article about Chapelizod. None of the above reports were used by Joyce. Neither does he mention the fact that the last British troops leave Irish soil on the 18th nor does he note the funeral of Mr. Thomas W. Lyster, MA., Chief Librarian on

December 18: instead he writes down another recipe title from the woman's page of that day: "POOR MAN'S DUCK: "Bone half a shoulder of mutton and lay it open, spread with sage and onion stuffing, roll and tie it up into the shape of a duck."

January 3: The Times reports rumours that secret peace talks are held between the Free State government and the irregulars. James Joyce notes down the phrase: "a bertha of lace" based on another item in the "Woman and her Home" section: "Round the shoulder line a bertha of lace would disguise any ugly signs of "bonyness," and would suit almost any young fresh-complexioned girl." From a brief article about "quaint and curious" examination answers] he quotes four items:

Wisdom is not always absent, as witness the boy who described teaching as a "sedimentary profession," ... What should be said of the child who gave, as the plural of "forget-me-not," "forget-us-not?" Most of us would be inclined to award full marks to this young rationalist, and not less to that other budding materialist who translated "de mortuis nil nisi bonum" as, "There's nothing but bones in the dead." Some of these "howlers" are, indeed, almost too neat to be natural. One young genius, mindful, perhaps, of a certain type of newspaper editorial, declared that "letters in sloping print are hysterics."

... I have several times had experience of the fact that it is the finer and sharper ear that fails, and the inferior ear (for common sounds) that catches the "short, shrill shriek" of the passing flittermouse. ... There are, however, so many different kinds of bats (even in Ireland we have seven), with voices of different degrees of strength, ... The largest of our Irish bats known as Leisler's bat possesses a peculiarly strong voice; ... There are other kinds of bats, Daubenton's, for example, which usually seem to fly quite silently."

Of course this is only one notebook and one newspaper, and Vincent Deane has shown that at the time, Joyce was reading quite a number of different newspapers, but in that case he was keeping up with a murder trial in London, not with political events in Ireland or elsewhere. There are references to the 'troubles' in Ireland in the notebook which I could not trace in the Irish Times and which must have come from elsewhere. But they are few and far between; the most famous is "Move up Mick, Make Room for Dick", which was a note left on the grave of Michael Collins to warn Richard Mulcahy that he could be assassinated next. In the Wake it becomes: "Move up. Mumpty! Mike Room for Rumpty!" 99.19-20.

Joyce was interested in Irish Free State politics, as was clear earlier in the year when Nora and his children were in Galway, but in his usual egotistical manner he preferred to see the civil war as an attack against himself. His notes in notebook VI.B.10 show that he was more interested, at least for the purposes for which he was making notes in the first place, in words than in events or things: he notes the names of the weapons and quaint phrases, but there are no conceptual notes, no traces of narrative sequences, nothing that suggests a link between what is happening in Ireland or in the rest of the world on the one hand and on the other the history of the world that Joyce was going to write according to a comment he made to Miss Weaver in August 1922, two months before he began to use notebook VI.B.10.

The notes that we have looked at come from one source only, the Irish Times and we have seen that in his selection from the paper, Joyce was much more interested in trivial and low cultural items than in politics or anything that belongs to the high culture with which his own work has become associated. Notebook B.10 also contains notes about a famous London murder trial; notes from a review article about something called "mental healing,", from another article about fox-hunting, there are references to a comic-strip, etc. Joyce made notes from articles on the most diverse subjects: about a war on rats, about Mademoiselle Lorly, barmaid at the Palace Hotel, about a famous boxing match between Carpenter and Siki, about birds in Dublin Bay, the history of the College Historical Society at Trinity, about the Dublin leather trade, or about the resignation of the Chief Steward at Trinity, even about the price of Coal or of Imported Bacon.The notebook we have been looking at is only one of more than sixty and B.10 is not special: we have been able to find a similar catholic and decidedly low-brow taste in most of the other notebooks. There are occasional lapses into the high-brow culture I associate with Stephen Dedalus on the beach. We do have a whole list of notes on Pelagianism somewhere, one of those herecies Stephen is so fond of, but Joyce found what he needed in an article in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I would need more time than I have here to show the history of the view of Joyce as a modern-day renaissance man, but it is clear that this view was based to a large extent on the pre-ironic reading of the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen Dedalus's precocity in that book impresses us (and that is what it was supposed to do) and it set the standard for the portrayal of adolescents in fiction. Joyce made his hero uncommonly precocious by placing events of his own life a number of years earlier. Another and much more prevalent technique is the fact that Stephen Dedalus's learning is second-hand: when he builds an aesthetics on Aquinas, this is not based on a close and prolonged study of the Summa Theologica on the part of his creator. Jacques Aubert has shown that Joyce did not find the central sentence, Aquinas's pulchra enim dicuntur ea quae visa placent (and much else besides) in the Saint's Opera omnia but in Bernard Bosanquet's A History of Aesthetic (1892) (Aubert, 107).

Joyce himself seems to have been aware of the shallowness of Stephen's learning. On p. 86 of the notebook we have just been looking at, Joyce noted: "discussing Aden war / SD said that he / had read Motley's Rise / of Dutch Republic / (had read title)." This is a rather sophisticated critique of his alter ego, considering that it is Leopold Bloom who obliquely refers to the same book in a speech in "Circe" on 15.1390.

What does all of this mean for Joyce the writer? For one thing, that Hugh Kenner was right about Stephen in A Portrait. For another, that this also tells us something about the Stephen of Ulysses and about the relationship between Bloom and Stephen in that book. Finally it implies that just as Ulysses was a book about reading, in many ways Finnegans Wake is an anti-reading book. Not only is it "writerly" in Roland Barthes' terms, when it reflects on itself, as it does on a number of places in Book I, especially chapters 1, 5 and 7, Finnegans Wake excludes reading as a strategy leading to knowledge. Not only does it keep telling us about oral tales and tellings, it also tells us that reading is the least interesting thing you can do with a text. In Chapter one we are told to look at the individual letters, in chapter 5 we are told to study the form of writing, the colour of the envelope, and in fact everything except what the text itself means. When we are introduced to the writer Shem in chapter 7, we are told that he is nothing but a liar and a plagiarist. The text asks the question: "One cannot even begin to post figure out a statuesquo ante as to how slow in reality the excommunicated Drumcondria, nate Hamis, really was. Who can say how many pseudostylic shamiana, how few or how many of the most venerated public impostures, how very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in the first place by this morbid process from his pelagiarist pen?"

What the notebooks seem to suggest is that if Joyce was going to write with Finnegans Wake a history of the world, we should read this not only as an objective but also as a subjective genetive: it is the world telling its history via Joyce's reading or, in Beckett's words, Finnegans Wake is not about something, it is that something itself.

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Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Noonday Press, 1974.

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