• DOI:10.1353/JJQ.2007.0035
• Corpus ID: 162357164

Joyce at Work on "Cyclops": Toward a Biography of Ulysses

@article{Groden2007JoyceAW,
  title={Joyce at Work on "Cyclops": Toward a Biography of Ulysses},
  author={Michael Groden},
  journal={James Joyce Quarterly},
  year={2007},
  volume={44},
  pages={217 - 245}
}

• M. Groden
• Published 15 October 2007
• Art, History
• James Joyce Quarterly

Here, then, is the biography of a book": with these words Herbert Gorman begins chapter 10 of his 1939 biography o Joyce.1 Gorman deals in this chapter with the initial publica tion of Ulysses and its early reviews, Joyce's protests against Samue Roth's piracy in the late 1920s, and Judge John M. Woolsey's legal decision allowing Ulysses to be published in the United States, but not with Joyce's writing of Ulysses; brief accounts of that appeared in earlier chapters. Only a few years after Gorman's book, however (and following Joyce's death two years later), manuscripts for Ulysses found their ways into research libraries and inspired studies of Joyce's writing of Ulysses, and soon the composition of Ulysses was as much a part of its perceived life as was the published book. The manuscripts acquired by the National Library of Ireland in 2002 offer vast amounts of new evidence regarding Joyce's writing of Ulysses, and I have been considering possible ways to study and write about these materials.2 My first idea was to produce an updated version of my 1977 book "Ulysses" in Progress and to look anew at the three stages I delineated there?early, middle, and last3?but this plan quickly proved unfeasible. The new manuscripts would change the account drastically, as would the new models for studying manu scripts provided by French critique genetique, or genetic criticism, and yet "Ulysses" in Progress is locked into the manuscript archive as it existed in the mid-1970s and into the pre-theory, pre-genetic mindset of those years. In addition, the book quotes the manuscripts extensively, using permission that I was able to obtain quite easily then, whereas permission to re-quote those materials or to quote the new documents now would probably be extremely expensive, if it could be gotten at all.4 Anew approach seems needed, one more nar rative than bibliographically analytical, and I have come to think of my project as a biography of Ulysses, a biography of the book rather than of Joyce (or only of Joyce the writer), and, unlike in Gorman's biography, an account of Ulysses as it came into being more than of its life after publication, Such a biography can tell the story of how Joyce