When I was a freshman in college, my Introduction to Literature teacher spent an entire month on the opening paragraph (or chapter, more likely in retrospect) of a James Joyce novel—it was probably
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as I remember “moocow” being in our discussion. We examined nearly every word and how each one was loaded with multiple meanings and how Joyce attempted to embed the history of English language in his use of his invented, conflated words. The teacher talked about how Joyce spent something like thirty years writing
Finnegans Wake with virtually every word deliberately having multiple meanings. If it took Joyce thirty years to write it, I thought it could take a lifetime to decipher!
I aced the test on
Dubliners by writing about the symbolism I found in the use of particular words (kind of stream of consciousness bullshit with some grounded basis on my part). At the end of the semester, the teacher sat me down and told me that she wanted to place me in the advanced James Joyce class on
Ulysses next semester. I busted my ass academically in art high school, but didn’t feel up to that in art college. I thanked her and politely declined. I ended up taking Advanced Creative Writing with another teacher (Martin Smith, author of
Flora‘s Dream and
Goodbye, Philip Roth) for the next seven semesters at SVA; it was his Detective Fiction course that started me on my lifelong pursuit of collecting the work of mystery writer, Ross Macdonald.
In my many years of book collecting, I’ve read a lot of dealer catalogues. It’s my understanding that Joyce tinkered with the text of
Ulysses as various printings of the book were done. If I recall correctly, serious Joyce collectors need the first eight printings of the book because Joyce changed the text in each run!
I love holograph manuscripts because they capture the author’s thinking process on paper. Here’s my facsimile edition of James Joyce’s
Ulysses manuscript:
View attachment 276420
View attachment 276423