I. Originating Joyce

After reading the fifteen essays in the 2007 How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide, I had no doubt about its value to Joyce scholarship but did wonder how it might impact genetic criticism as a whole – the field has long been something of a soft wax for new scholarship to reshape. New contributions may reinforce its status as either a hermeneutic discipline that develops new protocols of interpretation or a Valéryan one seeking knowledge of immaterialities like the "movements of the creative mind" or the "workings of the writing process." They may follow through on the discipline's philosophical commitments to Baconian empiricism and induction, or else buttress its post-structuralist side by emphasizing the play of signifiers in the text and avant-texte.

Although both sides of these particular divisions find support in the book, insiders will probably agree that the perspective is generally more Iser than Valéry, more Bacon than Barthes, and that the "philological" side received a stronger show of hands. And what will outsiders think? Those who are sympathetic to this kind of criticism – without necessarily wanting to do it – will find much to complement their own thinking on Joyce, but for true skeptics it is harder to say. Will the Guide vitiate the discipline's reputation for naïve positivism, blind philology, and mindless draft-dodging? Will there be fewer accusations that genetic scholars pursue quixotic, imitation-science research on the genome of literary creation, that they fatuously fetishize the origins of texts?

"Turn no more aside and brood," I thought as I thought about this, reminding myself that most of these complaints could have been rebutted even before the evidence of the Wake book. By and large, genetic scholarship was not pioneered and pursued by wide-eyed visionaries, and one looks in vain through genetic articles for naïve positivism or overblown claims for a new science. (One somewhat misleading exception is Pierre-Marc de Biasi's 1993 essay “Vers une science de la littérature: L’analyse des manuscrits et la genèse de l’œuvre.”) In fact only the old aspersion about origins really bothered me. In his tendentious contribution to the 1996 Yale French Studies issue Drafts, Laurent Jenny made a comment that might still synopsize the problem: "Genetic criticism is searching for a phenomenon that is in effect unobservable, unobjectifiable: the origin of a literary work" (10). Speaking from a hermeneutic perspective in which the encounter between a (finished) text and a reader is of utmost importance and alone can justify research in the humanities, he added with some disgust that the discipline "does not have as its primary objective the reading of texts but rather the discovery of their origin" (11).

How Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake… Does that "how" include such questions as "how it all began" or why he wrote it? Together, the essays suggest that as genetic criticism seeks to incorporate a temporal dimension into the analysis of the literary text, it rarely if ever "searches for the origin" in any explicit or grand metaphysical sense. In practice scholars spend more time describing authorial decision-making and, while respecting the unpredictable mobility of writing, accept that literary composition takes place teleologically. For their part, the editors Sam Slote and Luca Crispi declare that the book is devoted to something else entirely: the play between a complicated text and its avant-textes: "The goal of this volume is to show what might be gained… from reading Finnegans Wake in the context of its prepublication manuscripts" (3). Nonetheless, whether or not genetic scholars even postulate that origins of literary texts are recoverable, their relentless excavation continues to create for many the expectation that they might shed light on the earliest forms of texts' emergence from the void. In short, however it may be with the tensions across the discipline's theoretical investments, which may anyway be constitutive and salutary for it, one thing should surely have been made available by now, whether through negative or positive examples: a robust description and interpretation of the possibility and consequences of seeking for the origins of literary writing. Has it?

Well, on the one hand, we know that the form of genetic criticism that took wing in Paris in the early 1970s drank deeply from structuralist and post-structuralist notions of textuality. Significant theoretical capital to theorize the avant-texte was borrowed from figures like Barthes, Kristeva, and Eco – on such subjects as, respectively, the text rather than the work, modes of intertextuality, and the "open work." But on the other hand, and perhaps surprisingly, what might be called in distorting shorthand the postmodern meditation on genesis and origins was, and has remained, altogether less well integrated into the discipline. Despite its engagement with avant-textes, teleology, and the whole calculus of creativity, geneticists have not been much inspired, at least not explicitly, to negotiate texts like Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art; Foucault's Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, and Derrida's work on the concept of origin, such as his Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry or the sections in Of Grammatology devoted to Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Language.

Have genetic scholars, in their attention to avant-textes, ignored such basic theoretical questions? In that case the indifference would be due to blindness. Or have they outpaced, overcome, or otherwise seen through such questions thanks to superior knowledge of how texts are constructed? In that case, indifference would be a hard-won philosophical perspective, the result of arduous thought and experience in the archive.

-- You see, you have no answer, says Molly Ivors to a flustered Gabriel.

I called for my tablets and began, and begin again now with Nietzsche, who names the thought that hangs like the sword of Damocles over the entire enterprise of genetic criticism: if for a long time "investigators of knowledge sought out the origin of things" in the full belief that "they would discover something of incalculable significance for all later action and judgment," and if they "always presupposed… that the salvation of man must depend on insight into the origin of things," then by the late nineteenth century "the more we advance towards origins, the more our interest diminishes" (45-6). In fact, he adds in italics, "The more insight we possess into an origin the less significant does the origin appear…" (46). Who wants to argue with Nietzsche? What if it were true that going backwards, reading the manuscripts and drafts, the "sources," everything that might expansively be construed as originating or avant-textual material for a literary work, ultimately only demonstrated the "insignificance" of the origin?

"Genealogy" says Foucault drawing upon Nietzsche to oppose more confidently metaphysical forms of historiography, "is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times (76). I am not sure why this famous opening line has not been cited more often by genetic scholars (perhaps they fear the skeptical or "relativist" reputation of the piece?) for it vividly describes a great deal of the work one finds in books like the Genetic Guide. "Genealogy…" he continues, "requires patience and a knowledge of details," and "depends on a vast accumulation of source material…" (76).

In fact, to glance like this at the key words of the Foucauldian genealogist is to think not only of genetic critics but of Joyce: meticulous, documentary, entangled and confused parchments, accumulation of source material, pages scratched over and recopied. Whatever may be said about the genetic study of authors who leave few avant-textes, the case for Joyce is in part quantitative: the Guide's editors remind us that he left, for his last book alone, a trail of over 25,000 pages, some of which imply the existence of more, e.g. intermediary drafts and lost notebooks. Perhaps then, despite its name, genetic criticism has from its origins and all along been more Joycean or genealogical in the Foucauldian sense than "genetic" in any sense.(1) And yet genealogy, says Foucault, repeatedly and with great conviction, is opposed to the "search for 'origins'" (76-7). If genetic scholars are accidental genealogists, wary of or indifferent to the idea of searching for origins, then why do they have the reputation with critics like Jenny of being obsessed with the topic? And what, incidentally, is so philosophically problematic about seeking origins?

These questions can be economically addressed with an example from Joyce.

To ask "what is the origin of Ulysses?" or "why did Joyce write it?" is to run the ragged edge between pursuing an important project (practically speaking, this is what many readers would like to know) and floundering in absurdity (such questions are wildly vague and naively presuppose permanent, foundational answers in a hermeneutic field where none can exist.) "The character of Ulysses always fascinated me - even when a boy," says Joyce, but such remarks merely place the novel's "origin" in a non-specific "always" as if it were the result of a youthful preference for one kind of hero over others (notably Achilles). "Imagine fifteen years ago I started writing it," he also says, "as a short story for Dubliners! For seven years I have been working at this book - blast it" (Letters, I, 146-7)! This give us two beginnings, one when he "started writing" the book and another when he started "working at" it.

Joyceans, of course, like to think of precise events as originating much of Ulysses. September 12, 1904, for example, was the night in the Martello tower when Samuel Chenevix Trench, the model for Haines, dreamed of a black panther and began shooting his pistol at the fire. Or June 22, 1904, the incident in the park when Joyce was helped by Alfred Hunter, the model for Bloom, after being knocked down. Ellmann points out that Joyce's "very lack of acquaintance" with Hunter "was of special interest, since Joyce regarded himself as hemmed in by indifference or hostility, and was the more surprised that someone unfamiliar, of temperament and background seemingly opposite, should have causelessly befriended him. Here might be one of those 'epiphanies' – sudden, unlooked for turns in experience – which could prove the more momentous for being modest" (708). Ellmann's language positions the Joycean epiphany as a genealogical type of artistic origin configured by insignificance, chance, and causelessness.

From a perspective informed by careful analysis of manuscript history, Hans Walter Gabler argues that the writing of Ulysses originated in a technical problem of how to rewrite, i.e. how to divide and emplot existing autobiographical material into two different literary works. It is, he says,

prominently in a mode of rewriting within Joyce's own oeuvre, as well as on the level of concerns about structure that predate the actual writing, that the beginnings of Ulysses first manifest themselves. We may discover its earliest formation by evaluating the relation of A Portrait to Stephen Hero, and by analyzing the process of rewriting and rethinking of written and unwritten Stephen Hero material in the light of Joyce's correspondence with his brother Stanislaus (221).

Together, the tower and library episodes show that the earliest writing for Ulysses from the autobiographical fountainhead originated in Joyce's endeavours – approximately between 1912 and 1914 – to define a line of division between A Portrait and Ulysses. As for the matter of Dublin, Ulysses reaches back to Dubliners, and to a time of conception in 1906 (223).

Here again the origin divides into phases according to topics (autobiography and Dublin). Beyond these examples, one can obviously increase the play of origins simply by changing the unit: instead of speaking of Ulysses, we can ask about the origins of individual chapters, characters, turns of phrase, paragraphs, punctuation marks, styles, etc. each of which, as genetic critics show, has its ramifying genealogy. The famous "schemes" Joyce circulated assigning each Ulysses chapter a bodily organ, a technic, a time, etc. can also be seen as devices that scatter and multiply origins, since each textual unit can be interpreted as conditioned by – potentially having originated in – almost any category.

To give an even more genealogical example, an origin of many smaller subdivisions of the Joycean text can often be traced to "source material." This is especially true of his last two books, which are so dependent upon and saturated with reading and notetaking that they represent supreme test cases or crises of "influence study." The full range of "originating" powers or modes of these sources has never been easy to describe or define, and the nature and purpose of Joyce's notebook material continues to stir controversy. Commenting recently on a source Joyce used for the "Sirens" chapter of Ulysses, Susan Brown shows that neither the notes

nor the source can be fruitfully treated as prescriptive. Joyce, as was his pattern cribbing from esoteric sources, is often inaccurate, sloppy, incomplete, illogical, and impressionistic. Furthermore, even if he understands his own notes (which he often does not), his application of his notes is symbolic and metaphoric – not according to rule. Thus, readers who expect to find in Joyce’s texts exact fidelity to a source or concept often miss what is there.

Thus it is that searching for the "origins" of Joyce's texts can become discouragingly idle or endless, a game of suspecting, naming, splitting, narrating, and dissolving influences and possibilities à la the Wakean crime plot. But while the elimination of linear narratives might seem, for theorists, to open up the origin to a useless infinity, bland relativism does no justice to a Joyce who devoted too much attention to conceptions, origins, beginnings, and births of all kinds for interpreters to ignore. As for literary genesis in particular, on the simplest level he shows characters writing, thinking about writing, planning to write, reflecting on writing, etc. Genetic critics on Joyce have not explicitly tried to match their methods to these scenes, take their lead from them, or integrate them into their methodological considerations. In short, we have not awarded them any privileged hermeneutic status.

Although there can be no a priori justification for doing so, there are pragmatic reasons for breaking into the hermeneutic circle by examining Joyce's fictional representations of literary genesis. In Ulysses, three early scenes in particular seem to form an important local economy or nodal network: first, the scene toward the end of Proteus in which Stephen searches for paper to write down a poem – the so-called "vampire" poem – that has come to him during his stroll along Sandymount. Next, Bloom in Lestrygonians composes in his mind a poem about a seagull and then revises it, with purposeful irony, later in the same chapter. Finally, Buck Mulligan, in Scylla and Charybdis, at the end of Stephen's long presentation in the National Library, suddenly shouts out "Eureka!" and begins scribbling down some humorously-intended ideas for a play. As he and Stephen are walking out of the library, he reads from his "tablet."(2)

Together these scenes can be taken as a limited yet serious étude by Joyce on emergent writing, its cultural and historical situatedness, and its origins in human character and the Lebenswelt. Each scene also contributes to the wider narratives and symbolic movements of Ulysses. Stephen's writing in Proteus, if we except the witticisms and aphorisms of Telemachus and Nestor, represents the origin or first instance of creativity itself in the time-space of the text of Ulysses.This, after all, is the first time pencil is creatively put to paper by the character who, through autobiographical identification, will grow up to write the novel we are reading. Bloom's poem contrasts sharply with Stephen's and represents the first clear confirmation of his own advertised identity as a "literary gentleman" (advertised, of course, quite literally: he has placed an ad with that description of himself.) Finally, Buck Mulligan offers a third, uniquely self-stimulating version of literary genesis when he bursts noisily into the complex conversational rhythms of Scylla and Charybdis and outlines a parodic play on masturbation.

II. Proteus: Stephen's Genesis by the Sea

One can – perhaps should, to understand Proteus – become disoriented by the pullulating metaphors of birth, growth, and death. Not only does the chapter open with Stephen thinking about the originary constraints on every real and possible experience, the "ineluctables" of time and space, he is throughout also concerned with maternity and paternity, as well as with physical, organic, linguistic and other origins. (Joyce designated philology as the "art/science" of this chapter and "primal matter" as the "correspondence" for Homer's Proteus.) As Murray McArthur has pointed out, the chapter is also saturated with onomatopoiea, the form of language that Vico considered the origin of meaning, the earliest step into signification from sound. Stephen sounds some of these notes when he meditates on the two Frauenzimmer he takes to be midwives: "One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing" (2.35; my italics). Even the fantasy, sometimes attributed to genetic critics, of trying to construe avant-textes as forms of immediate, pre-lapsarian signification is figured by the images, first, of a "navelcord" extending backwards in time all the way to the first parents, and second, of that cord metamorphosed into a telephone line enabling one to call them: "Hello! Kinch here," says Stephen, placing a call to his first parents, "Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one" (2.39-40).(3)

Stephen's peripatetics on the strand create the expectation that he will give birth to a great piece of writing. By the time he starts scrambling for paper, we have been exhaustively and exhaustingly exposed to the ruminations of this self-styled bard who, equipped with great erudition and several European languages, has been hemorrhaging intelligence and intensity. We understand that he, like the Hamlet to whom he relates so well and so often, is deeply involved in a "lyric" state of grief and melancholy. Now he has time alone, free from the oppressive Mulligans, Haineses, Deasies and schoolboys. Not only that, but he has already accomplished a good deal of difficult preliminary work, most of all by mocking and discarding his earlier self-preening poseur-self:

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years… (3.136-43).

Fully recognizing his former fatuity, surely he will create something better than that villanelle: his own Lycidas perhaps?

So although the narrator gives no specific reason for Stephen to begin writing a poem, we are not surprised when he does. He has been watching a gipsy man and woman, cocklepickers, with their dog on the beach, casting them in his thoughts as "a ruffian and his strolling mort" and citing a line about the attractions of the woman's body from the gipsy ballad by that name. In the manner of Aquinas's "morose delectation" – the enjoyment of imagining a sin without actually desiring to commit it – he thinks about her exotic blood and sexuality. Then he imagines the moon pulling the tides westward, and her too, and such distant, commanding call-and-response ideas bring vampires to mind:

Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss.

Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss. No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth's kiss.

His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy's letter. Here. Thanking you for the hospitality tear the blank end off. Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words. That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter (3.395-407).

This brief scene of writing almost does not take place for simple lack of paper. Stephen's three potential options – Deasy's letter, the banknotes, and the library slips – broadly represent important material constraints or spheres of his life as well as his alienation from them. He cannot very well write on banknotes – "blast them," he says, cursing the physical incompatibility of art and money – and he is separated from the more nourishing library by his own forgetfulness. His only option indebts him to Deasy, and the phrase "Thanking you for your hospitality" therefore has a double meaning: it is the formula that ends Deasy's letter but since Stephen appropriates it as he transitions to his own writing he winds up using both the words and the paper of a man who travels per vias rectas and pays his own way. The tearing of the paper humorously focuses the irony down to a single moment: we imagine Deasy's response to having his letter mutilated and compare his scene of writing in Nestor – two copies, typewritten, bombastic, self-certain – with Stephen's hasty scribbling. Having seen snippets of Deasy's prose, we expect to be able to compare the texts; with our eyes focused on the torn paper we cannot imagine that Stephen will write a poem that we will not see, for in Ulysses we have had unrestricted access to his mind. Yet not only are we not given the pleasure the text, we have it forcibly removed from before our eyes: Stephen "lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled note and pencil into a pocket…" (3.437-8). In this way the much-heralded work is demoted to the lowest caste: a "scribbled note" buried and promptly forgotten.

Why does Joyce not show the poem in Proteus but instead have Stephen remember it retrospectively in Aeolus? Without a "finished text" for readers to privilege and interpret, the literary genesis takes on primary, if mysterious, importance and presents itself as a kind of emblematic or essential proteity. But is the Homeric reference really the reason the poem is omitted? Is it so simple as being, to borrow the words Joyce gave to Budgen, "all in the Protean character of the thing" i.e. somehow more faithfully Protean to emphasize process over product, to show Stephen writing but not what he wrote (Budgen, 54)? If so, is it not more Platonist than Protean to cleave to illustrating a predetermined categorical concept, to strive for a "pure" proteity in the first place? (Later, when the poem appears in Aeolus, we will have to ask whether it is not itself a proteiform graph.) At any rate, readers have no recourse to ideal purity: left with emergent language so inchoate that we can hardly even recognize it as writing – Tim Martin calls it "proto-poetic" – we are unsure whether there is any stability to the vampire poem at all, on or off the paper.

To appreciate the literary genesis Joyce pursues in Proteus, the scene must be contrasted with the writing of the villanelle in A Portrait. There, genesis takes place as an annunciation in which the supine, passive artist, figured as female, receives the word. Readers hear and see the orgasmic "O!", later so prominent in Nausicaa, signaling the inseminating moment when the word can become flesh:

The instant flashed forth like a point of light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form was veiling softly its afterglow. O! In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the virgin’s chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light.

…

And then? The rhythm died away, ceased, began again to move and beat. And then? Smoke, incense ascending from the altar of the world.

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim
Tell no more of enchanted days.
…

Fearing to lose all, he raised himself suddenly on his elbow to look for paper and pencil. There was neither on the table; only the soup plate he had eaten the rice from for supper and the candlestick with its tendrils of tallow and its paper socket, singed by the last flame. He stretched his arm wearily towards the foot of the bed, groping with his hand in the pockets of the coat that hung there. His fingers found a pencil and then a cigarette packet. He lay back and, tearing open the packet, placed the last cigarette on the window ledge and began to write out the stanzas of the villanelle in small neat letters on the rough cardboard surface (219-21).

The amniotic prose nourishes the poem, and vice versa, the scene so patiently and rhythmically written that it remains a high point of romanticism in modernism. There are obvious differences with Proteus: the matutinal Stephen of A Portrait rises with the world and wakes to its rhythms, but the Proteus Stephen is mired in the languid noon of the Mallarméan faun. The villanelle emerges from the real relationship between Stephen and Emma Clery; in Proteus, the poem-process (seemingly) originates in a hazy thinking about the relationship between two passersby, disconnected (at least in Aquinas's terms) from Stephen's real desire. Since both geneses involve a tearing of paper and reappropriation of a surface, one must also compare the rich connotative force of the pack of cigarettes – its portentous one last cigarette and intoxicating incense – to the torn last scrap of Deasy's letter to the editor about foot and mouth disease.

In A Portrait, the sensitive and precise artist-priest preserves the majesty of a lyric annunciation expressed in Christian terms: Stephen overcomes the rough (but sturdy) cardboard surface with a writing technique that resembles engraving, so "small" and "neat" that it pays attention to each individual letter. The villanelle, we see, is meant to last forever unchanged. By contrast, in Proteus, the cosmic profundity signaled through words like "behold," "bids," and "cataractic planets," clashes sharply with the reality of the writing process. Stephen turns "his back to the sun" and bends "over far to a table of rock and scribble[s] words." Hunched, self-occluding, and scribbling in darkness, he is no priest of the eternal imagination but a distracted Bartleby.

However, the main difference in the representations of genesis is that in Proteus the poetics of birth is replaced by a poetics of excretion. In both books, the urge to write a poem comes upon Stephen the way a bowel movement or a sexual urge might, and he writes to satisfy himself, but while the passive, involuntary artist in Portrait goes on to give birth, and we watch the baby being born tercet by tercet, in Proteus, just after Stephen writes, he urinates and picks his nose.(4) The plot sequence cuts off any lingering, Shelleyan "afterglow" of form and deromanticizingly realigns poetry-writing with human waste, the delivery of words to the world taking place as an evacuation or ejaculation instead of a culminating, deliberative event in Stephen's aesthetic consciousness. There is no ethereal ascension beyond the constraints of time and circumstance: urine, snot, and Stephen's note are not only waste products but quickly biodegradable ones that begin to lose their integrity the moment they mingle with the external world. From this perspective, the scene of literary genesis reminds us that the chapter's striking proteity belongs to products as much as to processes, to decomposition as well as composition.

That the poetics of excretion is a studied feature of this particular genesis is made clear by the language Joyce chooses to register the sound of the "unspeeched," pre-linguistic, "issuing breath:" "ooeeehah." Budgen is wrong to speak of Stephen's "inspiration" before writing the poem for there is neither a sudden spiritual manifestation nor any physical breathing in that might resemble an annunciation or fertilization. The sound of the air leaving Stephen's body is unintelligible and pre-onomatopoietic; it enacts, signifies and sounds like nothing (Budgen 55). Within a couple of pages, however, the noise takes on meaning when we hear the "fourworded wavespeech" of Stephen's urine: "seesoo, hrs, rsseeiss, ooos" (2.455-6). If we remove the "s" sounds that express the meeting of waters then we have a close graphic and sonorous match with the gaseous origins of Stephen's poem. Later, all of this will be driven home when Stephen delivers Deasy's letter to newspaper editor Myles Crawford in Aeolus. Crawford asks: "who tore it? Was he short taken?" (i.e. did he have an urgent need to wipe himself?) The reader can see what the editor cannot, that the remark has hit upon the truth: in Proteus Stephen is short taken and does use the scrap as toilet paper to wipe his mind. In fact he is caught twice in rapid succession, once without paper and once without his handkerchief, and just as he wonders who will eventually read his poem, so he muses over who might see his snot-monument.

It is therefore a mistake to think that craftsmanship or creativity guide the genesis of Stephen's "note." The proto-poem's meaning is not explicable in traditional aesthetic terms because it is chiefly that of a waste product, a composite residue of binge-thinking and binge-reading that Stephen's body and mind expulses and that he keeps out of retentive habit. At first the profound, music-of-the-spheres setting for his lyric activity may seem to recall the intense emotional backdrop to the villanelle, but in fact the Proteus genesis owes far more to morose, mediated, constipated delectations of reading and memory than to any immediate experience.

This becomes still more clear if we consider one of the seemingly infinite sources or origins for the poem, the 1898 Book of Images by W. T. Horton, in which there is a sequence of three entitled "The Path to the Moon," "Diana," and "All Thy Waves are Gone Over Me." Each of these resonates with Stephen's proto-poem: the last, in particular, shows a "pale vampire" "through storm his eyes" with "bat sails bloodying the sea." (See figure 1.) In his introduction to the volume, Yeats comments that this particular image reveals "a kind of humorous piety like that of the mediaeval miracle-plays and moralities" and treats the drawings generally as artifacts of symbolist thought experiments (14). This further suggests that we not be fooled by the fact that attention to process usually heightens the aura surrounding an artwork; to the contrary, Stephen's literary genesis on the strand has as much in common with Bloom's visit to the outhouse as it does with the writing of the villanelle.

In fact the no-nonsense attention to process in the Proteus scene of literary genesis makes it all but impossible to maintain the idea, frequently asserted by critics, that Stephen is gripped by grief or his psyche tortured by demonic visions. The way he talks to himself is clear, careful, and unemotional, reminiscent not of the villanelle but of the rhetoric of self-control and release Bloom used for his defecation. "Put a pin in that chap" says Stephen, before adding a mental note to edit to two mouths: "Must be two of em" "Glue em well." (Incidentally, this little discussion Stephen has with himself about how to compose this line is at odds with critics' claims that it is simply plagiarized.(5) ) And even as he is scribbling the words, at precisely the moment of (what should be) his greatest rapture and concentration, he muses detachedly, in a complete, quiet sentence, "That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter." Bloom manifests the same "yielding but resisting" attitude as he simultaneously reads and allows "his bowels quietly to ease themselves": "No great hurry. Keep it a bit" (4.501-7). Neither of them is composing in a species of fine frenzy.(6)

Ultimately, in the transition between the Portrait and Proteus Stephens, the shift from genesis as royal birth to genesis as excretion, we can glimpse the onset of a Nietzschean-Foucauldian attitude toward the origin:

History also teaches how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin. The lofty origin is no more than "a metaphysical extension which arises from the belief that things are most precious and essential at the moment of birth." We tend to think that this is the moment of their greatest perfection, when they emerged dazzling from the hands of a creator or in the shadowless light of a first morning. The origin always precedes the Fall. It comes before the body, before the world and time; it is associated with the gods, and its story is always sung as a theogony. But historical beginnings are lowly: not in the sense of modest or discreet like the steps of a dove, but derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation (Foucault, 79).

III. Stephen in Aeolus: The Vampire of the Son

In Aeolus, characters like O'Madden Burke, Myles Crawford, Professor MacHugh, and Lenehan are all so loud that they destroy the possibility of quiet conversation, much less meditative or lyric thought.(7) Stephen is subdued and overblown, and when his Proteus poem returns to his mind – set aside in italics – it is in a typically windy moment with many open and competing dialogic frames, beginning with Lenehan's riddle:

--Silence! What opera resembles a railwayline? Reflect, ponder, excogitate,reply.
Stephen handed over the typed sheets, pointing to the title and signature.
--Who? the editor asked.
Bit torn off.
--Mr Garrett Deasy, Stephen said.
--That old pelters, the editor said. Who tore it? Was he short taken?

On swift sail flaming
From storm and south
He comes, pale vampire,
Mouth to my mouth.

--Good day, Stephen, the professor said, coming to peer over their shoulders. Foot and mouth? Are you turned ...?
Bullockbefriending bard.

SHINDY IN WELLKNOWN RESTAURANT
--Good day, sir, Stephen answered blushing. The letter is not mine. Mr Garrett Deasy asked me to... (7.513-41).

Despite many confident pronouncements, every critic who has given this scene and the poem any attention has had trouble with it, usually struggling in one way or another with the problem of its origins. These include Robert Day, David Hayman, Robert Martin Adams, Stanley Sultan, Murray McArthur, Michael Murphy, Tim Martin, Sam Slote, Fritz Senn, and Hans Walter Gabler. A good portion of the debate has been about the quality of the poem, a key point of contention being the way it seems to echo the last stanza of the poem "Grief on the Sea" from the Gaelic Leaguer and Irish folklorist Douglas Hyde's Love Songs of Connacht:

And my love came behind me --
He came from the South;
His breast to my bosom,
His mouth to my mouth.

Thus one reason Stephen blushes as he recalls his poem may be that he knows he has incorporated a line from Hyde's book, precisely the book that the insufferable Haines is so excited about. (Stephen could also be embarrassed to do Deasy's bidding, embarrassed about his poem, embarrassed that he was in fact "short taken.") Best later explains in Scylla and Charybdis that Haines is "quite enthusiastic, don't you know, about Hyde's Lovesongs of Connacht. I couldn't bring him in to hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it" (9.93-5). Eglinton comments that the "peatsmoke is going to his head," and there is room to believe it may also have gone to Stephen's (9.100). Some critics see Stephen's borrowing or plagiarism – there many potential sources besides the ones so far mentioned – as Joyce's critique of his former self; others argue that the poem, in the best traditions of folklore, is of mixed heritage and represents something like a distilled version of the relentlessly intertextual Ulysses, a miniature experiment in Bakhtinian dialogicity.(8)

The nutrients in Stephen's piece of shit have often been analyzed, but rarely has the awkward dynamic of the poem's suppression and return been addressed. The problem is acute because the poem's radical distance from its origins – e.g. its origins in many other texts, in Stephen's body and mind, or in the Proteus chapter of Ulysses – make it virtually unreadable and uninterpretable. The surfeit of visible intertexts may suggest just the opposite – that the poem is bursting with a postmodern semantic plenitude – and so might the existence of so many critical interpretations, but before we can even describe those intertextual relationships the problem is to know where the poem is, to what it attaches or refers, and these are virtually unsolvable problems.(9) To take but one example: to whom does "He" refer in the third line? Putting the poem back in Proteus, we might assign it to the enDraculated "ruffian," as if the poem were voiced by the female gipsy cocklepicker, or else (despite the gender of the pronoun) to Stephen's mother, mutating the vampire theme prominent in Nestor (e.g. Stephen's identification with the blood-sucking student Cyril Sargent) and elsewhere (e.g. Circe where Stephen sees his mother as a ghoulish chewer of corpses.) Stanley Sultan addresses the protean pronoun problem by interpreting the vampire as neither Stephen nor his mother: he sees Stephen composing a "crude quatrain about the coming of a personified death to his mother" and argues that it is "far more polished" by the time we see it in Aeolus (58).

If we attach the poem to Aeolus, then the choices are just as numerous: "He" might be Deasy – a pale vampire sucking Stephen's artistic lifeblood – or, oddly, Professor MacHugh, who is a candidate because the poem says "He comes" at precisely the moment that he does. MacHugh may seem like an unlikely vampire, but the detail of his noisily flossing his teeth a few pages earlier is suggestive. Or maybe the idea is that Stephen has been called from a distance and is moving unknowingly but inexorably toward the more kindly vampire Bloom.

There are other options. The point is that by the time we read this vampire poem it has been decontextualized but not meaningfully recontextualized, brought back to Stephen's (Protean? Aeolian?) consciousness not by any sequence of ideas or images (he is not thinking about vampires or kisses or mouths or south) but by its materiality: the paper befouled by the poem. Thus it is an error to analyze it either New Critically as a free-standing lyric or poststructurally as a play with signifiers and intertexts; it is best understood as a failed genesis expressed through a poetics of excretion. Exiled, it appears in Aeolus not as a delayed presence or a connection across time to a primordial Edenville atelier, but as a deracinated anachronism, a Kevin Egan, a wince-inducing memory, and an autobiographico-archeological discovery of a poorly wrought urn. Its status in Ulysses becomes clearer when we compare it to Bloom's and Mulligan's literary geneses.

IV. Lestrygonians: Three Quarks for Mr. Bloom

The advertisement to which Martha Clifford and many other women responded was from a man who, just like Stephen, styles himself as "literary." In the outhouse Bloom thinks of writing a collaborative piece with Molly, a short story to illustrate a proverb – "Which?" he asks himself as if this were the main creative problem to solve – and another time tries, in a quasi-programmatic epiphanic mode, jotting down on his cuff what she says while dressing. In Sirens he will actually put pen to paper to compose a letter to Clifford, in Nausicaa he will start a message in the sand to Gertie McDowell, and in Ithaca the narrator recalls some poems he had written at the ages of 11 and 22.

But early in Lestrygonians, Bloom momentarily becomes a poet again at the age of 38. He is thinking of food, of rats in vats of porter (the homonymy strikes him), of throwing himself in the river, of the example of Reuben J.'s son who nearly drowned, and of seagulls. He throws down a ball of paper – a crumpled-up throwaway ad for the coming of Elijah – and thinks to himself: Elijah is coming at 32 feet per second per second. But the birds are not fooled: they think neither that the paper is food nor that Elijah is coming. They just wheel about, flapping. Then we read:

The hungry famished gull
Flaps o'er the waters dull.

That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts. Solemn.

Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth (8.62-8).

Bloom's poem is a different kind of Joycean experiment on deracinated or un-originated poetics, for it is in print before or outside of any process of composition. Even to call it "Bloom's" poem is loose, for it is "his" only by virtue of the fact that it occurs in his consciousness, in the conventional poetic language (e.g. "o'er") he has inherited from his cultural milieu, and not because he lays claim to artistic agency. There are just the words arranged, instantly and unproblematically – one must say unthinkingly and unpoetically. No calling for tablets, no tortured intensity, no rapture, no mixtures of intertexts, no pre-proto-primordial onomatopoiea – in short, no genetic event.

Nor, although it would have supplied him with paper, does Bloom regret throwing away his throwaway. He dispenses happily with the supplement of material inscription, and his insouciance toward écriture raises the uncomfortable question of why Stephen and Buck are so desperate to write things down. Does Joyce betray here an attraction for the fatherless text, the epiphanic product of a thought that is free of literary erudition and thoughtlessly true to the essence of what is observed and no more? Bloom speaks the whatness of gullness of allgull, and, however dull, the poem's dullness is the dullness of truth. And he does so instantaneously, in thought represented as "thought" or "writing" or "creation" only ex post facto. The poem becomes a "poem" only when a genesis is invented for and retroactively applied to it. In fact, taken alone, Bloom's paperless poem seems to admit no interpretation, no hermeneutic depth, no symbolism – it seems able to become complex only when placed in a dialectic with others.

While Stephen has his identity wrapped up in his status as a bard – painfully, since he is a poète manqué – Bloom announces himself as a non-poet and sees his couplet only as the kind of thing others do. His thought is that poets pay attention to "similar sounds"; in his example the gull-dull rhyme stands out along, perhaps, with the subtler assonance and consonance of "famished" and "Flaps." But maybe Lenehan is right that there is "a touch of the artist about old Bloom," for although his poem has not sent critics scrambling backwards to famous verses on skylarks, nightingales, and albatrosses or uses of the gull / dull rhyme, the six feet do scan perfectly as iambic trimeters or, run together, as a single hexameter (the meter of the Homeric epic), i.e. an alexandrine with an internal rhyme and a conventional caesura (10.582-3). And on second thought, perhaps the poem does require some interpretation: does the "hungry famished" sequence represent thoughtless repetition? Or intensification? Or revision within the poem? Does Bloom violate a principle of lyric economy or capture the extra-hungry hunger of gulls?

This poem-without-or-before-genesis postulates not automatic writing (the poem's form is too conventional) but the furthest possible radicalization of the idea of the passive artist. For this is a portrait of art without artistry or artist, of epiphanic illuminations that need no sensitive soul to receive and record them with great care. For all its pragmatism and simplicity, the poem therefore represents a limit case or unreachable asymptote in Joycean composition: gloriously, Bloom will not leave 25,000+ pages of avant-texte. He'll leave none, and no text either.

Perhaps most importantly, the straightforward couplet reflects the poetics of the homme moyen sensuel and joins the Ulyssean project of contrapuntally reframing, perhaps even redeeming, the youthful, aestheticizing, omphalos-observing Stephen. Readers are invited to compare the two poems and scenes of genesis not only because they share basic situations (a bat and a bird flying over water) and stylistic features (present-tense verbs in third person singular, masculine rhymes) but also because Stephen's poem appears suddenly in his mind in Aeolus and Bloom's in his right at the beginning of the next chapter, Lestrygonians. But while the vampire that Stephen complicatedly imagines and outsources comes across the water on batwings as a restless, miscegenated, bilious composite of immediate experience, memory, and many texts carrying a welter of associations, Bloom's gull is just hungry, very hungry, and right there in front of him. His poem belongs to him not because he composes it but because its empathetic and realist poetics originate in his character.

The differences between the two literary geneses and their products are striking, but we might ask whether it is really fair to see Bloom's unheroic-heroic couplet – as well, perhaps, as the modes of human being and creativity it reflects – as initiating a dialectic with Stephen. It is if we accept that, for the reader of Ulysses, it is not an innocent example when Bloom cites Shakespeare's "Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit," but rather a way for Bloom to announce himself (unconsciously) as a spirit-father, or benevolent vampire, to Stephen. (The rest of the quotation is obviously appropriate to Bloom, too, for he is doomed to walk the earth: he is a Jew, a cuckold who cannot return home, and a canvasser for ads.) Bloom's actions also prepare for the way he will treat and be treated by Stephen. Where Stephen excretes his poem, stretches out on the rocks, urinates, and picks his nose, Bloom continues to worry about the welfare of the seagulls he has lyricized, even though (in another detail that links the scenes) "they spread foot and mouth disease" (8.84-5). He buys them two Banbury cakes for a penny and feeds them, just as he will take such pains to feed Stephen in Eumaeus, finally noting, with characteristic equanimity, how ungrateful the gulls seem to be: "Lot of thanks I get. Not even a caw" (8.84).

Later in Lestrygonians, Bloom sees George Russell, the mystic, with a young woman; he remembers the language of the personal ad that he placed – "To aid gentleman in literary work" – then wonders what Russell is saying to her; he assumes it is "something occult: symbolism" (8.530). Russell's beard, bicycle, and vegetarianism come together in his mind, and he thinks:

Her stockings are loose over her ankles. I detest that: so tasteless. Those literary etherial people they are all. Dreamy, cloudy, symbolistic. Esthetes they are. I wouldn't be surprised if it was that kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical. For example one of those policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts; you couldn't squeeze a line of poetry out of him. Don't know what poetry is even. Must be in a certain mood.

The dreamy cloudy gull Waves o'er the waters dull (8.542-550).

Like an engaged anthropologist or ethnographer, Bloom tries his hand at writing like one of these strange vegetarians and dreamy, cloudy esthetes. He falsifies reality (gulls are hungry, not dreamy) and fleetingly proposes a broad explanation for literary genesis: poetry results from mood, and mood from food. Out goes the "hungry famished" gull and in comes the "dreamy cloudy" one; out goes the realist "Flaps" and in comes the oneiric "Waves." Irish stew could never produce such writing, but that may not be a bad thing; Bloom remains sympathetically equidistant from both gassy mystics and sweaty policemen. His genetic logic seems meant in part for Stephen, whose fecal vampire poem he would probably trace to overreading.

V. Scylla and Charybdis: Buck Mulligan's Pen Isolates Him.

Finally, Buck Mulligan's moment of literary genesis occurs at the end of Stephen's dialogue in Scylla and Charybdis. Stephen's long last sentence ends:

…in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

-- Eureka! Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka!

Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's desk.
-- May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.
He began to scribble on a slip of paper.

Take some slips from the counter going out (9.1051-8).

Instead of being something to think about seriously, the promise of a permanent state of self-sustaining androgyny in the economy of heaven represents for Mulligan a chance to mock the unmarried men in the library. He performs his grandiose literary genesis while Stephen, Eglinton, and Best continue their conversation, awkwardly negotiating the competing demands of silently writing and attracting attention: at one point he stands "up from his laughing scribbling, laughing" (9.1086). When he and Stephen are leaving the library together, he performs:

I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.
The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined. Gone the nine men's
morrice with caps of indices.
In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet:

--Everyman His Own Wife
or
A Honeymoon in the Hand
(a national immorality in three orgasms)
by
Ballocky Mulligan
He turned a happy patch's smirk to Stephen, saying:
--The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.
He read, marcato...
He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen: and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men… (9.1167-91)

Appearing shortly after Stephen's critique of the literary talent of the God of Genesis – "The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later)…" – Mulligan's composition is clearly a masturbation; he is the only person pleased by it (9.1046-8). His self-satisfying performance in front of Stephen recalls Deasy's journalistic genesis in Nestor – "I don't mince words, do I?" was his rhetorical question – but at least Deasy had a public issue in mind (2.331). As the ironic play on the word "conception" suggests – "I have conceived a play for the mummers" – Mulligan's various voices, smirking, laughing, and lolling head reveal too much pleasure taken in a puerile and sterile production.

Stephen has performed in the arena of the "nine men's morrice" dance, Mulligan only on the side. Twice, once before and once after his composition, we hear that he speaks to "shadows" rather than to real people. Because his creativity is so ostentatiously public but his creation audible only to an audience of one (Stephen, who does not acknowledge it) Mulligan's scene represents the limit point of a prestidigitative artist and an artistry without any art: the opposite, then, of the Bloomian genesis.

If Stephen's literary shit has the potential to become fertilizer – it is a very rich composite, if repugnant in its present form – and Bloom's poem has the force of honesty and humility, then Mulligan's obnoxious play is so much spilled seed,(10) all the more clearly a failure because it arrives third in this little economy, i.e. in the Hegelian position of synthesis. Coming off as a juvenile failure and missed opportunity, Mulligan lacks the strengths visible, sketchily but unmistakeably, in Stephen (seriousness, erudition, experimentalism) and Bloom (integrity, empathy, directness). His literary genesis reveals mainly that he has removed himself from the valuable, if still largely symbolic, human dialectic developing between the other two.

VI. Conclusion.

What does this brief study suggest about the hermeneutic consequences, for genetic critics and others, of Joyce's fictionalized scenes of literary genesis? The lengthy and absolute genesis enshrined, with whatever degree of irony, in the villanelle scene in A Portrait has in Ulysses been fragmented into shorter, more individualized ones. There is no pretense to a single poetics of genesis, no aesthetic vocabulary or metaphorical system from Aquinas or the book of Genesis to underpin the various scenes of writing. On the contrary, the conceptual and metaphorical frameworks that guide our understanding of the genetic processes examined above – Stephen's excretion, Bloom's default to cultural norms, Mulligan's masturbation – are all presented as obviously partial and insufficient.

Of a piece with this detranscendentalizing, genealogical attitude toward literary genesis in Ulysses is the way Joyce pursues a via negativa instead of a heroic model, algebraically manipulating unsuccessful scenes of genesis with larger, more positive goals in mind. The genetic economy of Stephen, Bloom, and Mulligan recalls that of Dubliners in which Joyce used figures like Little Chandler, Ignatius Gallaher, Joe Hynes, and Gabriel Conroy to show the kinds of writers he did not wish to become, all without depicting ones he did. But while the Dubliners authors were essentially beyond hope, somewhere in the abstract formula "Stephen plus Bloom minus Mulligan" lies a more promising origin myth for the text of Ulysses.

Taken together, the foregoing scenes suggest that scholars of the profoundly genealogical author Joyce might look more synoptically and simultaneously at the poetics of genesis in play in different units of his texts and avant-textes. Looking at the published text of Ulysses is already enough to encourage us to continue developing the field of differential or comparative genetics, for example by examining and comparing more partial, localized, abortive, or otherwise unheroic and unconsummated genetic events. Ultimately, the book also suggests that it can itself be interpreted as a retrospective commentary on its own genesis, and on genesis itself. Like every other piece of new genetic scholarship, it has the potential to put its stamp on the soft wax of genetic theory and criticism.

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