Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Joyce’s creative process and the construction of characters in Ulysses
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.ucd.ie/research/people/englishdramafilm/drlucacrispi/ * http://jamesjoyce.ie/tag/luca-crispi/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2003042811
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2003042811
HEADING: Crispi, Luca
000 00596cz a2200133n 450
001 5979968
005 20030710161843.0
008 030624n| acannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2003042811
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC
100 1_ |a Crispi, Luca
670 __ |a Joyce, James. The Finnegans wake notebooks at Buffalo, 2001- : |b Notebook VI.B.10 t.p. (Luca Crispi) p. 16 (The Poetry/Rare Books Collection, University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York)
670 __ |a Website for SUNY at Buffalo Libraries, June 24, 2003 |b (Luca Crispi, Joyce Scholar-in-Residence)
953 __ |a lh22 |b lh22
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:B.A., 1986; M.A., 1992; Ph.D., 2001.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Academic. University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, lecturer and assistant professor in English. Dublin James Joyce Journal, founding coeditor, 2008–; Dublin James Joyce Summer School, associate director; State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, James Joyce Scholar-in-Residence, 1996-2003; National Library of Ireland, cocurator of exhibits on James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, 2003-07.
WRITINGS
Contributor of chapters to books, including European Joyce Studies 25: New Quotatoes: Joycean Exogenisis in the Digital Age, edited by Ronan Crowley and Dirk Van Hulle, Brill, 2016.
Contributor of articles to journals, including James Joyce Quarterly and Genetic Joyce Studies.
SIDELIGHTS
Luca Crispi is an academic. He serves as a lecturer in the University College Dublin School of English, Drama & Film. Crispi’s research interests include modernism, James Joyce, and Anglo-Irish literature. With Anne Fogarty, he is a founding coeditor of the Dublin James Joyce Journal. Crispi also serves as associate director of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School. From 2003 until 2007, he worked as the James Joyce and W.B. Yeats Research Scholar at the National Library of Ireland. He has also served as a cocurator of exhibits on James Joyce and W.B. Yeats with the National Library of Ireland. In 2007 Crispi coedited How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide with Sam Slote.
Crispi published Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms in 2015. The account examines how James Joyce created his characters Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy Bloom and also relates a history of the formulation of his novel Ulysses. Crispi uses Joyce’s notes to expand on the evolution of the two characters and additionally shows the chronology of Ulysses from the earliest notes in 1917 through to publication in 1922 and subsequent editions. Crispi delineates Joyce’s creative process through his notes and the fictionalization of Joyce’s experiences in the creation of the Blooms.
Writing in the Irish University Review, Tim Conley observed that “Crispi calls his book, dense with charts and footnotes, ‘an inductively empirical descriptive study.’…. Such a characterization does not convey the sheer amount of textual material that Crispi has sorted through, studied, and organized.” Conley also recorded that “at the head of each chapter and section, Crispi lists and dates the relevant manuscripts, which is both handy for reference and obviates to a large degree the obstructions such technical details would otherwise pose in the writing.” Conley summarized that “the writing is, if occasionally a little workmanlike, never unclear, a rare feat in any study of Joyce. The appendices—an overview and glossary of documents, a census of manuscripts by episode, and chronological lists of extant manuscripts and proofs—are reason alone to have this book on a shelf within ready reach. Even the most dedicated, lifetime reader of Ulysses is going to learn a few arresting things about the novel (and the novels it might have been). Crispi’s is an instructive book for the student and a necessary book for the scholar.”
In a review in the Oxford Academic Review of English Studies, John McCourt remarked that “as is so often the case, the value of genetic criticism is to be found not so much in the by now well-rehearsed theory but in the strength of its application and practice.” McCourt continued, saying that “this book which, rather surprisingly but very efficaciously, begins and ends with the ‘conquering hero,’ Blazes Boylan—pointing out that it is very much more his day than it is Bloom’s—contains practice of the highest order based on a hugely impressive, broad and deep knowledge of the sprawling, sometimes fragmentary, often borderline-illegible body of writing—notes, drafts, faircopies, typescripts, and proofs—that combine to make up the Joyce corpus of manuscripts. Crispi’s painstaking scholarship leaves us with no doubt that it would be perilous to ignore the evolutionary archive of Joyce’s novel.”
Reviewing the book in the Irish Times, Sam Slote mentioned that “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.” Slote concluded that “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.” Writing on the Eason Web site, Margot Norris found that “Crispi’s learning is formidable, his archival research dedicated, authoritative and immensely assiduous, and his responsiveness to textual detail impeccable. The result is a magisterial contribution, both to Joyce scholarship, and to the study of modernist literature in general.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, November 1, 2007, C.S. Kalish, review of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, p. 472; April 1, 2016, review of Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms, p. 1165.
Irish Times, March 5, 2016, Sam Slote, review of Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses.
Irish University Review, September 22, 2016, Tim Conley, review of Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses, p. 387.
James Joyce Quarterly, spring, 2008, Louis Armand, review of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake, pp. 591-600.
Modernism/Modernity, November 1, 2007, Vike Martina Plock, review of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake, p. 780.
Review of English Studies, June 1, 2016, John McCourt, review of Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses, pp. 610-612.
ONLINE
Eason Online, http://www.easons.com/ (March 11, 2017), Margot Norris, review of Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses.
Oxford Academic Review of English Studies, https://academic.oup.com/ (June 1, 2016), review of Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses.
University College Dublin Web site, http://www.ucd.ie/ (April 28, 2017), author profile.*
LUCA CRISPI is lecturer in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film. He is co-editor of How Joyce Wrote “Finnegans Wake” (2007) and author of Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in “Ulysses”(2015). He is a founding co-editor with Anne Fogarty of the Dublin James Joyce Journal (2008- present). He was the James Joyce and W.B. Yeats Research Scholar at the National Library of Ireland, 2003-7, and co-curator of the exhibitions James Joyce and Ulysses and The Life and Works of W.B. Yeats and was the James Joyce Scholar-in-Residence, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, from 1996 to 2003.
Dr Luca Crispi is Lecturer in James Joyce Studies and Modernism in the School of English, Drama and Film and in the UCD Centre for Research for James Joyce Studies. His monograph - Joyce's Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms - was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. He is a founding co-editor with Anne Fogarty of the Dublin James Joyce Journal (Volumes 1-8: 2008-15) and teaches on the Anglo-Irish as well as the Modern and Contemporary Literature MA programmes. He is also the Associate Director of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School and was a Board Member of the International James Joyce Foundation (2007-12).
He was the co-editor with Catherine Fahy of The Joyce Studies 2004 Series (National Library of Ireland, 2004-5) and with Sam Slote (TCD) of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide (Wisconsin UP, 2007). He was the James Joyce and W.B. Yeats Research Scholar at the National Library of Ireland from 2003 to 2007 and co-curator of the exhibitions James Joyce and Ulysses at the National Library of Ireland (2004-6) and Yeats: The Life and Works of W.B Yeats (2006-ongoing), and was the James Joyce Scholar-in-Residence, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, from 1996 to 2003. He completed a comprehensive catalogue of the Buffalo Joyce Collections in 2010. His recent articles have appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, the Journal of Modern Literature, Joyce Studies Annual and Genetic Joyce Studies and he is currently working on a monograph entitled Revising the Modernist Aesthetic of 'Ulysses'. He has articles forthcoming in European Joyce Studies and Variants: the Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship.
3/11/2017 Book Review Index Plus Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=BRIP&ts=1489260702501 1/9
Print Marked Items
Luca Crispi, Joyce's Creative Process and the
Construction of Characters: Becoming the
Blooms
Tim Conley
Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies.
46.2 (AutumnWinter 2016): p387.
http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/iur.2016.0236
COPYRIGHT 2016 Edinburgh University Press
http://www.irishuniversityreview.ie/
Full Text:
Luca Crispi, Joyce's Creative Process and the Construction of Characters: Becoming the Blooms. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015. 368 pages. 60 [pounds sterling] GBP.
Many writers of fiction attest that their characters have lives of their own, though exactly what kinds of lives they are,
and what relationship the writer has with these 'living' characters, varies significantly from writer to writer. Nabokov
declared his characters galley slaves, while Pirandello, Raymond Queneau, and Flann O'Brien dramatized quests for,
escapes from, and mutinies against their characters' astonished authors. The life of a character in a text is in fact not one
life but three: there is her life as it unfolds in the narrative; her life that is not represented or recounted in the text (what
television producers call her 'backstory', but also her future after the story ends), which may or may not be discernible
to the reader, depending on how much of it is revealed; and her life as it is bound up with the process of composition,
the life of the text itself. These lives and counterlives can overlap, supplement, or even gainsay one another.
Understanding the interrelations of these lives not only enriches our readings of the texts in which these characters
appear but illuminates the working methods of the author, what gets somewhat airily called his 'creative process'.
Joyce's Ulysses represents both a considerable challenge and a valuable opportunity in this regard. On the one hand, the
novel is notoriously complex, and moreover is encircled by mountains of scholarly commentary and clouded over with
editorial debates. On the other hand, the trove of documents that show, to anyone willing to do the patient work of
exploring them, the layers and stages of Joyce's writing. Textual genetics, a kind of forensic hermeneutics, is the name
of this undertaking, and Luca Crispi's new book is both an argument for genetic criticism and an excellent display of its
fruits.
Crispi calls his book, dense with charts and footnotes, 'an inductively empirical descriptive study' (p.20) of the lives of
characters in Ulyssesprimarily Leopold and Molly Bloom, of course, but also any number of minor characters who
have some notable influence on their lives, some of them mentioned or alluded to rather than actually present in Joyce's
1904 Dublin. Such a characterization does not convey the sheer amount of textual material that Crispi has sorted
through, studied, and organized: hundreds of pages of notes, drafts, typescripts, and proofs, variously housed in such
disparate locations as London, Dublin, Texas, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and California. In the wake of new
manuscripts acquired by the National Library of Ireland, the textual history of the novel has become even more
complex than earlier, foundational genetic research had supposed: we have even more glimpses of alternate versions of
Ulysses to think about. As in studies of biological evolution, the gaps in the (fossil or textual) record do not represent
contradictions of the general theory or historical paradigm, but new pieces to the puzzle bring to light new variations of
particular metamorphoses. In textual terms, this means unanticipated changes, curious inconsistencies, and lost threads
of storylines (Crispi is something of a collector of these).
3/11/2017 Book Review Index Plus Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=BRIP&ts=1489260702501 2/9
Thus, if it is true that 'character remains one of the most controversial and least welldefined terms and concepts in
literary criticism' (p.18), genetic inquiry seems wellsuited to help think through how characters are shaped, and
thereby to better appreciate character itself as a process rather than as a fixed design. If anything, Crispi's introduction
belabours the case for genetics more than is really necessary: there is no serious dispute among Joyce scholars about
either the methodologies or the great value of such inquiries. Perhaps this was at least partly the result of the publisher's
urging (just as one suspects the publisher has had a firm hand in awkwardly, regrettably reversing what were probably
title and subtitle).
Joyce's inexorable drive to keep adding more and more to his pages has few exceptions, but they are always worth
looking at closely: as Crispi has it, 'when some text does drop out it can be quite significant' (p.121). Take the
contradictory accounts of Molly's age: the year of her birth is given as 1870 in 'Ithaca', but in Crispi's determination, it
is 1871. She herself calculates her age as 'up to 35 no Im what am I at all 111 be 33 in September', but in a draft of
'Penelope' made in 1921, Joyce included this 'resigned reflection: "O well up to forty'" (p.121). This Molly Bloom,
Crispi observes, seems 'much more comfortable with aging' than does the Molly Bloom that readers of Ulysses know.
For whatever reasonand despite all of the documentary evidence that fuels speculations about Joyce's 'creative
process', how often we have to shrug and say, 'for whatever reason'Joyce thought better of the phrase and it did not
survive to the next manuscript. Or consider the manuscript version of the 'Cyclops' episode in which the drinkers at
Barney Kiernan's impugn Bloom's masculinity and marriage even more fiercely and knowledgeably than they do in the
novel as we know it:
I know some talk one time that they were going to be divorced, says Hynes.
Restitution of conjugal rights, says MacHugh: What, Jack?
Still, they say he's always dancing attendance on her. Brings up her breakfast in her bed every morning and has his
own bit down in the kitchen.
All eventually swept away, though Joyce reroutes ideas more often than he outright disposes of them. 'The manuscripts
document the extent to which Joyce was prone to reassign actions, thoughts, or traits from one character to another',
writes Crispi (p.163), and he understands Stephen Dedalus's puzzling role in this version of the chapter (noted years
ago by Michael Groden) in this way.
Crispi underscores how much readers 'know' about the Blooms comes from gossip (and one might add that in
Finnegans Wake, character, recognition, and what that book calls 'gossiple' become virtually indistinguishable). To this
might be added the point that Joyce himself does not necessarily 'know' each and all of his characters any more or
better than we do: Lieutenant Stanley Gardner, a barely mentioned extramarital lover of Molly's, is a case in point, and
Joyce does not seem to have developed much more than a dim outline of Molly's mother. Crispi's book amply
demonstrates that what Joyce presents is 'the illusion of totality and completeness' (p.8): that is, a selfconscious
illusion at once incredibly elaborate and disarmingly uncertain.
Surprises in studying the novel's composition include those sequences that go against a reader's intuition. For instance,
'readers of Ulysses would be correct to presume that it was Bloom's thoughts about Ophelia's suicide that prompted him
to think of his own father's death, but reading the work genetically shows that Joyce actually worked the other way
round: the more basic description of Virag's suicide prompted Joyce several years later to reinforce an already complex
intertextual parallel to Shakespeare's plays' (p.70). Changes and inconsistencies, however minor they seem, invite new
interpretations of the larger schemes of the novel. The question of whether 'demoting Molly's father to a drummajor' in
a draft of the 'Sirens' episode 'is probably an instance of Joyce piling up musical allusions' (in this case, Offenbach)
rather than a factual alteration to the character is a good example, and Crispi's belief that it could be supported by
consideration of a later reranking of the character, in 'Circe', to 'Majorgeneral', another operatic allusion, this one to
Gilbert and Sullivan. This pattern suggests that Bloom's respect for his fatherinlaw is mixed with a sense of
something ridiculous about the man's military identity.
Empirical though his book is, Crispi is no hardnosed determinist and for all of the limits to interpretation his book
might suggest, it provides at least as many new grounds for assessing characters and relationships in the novel. Though
I would argue that he is a little too absolute and perhaps even reductive in his view of Blazes Boylan, our difference on
this point is entirely subjective, not just in how we judge the character but in how we judge the textual evolution of that
character. Crispi recounts how Molly's calling her lover 'Blazes' to his irritation is a late addition to the text (as is his
own proper first name). This gives context to his slapping her behind and gives him 'more depth of character than
anything else we are told about his emotional range in the book' (p.278), and Crispi further sees this as another step in
rendering the reader's view of Boylan 'that much more equivocal, which is the point of his representation in Ulysses'
3/11/2017 Book Review Index Plus Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=BRIP&ts=1489260702501 3/9
(p.279). I'm not sure exactly what the phrase 'the point of his representation' means. Crispi thinks that the adverb
'roguishly', used to describe Boylan's asking a shop girl to use the telephone, conveys a 'distinctly unfavourable image'
(p.51), but I wonder whether 'roguishly' might not be an instance of the Uncle Charles Principle, a very brief exposure
of Boylan's mind, according to which he is the roguish Hugh, not the petulant Blazes. (The only error I find in Crispi's
book concerns Boylan, and it is so minor as to be located in parentheses. It isn't true that 'only the women' in the novel
take notice of Boylan's flower (55n82): Master Patrick Dignam in 'Wandering Rocks' remarks upon 'a red flower in a
toff's mouth and a swell pair of kicks on him'.)
At the head of each chapter and section, Crispi lists and dates the relevant manuscripts, which is both handy for
reference and obviates to a large degree the obstructions such technical details would otherwise pose in the writing.
And the writing is, if occasionally a little workmanlike, never unclear, a rare feat in any study of Joyce. The
appendicesan overview and glossary of documents, a census of manuscripts by episode, and chronological lists of
extant manuscripts and proofsare reason alone to have this book on a shelf within ready reach. Even the most
dedicated, lifetime reader of Ulysses is going to learn a few arresting things about the novel (and the novels it might
have been). Crispi's is an instructive book for the student and a necessary book for the scholar.
TIM CONLEY
Brock University
DOI: 10.3366/iur.2016.0236
Conley, Tim
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Conley, Tim. "Luca Crispi, Joyce's Creative Process and the Construction of Characters: Becoming the Blooms." Irish
University Review: a journal of Irish Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 2016, p. 387+. Book Review Index Plus,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=BRIP&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473148695&it=r&asid=7292312ae3f928b3c258fc0d7f264a88.
Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473148695
3/11/2017 Book Review Index Plus Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=BRIP&ts=1489260702501 4/9
Joyce's Creative Process and the Construction of
Characters in "Ulysses": 'Becoming the Blooms.'
John McCourt
The Review of English Studies.
67.280 (June 2016): p610612.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
McCourt, John. "Joyce's Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in 'Ulysses': 'Becoming the Blooms.'."
The Review of English Studies, vol. 67, no. 280, 2016, pp. 610612. Book Review Index Plus,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=BRIP&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462498964&it=r&asid=14ca3b4caf1d2dbc08eee3a2daed1038.
Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462498964
3/11/2017 Book Review Index Plus Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=BRIP&ts=1489260702501 5/9
Crispi, Luca. Joyce's creative process and the
construction of characters in Ulysses, becoming
the Blooms
R.R. Joly
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1165.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Joly, R.R. "Crispi, Luca. Joyce's creative process and the construction of characters in Ulysses, becoming the Blooms."
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1165. Book Review Index Plus,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=BRIP&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661521&it=r&asid=5bd67b7a4601160fd32c4a36d8b9aa67.
Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661521
3/11/2017 Book Review Index Plus Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=BRIP&ts=1489260702501 6/9
Dublin James Joyce Journal
David Pierce
James Joyce Quarterly.
46.34 (SpringSummer 2009): p598601.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Pierce, David. "Dublin James Joyce Journal." James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 34, 2009, pp. 598601. Book Review
Index Plus, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=BRIP&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA253417192&it=r&asid=b0090b96a421b493d7ce715f8ba370e6.
Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A253417192
3/11/2017 Book Review Index Plus Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=BRIP&ts=1489260702501 7/9
How Joyce Wrote "Finnegans Wake": A ChapterByChapter
Genetic Guide
Louis Armand
James Joyce Quarterly.
45.34 (SpringSummer 2008): p591600.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Armand, Louis. "How Joyce Wrote 'Finnegans Wake': A ChapterByChapter Genetic Guide." James Joyce Quarterly,
vol. 45, no. 34, 2008, pp. 591600. Book Review Index Plus, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=BRIP&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA205610525&it=r&asid=a89003b9ebf699a903a7e6857d4048d8.
Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A205610525
3/11/2017 Book Review Index Plus Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=BRIP&ts=1489260702501 8/9
How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A ChapterbyChapter
Genetic Guide
C.S. Kalish
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
45.3 (Nov. 2007): p472.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Kalish, C.S. "How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A ChapterbyChapter Genetic Guide." CHOICE: Current Reviews
for Academic Libraries, Nov. 2007, p. 472. Book Review Index Plus, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=BRIP&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA173586444&it=r&asid=db3ef4ae1aba646b890649f563e1411e.
Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A173586444
3/11/2017 Book Review Index Plus Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=BRIP&ts=1489260702501 9/9
How Joyce Wrote Finnegons Wake: A ChapterbyChapter
Genetic Guide
Vike Martina Plock
Modernism/Modernity.
14.4 (Nov. 2007): p780.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Plock, Vike Martina. "How Joyce Wrote Finnegons Wake: A ChapterbyChapter Genetic Guide."
Modernism/Modernity, vol. 14, no. 4, 2007, p. 780+. Book Review Index Plus, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=BRIP&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA174636376&it=r&asid=f069d1495675e0d9e3cbc14fa3aff208.
Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A174636376
luca crispi . Joyce’s Creative Process and the construction of Characters in Ulysses: ‘Becoming the Blooms’ .
Luca Crispi . Joyce’s Creative Process and the construction of Characters in Ulysses: ‘ Becoming the Blooms ’ . Pp. xvii + 336 . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2015 . Cloth, £60.
John McCourt
Review of English Studies (2016) 67 (280): 610-612. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgw003
Published: 10 February 2016
PDF
Cite
Share Tools
Issue Section: Reviews
It is something of a pity that this original, important, innovative, well-researched, and impeccably produced volume labours under a somewhat uninspiring and cumbersome title. Becoming the Blooms might well have served it better as an initial hook. That this is followed by an occasionally awkward, sometimes repetitious theoretical chapter called ‘Introductory Contexts’ might also frighten off the fainthearted reader.
But this would be a shame because once these two initial hurdles have been cleared, the book soars. As is so often the case, the value of genetic criticism is to be found not so much in the by now well-rehearsed theory but in the strength of its application and practice. This book which, rather surprisingly but very efficaciously, begins and ends with the ‘conquering hero’, Blazes Boylan—pointing out that it is very much more his day than it is Bloom’s—contains practice of the highest order based on a hugely impressive, broad and deep knowledge of the sprawling, sometimes fragmentary, often borderline-illegible body of writing—notes, drafts, faircopies, typescripts, and proofs—that combine to make up the Joyce corpus of manuscripts. Crispi’s painstaking scholarship leaves us with no doubt that it would be perilous to ignore the evolutionary archive of Joyce’s novel. He gives a very rich sense of the step by step, not always consistent or regular process of assembly and accretion which is loosely divided into two key phases: the first from 1917 to 1920 which focussed on the 14 episodes published in instalments in the Little Review ; the second, the period of the final push to finish the additional four episodes and revise the entire work for final publication in 1922. Rare insight is provided not only into how the writer wrote (something which, until the rise of genetic approaches, was given only cursory anecdotal treatment in Joyce Studies), but also into how the Joyce text accumulates and conveys networks of meaning and how it might be read and interpreted.
Following his long immersion in the Joyce materials held at the University of Buffalo and his sustained work on the new materials at the National Library of Ireland, Luca Crispi is singularly qualified to write an authoritative work on the genesis of Joyce’s great novel and to illuminate readers on how Joyce developed, divided and multiplied the tiny stories and minor events that grew into the great text we know as Ulysses . But Crispi does much more. At the heart of his endeavour is the problematic question of ‘character’ in fiction, not to mention in modernist fiction—one which is, as he rightly notes, too often ignored or dismissed in literary theory and criticism. Crispi explores what the surviving manuscripts of Ulysses reveal about the development of the characters we know as Leopold and Molly Bloom as the novel took shape. What he shows is an often surprising process of revision and addition, with elements we take to be central to our understanding of one of literature’s great couples sometimes revealed to be last-minute add-ons rather than foundational pillars. Similarly he shows that what we often take as a total and complete artwork, is little more than the illusionary effect of a Joycean sleight of hand. Given how much readers identify with the Blooms, and how much criticism and interpretation is pinned on their shoulders, it is surprising to find out that what we really know about the Blooms and their world is often remarkably fleeting and often scanty, sometimes even contradictory (for example the dating of their ‘first night’).
Crispi proceeds by disentangling ‘the perspectives on the stories of the Blooms in Ulysses ’—that of the writer, the character, and the reader. He also identifies four distinct temporal axes: ‘1) when Joyce wrote the stories, 2) when the characters are meant to have fictionally lived these experiences, 3) the often multiple times when one or more characters remembers or recounts the experiences, and 4) the reader’s (and re-reader’s) various temporal experiences of encountering the stories about the characters’ lives in Ulysses ’ (p. 13). Although he never names Sterne, rarely has Joyce’s Ulysses come to seem more like Tristram Shandy than it does in this reading which describes how the reader must ‘comprehend and reconfigure the often disconnected information into a coherent account’ (p. 14) and which brilliantly lays bare the art of the novel and the novelist’s art.
In a book which describes the growth and development of Leopold and Molly Bloom, a process which surely owed much to the writer’s time not only in Dublin but also, and indeed primarily, in Trieste, the odd passing nod to the role of that city in their formation would have been appropriate and might have helped answer Crispi’s rhetorical query (among other things) about our supposedly having no idea as to why Joyce picked Szombathely as Bloom’s ancestral homeland. It would have been beneficial to see more sustained engagement with what are described, rather slightingly, as works (unnamed and not cited), which have read Molly and Leopold as ‘semi-biographical products of Joyce’s memories of people he knew and/or either heard read about in his life in Dublin, Trieste, Zurich, Paris, and elsewhere’ (p. 19). Engagement with such criticism might have provided at least an occasional input into elements that suddenly ‘appear’ in Joyce’s text (like ‘Szombathely’) at a late stage in the composition process—in this case in the Rosenbach manuscript of ‘Circe’ (p. 67).
Similarly, the overall thrust of the book appears to argue for an undeclared chronology hierarchy: material being included early being assumed to be foundational; that inserted later, more occasional and, therefore, less significant. He seems to be making this point with regard to Lunita Lareda noting that ‘all the references to her’ appear only ‘on the episode’s fifth and final proof’ (pp 108–9) but concludes by regarding the late inclusion of the material on Molly’s mother as ‘among the clearest examples of a very late idea that has a fundamental and transformative impact on our reading of the published work’ (p. 111). But the mere fact that material does not pop up in early manuscripts does not mean that it is not vital for the final book or that it was not always prominent in Joyce’s mind, so prominent, perhaps, that he did not have to write it down in note form.
What we see most of all in the material presented here is how Joyce almost seems to give greater weight to the stylistic imperatives of a given episode than he does to bolstering the stability of his characters. But I am not sure that this is always the case. Writing about ‘Ithaca’, Crispi remarks how the raw, blunt impact of a note: ‘He feels imprint of BB’ is somehow diluted in the final version
What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?
New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed (p. 263).
I disagree that the ‘questions and answers in Ulysses stylistically sanitize Bloom’s psychological tribulations and mask the strong emotive force of the scenes’ (p. 263). But that is beside the point. Crispi is not necessarily asking his reader to accept his interpretative conclusions but he has already won the battle that he most cares about which is to lure that same reader into engaging with a far larger Joycean corpus of texts, drafts, notes, manuscripts, versions, and to find there much material that will make him question many of the supposed certainties that have been too long taken for granted in Joyce’s finished (if it can be said to be finished) Ulysses .
© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press 2016; all rights reserved
Joyce’s Creative Process review: Leopold and Molly, from bud to full bloom
A fascinating trawl through Ulysses’ notes and drafts demonstrates that the Blooms were not born out of James Joyce’s vision, but evolved, awkwardly, through revisions
Sam Slote
Sat, Mar 5, 2016, 00:56
First published:
Sat, Mar 5, 2016, 00:56
BUY NOW
Book Title:
Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in “Ulysses”: Becoming the Blooms
ISBN-13:
978-0198718857
Author:
Luca Crispi
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Guideline Price:
£60.0
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)
Becoming the Blooms cautiously humanises the often bewilderingly complex study of the Joycean textual process. Elliott Morsia, Literature & History Luca Crispi has given us a new format and focus for Joyce studies, providing a fine model to authors who are engaged in archival research, genetic studies, and character development ... if you are inclined to follow, he will take you down into the underworld of genetic Joyce studies. Christy L. Burns, James Joyce Literary Supplement Luca Crispis new book is both an argument for genetic criticism and an excellent display of its fruits. Tim Conley, Irish University Review A significant addition to Joyce studies. The books extensive research and distinctive methodology allow Crispi to demonstrate rich and valuable insights about the compositional process of Ulysses, representing its position as a vital book for all Joyceans as well as any scholar working in genetic studies. Helen Saunders, rish Studies Review a thorough and thoroughly original analysis of Ulysses ... Crispi's book serves as an object lesson in how scholarship can improve our understanding and enjoyment of literature. Sam Slote, Irish Times Luca Crispi's meticulously researched and superbly presented study is important both for the light it throws on Joyce's creative methods and, more generally, for its challenge to many of our assumptions about the way fictional characters are brought into being. Crispi asks what the surviving manuscripts of Ulysses can tell us about the evolution of Leopold and Molly Bloom as the novel developed, and discovers a surprisingly fluid process of revision,
accretion and transferral of characteristics. The result is a penetrating account of one of the most astonishing feats of literary creativity of the twentieth century. Derek Attridge original, important, innovative, well-researched, and impeccably produced ... the book soars. John McCourt, Review of English Studies Joyce's Creative Process marks a turning point in the James Joyce studies because it modifies the pedagogy concerning Ulysses, a novel regularly taught in undergraduate classes. Tackling a term as central and apparently easy to grasp as "character," Crispi demonstrates that no reading of Ulysses can avoid grappling with the genesis of the text or tapping its evolutionary archive, here synthesized with rare clarity. One cannot deny the
centrality of characterization -the fictional representation of human beings when they become beings of paper-in the study of narratives. By making us revise our assumptions about the main characters of Ulysses, this book revolutionizes the study of James Joyce as a whole. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvani This is the book in which genetic criticism of modernist writing properly comes of age, demonstrating that it can not only extend our knowledge of the mutations a text undergoes and our sense of its open-endedness, but also genuinely and subtly illuminate the myriad intricate movements of the creative process, and indeed transform interpretations. Crispi's learning is formidable, his archival research dedicated, authoritative and immensely assiduous, and his
responsiveness to textual detail impeccable. The result is a magisterial contribution, both to Joyce scholarship, and to the study of modernist literature in general. Andrew Gibson, Research Professor in Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of Lon The scholarship ... is extraordinary in its detail, resulting in a nuanced illumination of the complexity of the characters [in Ulysses]. Margot Norris