Firenze University Press www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems Citation: H.W. Gabler (2022) Emergence of James Joyce’s Dialogue Poetics. Jems: 11. pp. 229-252. doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149- 13431 Copyright: © 2022 H.W. Gabler. This is an open access, peer- reviewed article published by Firenze University Press (https:// oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/ bsfm-jems) and distributed under the terms of the Creative Com- mons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distri- bution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Infor- mation files. Competing Interests: The Author(s) declare(s) no conflict of interest. Editors: D. Pallotti, P. Pugliatti (University of Florence) JEMS - Journal of Early Modern Studies Journal of Early Modern Studies 11: 229-252, 2022 ISSN 2279-7149 (online) | DOI: 10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-13431 Emergence of James Joyce’s Dialogue Poetics Hans Walter Gabler Ludwig Maximilians Universität München () Abstract The present essay pursues a genetic trajectory through Joyce’s oeuvre from early 1903 to the end of 1918, that is from his epiphanies through Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the beginnings of Ulysses in its initial Telemachus episode and its twin early Hamlet chapter that became Scylla & Charybdis, ninth of the novel’s eighteen episodes. The focus in this is directed in particular on the emergence of Joyce’s dialogue poetics through his sustained engagement with Shakespeare’s work and his art. When in 1912, in Trieste, Joyce immersed himself in the study of Shakespeare and Hamlet towards a series of lectures he had been invited to give, his approach appears to have been guided by the author-to-author question: ‘How does he / How did he do it?’ The question is suitably adaptable to a critical analysis of the emergence of Joyce’s poetics of narrative during the creativity span this essay covers. Joyce’s oeuvre over these years was progressively generated through ever writing text from texts, a constant interplay of perception texts and new original writing. The mode of narrative in dialogue his texts develop both in open scenic exchanges and in silent reflections stimulates, too, for it demands, the reader’s dialogic involvement. Keywords: Early Joyce, Genetics of Writing, Hamlet and Shakespeare, Narrative in Dialogue, Perception Text, Ulysses Preamble In this year 2022, we commemorate the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses one hundred years ago. On 2 February 1922, his fortieth birthday, Joyce held in his hands the first copy of the book towards and on which he had crafted his art, and developed himself, for twenty years and more. Our closest encounter with the emergence of that writing comes through the unfolding of its processes themselves. With a mind-set to the genetics of literary texts, the essay to follow endeavours to respond to the signals of creative awareness, experience, pre-reading issuing into compo- sition, such as they remain materially discernible in the authorial writing that survives. Our genetic pursuit sets in where Joyce’s writing begins with his epiphany vignettes. Our central interest hans walter gabler230 is on his literary work in prose from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to mid-Ulysses. This is a period of creativity where self-reflection on his art in terms of both poetics and technique shows at its perhaps most intense in Joyce’s authorship. At its centre in the mid-nineteen-tens is Joyce’s encounter from author to author with William Shakespeare. It is the period through which he develops into a modernist writer. Just upon reaching the age of eighteen years, James Joyce on 20 January 1900 lectured to the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin from his essay ‘Drama and Life’ (Barry 2000, 23-29). ‘Drama’ of the present and the prospective future is ‘life’, we understand, under a condition of literature. Crown witness is Shakespeare. ‘Shakespeare was before all else a literary artist … [his] work … was literature in dialogue’ (23). The present essay builds upon the assumption that here lies the origin of Joyce’s poetics as it grew and exfoliated, over close to two decades of writing, to reaching Scylla and Charybdis, his Hamlet-and-Shakespeare chapter at midpoint in Ulysses. ‘Literature’ is his chosen medium of art. ‘Drama’ is his narrative aspiration. ‘Life’ is the key to attaining it. He perceives – senses, observes, experiences, reads – life epiphanies throughout his day-to-day and night-to-night existence. Whether he senses, observes, experiences, reads – we posit reading-into-text as Joyce’s core mode of perception, and of committing perception – perception text – into his prodigious memory. It is from his read and memory-stored perception texts that he creates and generates literary texts in and of his own writing. For these, he develops an increasingly refined poetics of drama narration, constitutive of narrative character and action in scene and dialogue. This narrative mode, too, deepens progressively to protagonist self-dialogue – scenically silent, audible only in the read- ing. Inviting, indeed demanding, reader perception and participation, the silent protagonist self-dialogues in narrated scenes establish, as well, the reader as participatory character dialog- ically within the literary artefact. It is under such premises that the following essay in its own mode of genetically critical analysis and argument reviews the emergence of Joyce’s literary art. I James Joyce lived and thrived from 1904 to 1915 in Trieste. He was there liberated to the full to English as his language of literary creation.1 As his language of public address, at the same time, he went for Italian. From 1907 onwards, and in the native language of his audiences and readers, he delivered lectures at the Università Popolare and wrote articles for the newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera. Significantly, the one theme that united his lectures and articles was Ireland and things Irish, historical and contemporary. He wished to convey to his fellow citizens in his chosen exile a perception and experience of his home country. In 1914, he planned a collection for Italian readers of his Triestine essays on the matter of Ireland. The war broke out, the book was never published. It was to have borne the title L’Irlanda alla sbarra (Ireland at the Bar). The 1907 Il Piccolo della Sera article so named was to have opened it. ‘Ireland at the Bar’ sets out the case of an, in effect, colonialist British atrocity of condemning and hanging an accused native Irishman not guilty of the deed under sentence. In August 1882, a whole family by the name of (English) Joyce, (Gaelic) Seoighe, had been murdered in their home in Maamtrasna in Western Ireland. Brought to court with the perpetrators of the deed was also one Miles Joyce. He was family-related to both the murdered family and the gang rightly accused. Court procedures by which he could have been vindicated foundered catastrophically on the insuperable language barrier between the English judge and the Gaelic-only accused. 1 At somewhat greater length, I argued as much in Gabler 2004. james joyce’s dialogue poetics 231 Opening the collection of Joyce’s Triestine journalism, this narrative would have made its impact through its high personal engagement. Joyce tells the story not just from an historian’s de-per- sonalised middle distance. What it brings home is a deep concern of the present: the condition of Ireland under British rule, with its indigenous population in effect permanently muted through the absolute language barrier.2 The narrative’s strong personal undercurrent is likely due, too, to Joyce’s felt knowledge that the Maamtrasna murders happened in his own lifetime. Admittedly, he was just six months old when they did and cannot in any sense have had a memory of them. Yet not only would he have heard them talked about. Being who he was, he would, too, have read of them. Among his father’s books was shelved the pamphlet account of 1884 by T. Harrington, M.P., The Maamtrasna massacre: impeachment of the trials. This is how it reads: The third prisoner, Myles Joyce, was, before a quarter of an hour had elapsed, brought into the dock to stand his trial for complicity in the murder. The prisoner is older than either of the previous men who have been tried. He was dressed in older garments, but, unlike them, he did not appear to have the slightest knowledge of the language in which his trial is being conducted. He sits in the dock like them … with his head leaning upon his arms, which he reels upon the bar of the dock. (1884, Appendix, 29)3 This, by contrast, is what we read by James Joyce: The old man, as well as the other prisoners knew no English. The court was obliged to have recourse to the services of an interpreter. The cross-examination conducted with the help of this individual was sometimes tragic and sometimes comic. On one side there was the official interpreter and on the other the patriarch of the wretched tribe, who being little used to civil customs, seemed stupefied by all those judicial proceedings. The magistrate said: “Ask the accused whether he saw the woman on that morning.” The question was repeated to him in Irish and the old man burst into complicated explanations gesturing, appealing to the other accused men & to heaven. Then worn out by the effort, he was silent again and the interpreter, addressing the magistrate, said: —He says that he did not, your worship. —Ask him whether he was close by that place at that time. The old man began again speaking and protesting; shouting, almost beside himself with the anguish of not understanding and of not making himself understood, weeping with anger and terror. And the interpreter, again drily: —He says no, your worship. At the end of the cross-examination the poor old man was found guilty and the case was sent forward to the Higher Court, which sentenced him to death. On the day of the execution of the sentence the square in front of the gaol was filled with people who on their knees were howling prayers in Irish for the repose of poor Miles Joyce’s soul. Legend says that even the hangman could not make himself understood by the victim and that losing patience, he gave the miserable man’s head a kick to thrust it into the noose.4 2 A recent account is Kelleher 2018. 3 The Appendix to Harrington’s report is an abridged version of the text the Freeman’s Journal published on 14 November 1882. 4 The translation here given is not the one offered in Barry 2000, 145-147 (which usefully appends, however, all of Joyce’s Triestine articles in the Italian original; see L’Irlanda alla sbarra on 217-219). The James Joyce Archive (JJA 2) provides a sequence of translations into English from Joyce’s Italian that may have been a communal effort of family and friends in Trieste in the mid-1910s. These survive somewhat fragmentarily from the archives of Stanislaus Joyce, meanwhile in the holdings of Cornell University Library. They are likely to have been prepared for an edition in English of Joyce’s Triestine Italian articles that, like its Italian counterpart, was never realised. The translations were with some probability overseen, at least through select stretches, by Joyce himself. In their language and style the Triestine translations feel distinctly closer to James Joyce’s tone, rhythms and usage of English in the early 1910s than do later translations more readily accessible (Groden et al. 1977-1979, vol. 2, 664-665). hans walter gabler232 This is Joycean narrative. At the same time, it is not Joycean invention. James Joyce did not invent freely. His artistry craved supports and scaffolds: structures from which and into which to be tex- tured. Undoubtedly, his extraordinary powers of memory helped him at many a stile. But why, and most pertinently how, was memory activated into creative thinking and writing? Recourse could be taken to time-honoured traditions of memory systems that reach back even into antiquity: The rainladen trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann: and the memory of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of quiet joy. His morning walk across the city had begun: and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman, that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the win- dows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile, that as he went by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty, and that passing a grimy marine dealer’s shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson which begins: I was not wearier where I lay. (Joyce 1993, V, 71-86) This accords with a Ciceronian memory template: text triggered from memory by recalling in the imagination given pre-defined nodes of an ambulatory circuit. In the case of Cicero, the rhetor would memorise a speech, ambling, say, through the rooms of a house. In performance, he would mentally pass again through that house and in each room re-envisaged recall the memory-stored text allocated to this room, or that piece of furniture, for his next argument in the speech under delivery.5 What Joyce describes for Stephen Dedalus is, we may be sure, modelled on his own, James Joyce’s, practice. The memory marks in Dublin by which Stephen’s morning walk leads, or might lead him, call up texts that he (Stephen a.k.a. the young student James Joyce) has read. The narrative progress in the passage cited relies on atmospheric association. This is increasingly aggregated into textual echoes and culminates in a text quote from a poem by Ben Jonson. In other words, Joyce in the process of writing generates his composition from a bouquet of felt texts of perception – perception texts. Amalgamating the perception texts in all their fragrances results in a fresh imaginatively scenic telling of Stephen Dedalus’ late-morning ambulation through Dublin. It is texts mentally or physically given, perception texts, that Joyce in composition trans- forms into text of his writing. His every experience, lived experience just as reading experience, was throughout, it appears, patterned in memory as text. To call up these perception texts therefore meant to read them. Creatively to do so meant to perceive and grasp their narratable core so as to transform it into autonomous narration. In the example of Joyce’s telling the The Maamtrasna massacre in ‘Ireland at the Bar’, memory from experience and memory from reading coalesce. The emotional jolt when encountering the event in first reading the record of it can be felt through Joyce’s text engendered from the record. While the past recounted by Tim Harrington as information to be read in print thus amounts to being the very perception text anterior to the text that Joyce shaped, it is unlikely that, writing L’Irlanda alla sbarra in 5 A standard reference work for enquiring into memory systems is still Yates 1966. james joyce’s dialogue poetics 233 1907 in Trieste, he would actually have had Harrington’s pamphlet at hand to re-read. He re-perceived from memory the text once read and the emotion experienced from it. Through Joyce’s creativity, then, Harrington’s record was remoulded. But so summarising we hardly begin to discern what constitutes the quality and originality of the target text engen- dered from its perception text. In generating ‘Ireland at the Bar’ from its perception substrate, Joyce composed the narrative – specifically the opening as extracted above – scenically, both as a scene in dialogues among the characters in the court room and, in parallel, as a latent dialogue between the narration and the reader. Even in its guise as narrative, the passage thus becomes thoroughly dramatic. It exemplifies in nuce Joyce’s notion of the ‘esthetic image’ that he has Stephen Dedalus offer to Lynch in A Portrait (V, 1464-1465): ‘The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and projected from the human imagination’. There is hardly a more succinct definition, and indeed awareness, conceivable of Joyce’s sense of the interrelationship between his perception texts and the target texts he turns them into. The concept of the ‘esthetic image’ that Joyce has Stephen define also deepens our understanding of the ever-quoted punch line that follows: ‘The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handywork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’ (1467-1469). This proclamation is quintessentially dramatic and so in itself of the nature of an esthetic image. The perception texts from which it is generated, that give it power, and through which we fathom its depths, extend through western writing from Aristotle through medieval theology and philology up to literary renewals by Joyce’s recent literary forebears, one Flaubert among them. * * * I proposed the term ‘perception text’ in an earlier investigation. A conference in York in 2012 explored the nature and range of Joyce’s non-fictional writing. This theme offered a frame within which to discuss the relationship between perception texts and texts of James Joyce’s fictional writing. On the premise that Joyce never invented independently when writing, I sought to show that what he wrote derived from – no: was kindled by – experience, emotion, knowledge and understanding perceived and read, and thence memory-stored in mental text mode for recycling into subsequent text composition. In his writing, Joyce relied on perception texts from which his own texts were creatively generated. James Joyce’s perception texts may be exogenous, as was the account of the Maamtrasna case at court. Equally, they may be texts of his own earlier writing. By common understanding, Stephen Hero, for example, is the genetic antecedent to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As drafted, Stephen Hero was hence the perception text for A Portrait. The surviving draft fragment as a matter of fact even preserves written traces of how it was reworked towards the novel.6 Stephen Hero, in its turn, sprang largely, we must assume, from Joyce’s memory store of biographical and autobio- graphical perception. The writing aggregates the perception matter into a cumulated, and thereby at most proto-fictional, narrative. Hence I argued (and still do) that, in contrast to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the fiction, the narrative Stephen Hero is as yet basically non-fictional.7 As we are beginning to see, the ‘perception text’-to-‘text’ correlation touches in essentials on James Joyce’s creativity. It so sheds light on his emergent poetics. What these are, and how he endeavours to write in accordance with them, Joyce seldom talks about, it is true, in propria 6 See Melchior 1988. 7 The York conference was held in 2012, the essays from it were published in 2018. My contribution came out in parallel: Gabler 2018a comprises end paragraphs left out of the otherwise identical Gabler 2018b. hans walter gabler234 persona. We must both intuit and analyse what he does and critically assess just how he shapes language and narrative into the design and articulation of his original writing. * * * Joyce’s first endeavours to realise original writing in practice are the vignettes in language he himself labelled his ‘epiphanies’. In the words of Stephen Daedalus of Stephen Hero, he defines the epiphany by its nature which he decrees as a spiritual manifestation: ‘By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself ’ (Joyce 1963, 211). Emphasising the effect a piece of writing must have so as to be recognised as an epiphany, Daedalus, for the benefit of his conversation partner and for ours, casts himself as an outside observer, an analyst and (as it were) a critic. He does not reveal the secrets of the workshop, does not lay open how an epiphany should be composed to attain that effect; that is: how, practically, to make it. What we initially have to go on, therefore, are the written outcomes of Joyce’s epiphany writing, such as: Figure 1 – ‘Epiphany 5’ by the Joyce (1991) numbering. The James Joyce Archive, Groden et al. 1977-1979, vol. 7, 54. james joyce’s dialogue poetics 235 High up in the old, dark-windowed house: firelight in the narrow room: dusk outside. An old woman bustles about, making tea; she tells of the changes, her odd ways, and what the priest and the doctor said. …. I hear her words in the distance. I wander among the coals, among the ways of adventure …… Christ! What is in the doorway? …. A skull – a monkey; a creature drawn hither to the fire, to the voices: a silly creature. —Is that Mary Ellen?— —No, Eliza, it’s Jim …— —D’ye want anything, Eliza?— —I thought it was Mary Ellen ….. I thought you were Mary Ellen, Jim—8 This is unmistakably the texting of a situation remembered. At the same time, the altercations in spoken words betray a basic pre-organisation in text shape of the moment recalled. Joyce’s notions of ‘the esthetic image in the dramatic form’ are a guide to appreciating how he worked the epiphany. The text vignette basically sets out a scene. This is played out between three characters: Eliza, an answering voice from a character of no name, and ‘I’=Jim. It begins with a lengthy introduction wavering between narrative and stage direction and culminates in dialogue directly rendered, encapsuled in opening and closing dashes. What the record does not convey is what caused it to be written at all, nor what in reading we should make of it: ‘what it means’. James Joyce wrote poetry and composed epiphanies largely before venturing into extended prose. His epiphany phase lasted essentially until his sojourn in Paris from late 1902 to well into 1903. His epiphany vignettes began to serve as perception texts for narrative. His appar- ently earliest writing of extended prose can be dated to 1903. In the spring a telegram called him back from Paris to the deathbed of his mother. Over the summer months, her son read to her first attempts at the narrative that a few months later was, by suggestion from brother Stanislaus, given the title Stephen Hero.9 Neither do those attempts survive, nor does anything of the continuation until the ‘University episode’ as encompassed in the narrative’s one extant fragment. Ample evidence of Joyce’s re-use of epiphanies as perception texts pervades Stephen Hero as we have it, as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and even Ulysses. The writing history of A Portrait is complicated. In the extant fair copy, Chapter II is ma- terially the earliest. It dates, it appears, from a period of composition prior to that of the novel’s first chapter as we have it, and of the chapters following. In its second segment, we re-encounter the Eliza epiphany: Eliza is now Ellen, the person mistakenly expected is Josephine, and Jim is of course Stephen. The vignette, revised as it is, comes second in a concatenation of scenes (ll. 253 to 356) that recognisably incorporates three epiphany adaptations. The integration of epiphany cores in this stretch of the Chapter II text bears witness to the determination to weld such erstwhile individual vignettes into the narrative. What this involves is revision of the identifiable perception texts to splice them into the continuous text flow, while at the same time lending the narrative a dramatically scenic quality. Most momentous in this respect is the integration into the Portrait fiction of the epiphany that in its vignette original reads thus: 8 Epiphany no. 56 in Stanislaus Joyce’s numbering; the handwriting is his. 9 Detailed by me on pp. xv-xvi in Joyce 2007. This edition adopts the reading text from Joyce 1984 21986. hans walter gabler236 Figure 2 – ‘Epiphany 3’ by the Joyce (1991) numbering. The James Joyce Archive, Groden et al. 1977-1979, vol. 7, 64 In the fiction of A Portrait, its fresh instantiation is embedded in a continuous narrative culmi- nating at this point in the epiphany re-use. The first sentence of the original record is extended into a full paragraph. Then follows the re-instantiation in narrator’s rendering (Erlebte Rede) from what was in this case a truly intimate perception text: james joyce’s dialogue poetics 237 It was the last tram. The lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in admonition. The conduc- tor talked with the driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. On the empty seats of the tram were scattered a few coloured tickets. No sound of footsteps came up or down the road. No sound broke the peace of the night save when the lank brown horses rubbed their noses together and shook their bells. They seemed to listen, he on the upper step and she on the lower. She came up to his step many times and went down to hers again between their phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments on the upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down. His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or in revery, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thou- sand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand. And he remembered the day when he and Eileen had stood looking into the hotel grounds, watching the waiters running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and the foxterrier scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn, and how, all of a sudden, she had broken out into a peal of laughter and had run down the sloping curve of the path. Now, as then, he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him. —She too wants me to catch hold of her, he thought. That’s why she came with me to the tram. I could easily catch hold of her when she comes up to my step: nobody is looking. I could hold her and kiss her. But he did neither: and, when he was sitting alone in the deserted tram, he tore his ticket into shreds and stared gloomily at the corrugated footboard. (Joyce 1993, II, 322-356) This has become a thoroughly narrative text, while it has retained and in moments even intensified its scenic potential. Retained, too, is the dialogic quality we have begun to recognise as constitutive of the composition of original Joycean ‘target’ text from perception texts. Significantly, though, dialogue in the ordinary sense of exchanges in spoken words is absent. Exchanges between driver and conductor are reduced just to their nods. Response or the lack thereof between the boy and girl expresses itself, and is in the telling rendered, through gesture and in body language alone. Dialogue verbalised is cast as inaudible. Given exclusively to the boy, Stephen, it is altogether interior self-dialogue. It feels, one might say, like stream of consciousness before the fact. Over and above this, the singularity of this instance of a text of narrative fiction generated from its perception text lies in the reversal of the core insight of the event mirrored. The per- ception text’s phrase: ‘And now she does not urge her vanities’ turns in the Portrait instantiation into its opposite: ‘He saw her urge her vanities…’. Re-focussing the perception text’s ‘I’ into the narrated ‘he’ permits in the fiction to reverse the characters’ characters into their respective opposites: a coyly prude girl and an uncommunicative boy insecure in his vain superiority. In hans walter gabler238 the service of Joyce’s composition of narrative prose, re-use of the perception text modified liberates at will the fictional realisation from the contingencies of the source perception. What went by the wayside from the perception text in the present instance, however, was its epiphany nucleus, its ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’. The phrase in the perception text that marks the moment is ‘And now she does not urge her vanities’, and the awareness drawn from it ‘(wisdom of children)’ is in third-person narration confirmed through the perception text’s entire peroration. In contrast: the gain in characterisation – let us call it: realistic characterisation – achieved in re-composition meant a sacrifice of the original epiphanic moment. The loss was recognised and made up for in the narrative continuation. This allows us to witness the birth (as it were) of a perception text on-the-fly, instantly turned into narrative. The key phrase defining that moment is: ‘And he remembered [my emphasis] the day when he and Eileen had stood looking into the hotel grounds …’. This conjures up a perception scene at once paralleled with the present experience on the steps of the tram: ‘Now, as then, he stood listlessly in his place …’. Stephen is shown locked in his inertia. Alone he departs in the deserted tram and, tearing his ticket into shreds, ‘stare[s] gloomily at the corrugated footboard’. This nadir of mood marks the climactic moment of the redoubled perception-through-memory scene. It kindles insight – yet not, within the fiction, Stephen’s subjective insight, but instead objectively the sudden manifestation to the reader of the significance, the ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’, engendered through the transub- stantiation of the ‘It was the last tram’ epiphany into the narrative fiction, now here in A Portrait, Chapter II, redoubled through the telling of a second perception remembered. The effect achieved is momentous. It evidences how Joyce performed the task he appears to have set himself: to write prose in terms of the parameters of drama. Puzzled as we may long have been by generally no more than observing how pre-existing epiphanies were strewn out literatim or modified over Joyce’s works from Stephen Hero to Ulysses, we gain from the present example a closer understanding of Joyce’s early poetics. Evolving his prose writing practice, he deployed the epiphany template as blueprint for narrative composition centred dramatically on character, dialogue and scene. As character, the narrated ‘he’ of the fiction is, as shown, distinct from the perception text’s ‘I’. Whereas that ‘I’ is contingent on the epiphany’s memory substratum, the novel’s ‘he’ – its protagonist – is engendered from language in the original autonomy of fiction. In this auton- omy established through the art of writing, ‘he’ has, like any and every narrated character, the potential for development, for being developed, through the fiction’s narrated events and time. * * * The potential for text development is a main driving force of the creative process. In course of the emergence of a composition, it springs from impulses of revision. Re-visioning, seeing text written afresh and anew, relies essentially on the author’s reading capacity. It kindles in turn the author’s reimagining and recomposing text written. The author’s response on re-reading text in progress is hence properly a very first reader response to it. Reader response is thus an integral element to creativity in literary art. This is a dimension that Joyce recognised in his writing and re-writing – in his own creative response to texts of his that become for him fresh perception texts. He demonstrates such recognising and responding in Chapter V of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where after narrated ten years of the protagonist’s life through the novel, ‘he’ is made to anchor his memory once more in the conception text of the ‘It was the last tram’ epiphany: He had written verses for her again after ten years. Ten years before she had worn her shawl cowlwise about her head, send- james joyce’s dialogue poetics 239 ing sprays of her warm breath into the night air, tapping her foot upon the glassy road. It was the last tram; the lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked with the driver, both nod- ding often in the green light of the lamp. They stood on the steps of the tram, he on the upper, she on the lower. She came up to his step many times between their phrases and went down again and once or twice remained beside him forgetting to go down and then went down. Let be! Let be! Ten years from that wisdom of children to his folly. If he sent her the verses? They would be read out at breakfast amid the tapping of eggshells. Folly indeed! The brothers would laugh and try to wrest the page from each other with their strong hard fingers. The suave priest, her uncle, seated in his armchair, would hold the page at arm’s length, read it smiling and approve of the literary form. (Joyce 1993, V, 1706-1723) This instantiation of the ‘It was the last tram’ epiphany may be said to have two perception texts. One is the seminal notation in Stanislaus Joyce’s hand from James Joyce’s early experimental days of writing vignettes in drama or prose notation. This version is re-instantiated here in much of its setting, in the noddings of conductor and driver, the ups and downs on the steps of the tram, the girl’s ‘remain[ing] beside him forgetting to go down and then [going] down’ – a courtship dance apostrophised, as in the epiphany, as ‘wisdom of children’. The other perception text for this passage from the novel’s fifth chapter is, cannot help being, the instantiation in the second chapter. The double encounter in the one fiction with this text the same and not the same provides significant interpretational leverage – or, more specifically: from out of the contrast between the instantiations in the second and in the fifth chapter, it demands, even as it activates, heightened reader participation. We note, for example, that an awareness on Stephen’s part in Chapter II that ‘she urges her vanities’ is in Chapter V not repeated. Do we understand, therefore, that the narrator behind the second chapter’s ‘he’ is unreliable; meaning: should we have read, should we read the observation as given in Chapter II as ‘his’ (Stephen’s) ‘mis-reading’ of the girl? This is a serious option. It goes together with, even as it adds to the complexity and depth of interpretatively assessing, Stephen’s insisting on his ‘folly’ then, ten years ago, and now. Recognising and exploring correlations of perception texts and narrated text generated from them does not narrow interpretation. It opens the range of options for reader response to, and participation in, the text read. Looking at the two instantiations of the use in A Portrait of what was originally the ‘It was the last tram’ epiphany, we realise that they are in essence the author’s, James Joyce’s, arrangement into the narrative of perception texts, dissonant in their consonance, for the reader. In the Chapter II instantiation, it is the reader’s task to perceive the youths on the steps of the tram as a coyly prude girl and an uncommunicative boy insecure in his vain superiority, as well as to measure the girl’s perception against the neutral narrator’s rendering. From the Chapter V instantiation, the reader is challenged to second read the girl’s perception of the passage in Chapter II, as well as to relate both instantiations, the past in Chapter II and the present in Chapter V, to Stephen’s now-present memory recall of the parting on the steps of the tram ten years back and to his self-awareness now, both as he articulates it and as the narrative conveys it. The perceptions and the likely enough manifold understandings generated from them in the reader are ‘spiritual manifestations’ – if we wish to uphold the high-falutin’ Dedalus coinage – else, interpretative insights, or even just reading options. In all events, the text hans walter gabler240 in its author arrangement offers challenges and gives incentives to active participatory reading. From the reading spring moments of each and any reader’s experiencing the narrative read in the text through which it presents itself. The reader memory-stores such reading experiences to re-read from memory, when and wherever, under given recall stimuli. * * * As materially written down, Joyce’s epiphanies record experience gained from observation, memory or dreams. We have seen that he turned to them for the perception and memory they stored so as to develop from them new and original writing. The effect of their transfer was to infuse into his evolving narrative prose the principle of the dramatically heightened instance of perception. Albeit that the records of epiphanic moments as they happen to have been preserved are but incidental survivors from the workshop, they have yet paradigmatic significance. They help us to understand an essential dimension of Joyce’s mode and nature of creative writing. Transferred and integrated into the run of Joyce’s early narratives, his epiphany vignettes furthered essentially the development of his narrative art in practice as well as conceptually. His texts with increasing intensity invite, indeed necessitate, reader perception and participation. Joyce thus decisively extended the ‘perception-text’ to ‘text’ networking of his writing to encompass also the reading of that writing. His entire oeuvre will eventually imply the assumption, and the demand on the reader, that the text read enters, as read, into the reader’s realms of experience. Through attaining the stance and the capacity to write and to narrate texts the reader must always co-construct, Joyce establishes himself as a modernist writer. II The resumption of the ‘It was the last tram’ epiphany in Chapter V of A Portrait dovetails with Joyce’s momentous re-encounter with Shakespeare. Focused on his in-depth exploration of Hamlet, it culminated in a series of twelve Amleto lectures, given in English, in late 1912 and into 1913 to the Università Popolare in Trieste – a grander appointment than his occasional earlier engage- ments at that institution, let alone his stints as journalist in Trieste since 1907. The invitation now, a dozen years after lecturing on ‘Drama and Life’ to the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin, stimulated him to delve deeply into Shakespeare studies. From early spring through the summer and into the autumn of 1912 he did extensive research in preparation for his subject (Quillian 1974-1975). What through this immersion he came to realise was – not to put too fine a point on it – that Shakespeare wrote like him. The perspective is not paradoxical, nor as aggrandising as it appears. Joyce had in the process of his own writing over the dozen or so years since ‘Drama and Life’ experienced the force and responded to the creative stimulus of his erstwhile phrasing that Shakespeare’s work was ‘literature in dialogue’. The notion meanwhile answered very individually to his deep urge for innovation – to ‘make it new’ as Ezra Pound would summon the writers and artists of his generation to do – and soon did, not least under the strong impression that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man made on him. For Joyce, researching Shakespeare over those months from early summer to autumn 1912 meant intense immersion in the works and a most searching engagement with their author. The encounter and rapport were deeply from author to author. The scrutiny of Hamlet in particular was for Joyce, no doubt, foremost an explorative adventure under a fellow author’s guiding ques- tion: ‘How does he do it?’. How does Shakespeare arrange, say, the situation in the play when the james joyce’s dialogue poetics 241 ghost of Hamlet’s father demands of the son Hamlet to revenge the murder by which the father was killed? An anecdote that goes back to Shakespearean times served as pivot to the writer’s, Joyce’s, perception of how the writer, Shakespeare, construed the dramatic situation and correlated its significances. The anecdote has it that the actor who played the role of the ghost of Hamlet’s father was also their leading playwright, as well as a main shareholder of the company – and the author of the play to be performed. The actor was William Shakespeare. On top of this, Joyce draws on William Shakespeare’s personal tragedy. Shakespeare had a son by the name of Hamnet, or Hamlet, who died at the age of 11 years. For the sake of argument, let us posit that Joyce read, and so construed as Shakespeare’s, the author’s and actor’s, reading of the moment very much as he makes Stephen Dedalus set it out to his audience, the librarians in Dublin’s National Library in the Scylla & Charybdis episode of Ulysses: The play begins. An actor enters, clad in the cast-off mail of a buck of the court, a wellset man with a deep voice. It is the ghost, King Hamlet. The actor is Shakespeare. And Shakespeare speaks his words, calling the young man to whom he speaks, by name Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit and bidding him list. To his son he speaks, to his son the prince, young Hamlet, and to his son Hamlet [sic] Shakespeare who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.10 To create the Russian-dolls’ effect of Stephen Dedalus’ speech to the librarians, James Joyce the author chooses his language carefully. ‘Shakespeare speaks his words’: that is, William Shake- speare speaks (Stephen says) the words he (Shakespeare) has written for the actor (Shakespeare) to deliver in pronouncing what he (Shakespeare), impersonating the ghost of Hamlet’s father, by his own (Shakespeare’s) playscript has to utter. This is the performative situation that James Joyce sees in the configuration of Shakespeare’s play at this scenic moment, and on which he, Joyce, consequently draws to configure the fiction’s soliloquy for Stephen Dedalus. Texting that soliloquy, Joyce momentously transforms the perception text drawn from Shakespeare’s play text. The intense emotional involvement of the play’s characters, as well as of at least one of the actors: William Shakespeare, and the double-take on the son(s) Hamlet and Ham(n) et are all manifest only in Joyce’s text for Stephen – yet they follow all from James Joyce’s, the author’s, guiding question in exposing himself to William Shakespeare, the pre-author: ‘How does he do it?’ James Joyce’s answer through Stephen Dedalus to his own question is simply (as it were) that it is all a matter of logic: 10 This is a transcription strictly from Joyce’s first extant penning of the Scylla & Charybdis episode of late 1918, in the copybook NLI8_A in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. Cf. U 9, 174-180. hans walter gabler242 Is it possible that that actor, a ghost by absence, in the vesture of the elder Hamlet, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son, (for had Hamlet [sic] Shakespeare lived he would have been then a young man of twenty) is it possible that he did not draw the logical conclusion of those premises. I am the murdered father; you are the dispossessed son: your mother is the guilty queen. (Ibid.) Joyce construed into Stephen Dedalus’ delivery of his, Stephen’s, views on William Shakespeare, Hamlet and Hamlet/Hamnet, the text he, Joyce, read from the perception text as configured in Shakespeare’s, the author’s, arrangement of the character constellation and dialogue in Hamlet. An aspect of Joyce’s recognition that Shakespeare wrote like himself is likely to have involved an assumption that Shakespeare constituted his text and dialogue from, in turn, perception texts available to him. Shakespeare’s main source for Hamlet was, as we know, the Historica Danica of Saxo Grammaticus. I will not here open an academic investigation of the text correlations between the play Hamlet and the source or sources within Shakespeare’s material reach to assess whether Joyce was objectively correct in his assurance about Shakespeare’s working methods and strategies, let alone the modes in which Shakespeare’s creativity expressed itself. It is Joyce’s imaginative leap that Shakespeare wrote like him which spurs on his, Joyce’s, creativity. We do not need to validate Shakespeare through Joyce. But there is every reason to pay Joyce respect for validating by Shakespeare his early poetics and his endeavour to realise it through the early decades of his creative writing as literature in dialogue. * * * We remarked above that Stephen and the girl in the ‘It was the last tram’ episode in Chapter II of A Portrait were not in spoken dialogue with one another, but that instead the narrative was texted as an intense silent self-dialogue of Stephen with himself. In the novel’s mode of being told through a third-person neutral voice, that dialogue is narrated, not acted. The narrative feels, as suggested, like stream of consciousness before the fact. Without mediation through a neutral voice we encounter instead in the opening passage of the Proteus episode of Ulysses a self-dialogue of Stephen’s in dramatic immediacy: Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. (U 3, 1-9) james joyce’s dialogue poetics 243 Employing the stream of consciousness technique for character narration sourced to the flow of awareness, observation and thought of the (given) protagonist is, as we know, the change of narrative stance of Ulysses over A Portrait. Stephen Dedalus is the protagonist of Telemachus, Nestor, and Proteus, the first three episodes of Ulysses, as he was throughout A Portrait. Once more he is given that role in Scylla & Charybdis, the ninth episode of Ulysses as published. Fascinatingly, though elusively since lost, there existed of that chapter a fore-runner, a Hamlet chapter that Joyce announced to Ezra Pound in 1916 as written and sharable, and months later in 1917 offered him for publication whole or in part (though it would suffer, Joyce said, were it published only in excerpts).11 Pound, though it was he who had enquired about something publishable, did not take Joyce up on the Hamlet chapter offer. What this means is that the first episodes that Joyce drafted for Ulysses were Telemachus and the Hamlet chapter that was to become Scylla & Charybdis. Telemachus and Hamlet in conjunction allow us to assess how Joyce, moving on from A Portrait to Ulysses, radicalised his declared poetics. In terms of narrative patterning, he broke through to his own original realisa- tion of ‘literature in dialogue’. He eliminated the third-person narrator. The foundations for the new modes of dialogue to which he advanced were laid in Telemachus and the Hamlet chapter. Their dialogic patterns were to govern Ulysses through its entire first half of nine episodes, with Scylla & Charybdis, finally datable to 1918, as the eventual capstone. Telemachus represents the first phase in the process. From beginning to end, conversing in dialogue is the chapter’s dominant propulsion force. Into its constant flow of the spoken word between Mulligan, Stephen, and later Haines (not to forget the milkwoman), it is true, are interspersed textual islands of Stephen’s reflection, most memorable among them his vision of his mother after her death appearing to him in a dream (U 1, 102-110).12 Yet Stephen’s silent reflections and memories are relatively few and far between in the chapter. Over-all, and in terms of narrative technique, Telemachus carries on and forward the mode in which the first and third section of Chapter V of A Portrait progresses. These sections run an untrammelled course of spoken dialogue between Stephen and all his fellow students who cross his path through Dublin and whom, scene upon scene, he takes on in groups, or sequesters singly in discussions that he, soliloquising, dominates. Telemachus radicalises what those two Portrait sections began. It reduces to near-zero the mediation through a third-party narrator. It pro- ceeds instead as a play-script in disguise. In narrating Telemachus on the pattern once already realised in Chapter V of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce strove to emulate and to re-originalise the notion and practice of ‘literature in dialogue’. The literature he achieves in such self-telling narrative possesses the performative quality of drama. In his ensuing bid for shaping his literary practice to his literature-in-dialogue poetics, the Hamlet chapter, Joyce focuses on the dramatic potential of soliloquy and rhetorical performance. For this, he needs just one protagonist performer – besides, of course, an audience. His performer is his trusted stand-by (and alter ego) Stephen Dedalus. Him he casts to lecture on Shakespeare and Hamlet to the librarians at his (Joyce’s and Stephen’s) regular haunt, Dublin’s National Library. * * * 11 James Joyce to Ezra Pound, 9 April 1917, Gilbert 1966, 101. 12 Originally, it should be borne in mind, this was an epiphany, possibly the last one Joyce wrote. Now, in the incipient new fiction, it is redeployed according to the pattern of epiphany reuses in A Portrait. hans walter gabler244 The earliest material state in which Scylla & Charybdis exists is a draft of late 1918 in three copybooks.13 It is the closest we get to the lost Hamlet of 1916. While it thus provides but me- diate evidence, it yet permits detailed inference and fair deductions about the nature and time and pertinently about the state of the 1916 text. The 1918 draft for Scylla & Charybdis runs sure-footed, on the whole, through its 33 copybook pages. There sprout throughout revisions and additions, accommodated between the lines and in the margins to the consecutive writing on the right-hand pages, as well as spread over the blank areas opposite on the left (i.e., the versos of the preceding pages). I stripped the many-layered draft text (with computer aid) to its basic level before accretion of all revisions and editions.14 So assured is this core text of the draft that we may confidently posit that it represents the main substance of delivery from the lost 1916 Hamlet. It renders evident a carefully worked progression, stage by stage, through Stephen’s performing to his audience of librarians. The basic process design is dialogically scenic. Throughout, the librar- ians get their responses, questions and queries in that spur Stephen on in his lecturing. Yet at its core, this basic draft layer strings together the series of Stephen’s soliloquies on the theme first of Hamlet; and beyond, soon, on Shakespeare and all the biographical circumstances Joyce read and structured as his perception texts towards visualising and turning into narrative his sense of Shakespeare’s art. For this, Joyce operated the rhetorical strategy of deduction through logic to steer his perception of Shakespeare’s presumed perceptions into the Scylla & Charybdis episode’s, erstwhile Hamlet chapter’s, text for Stephen’s soliloquised performance. To get his perspective across, Joyce lets Russell, one of the librarians, pontificate in contrast: Art has to show us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. …. The rest is speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys. To which Stephen retorts: — The schoolmen were schoolboys at first, Stephen said. Aristotle himself was Plato’s prize schoolboy at first. And the quips and bantering go on: — That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would no doubt find Hamlet’s thoughts on the immortality of his soul as shallow as Plato’s. John Eglinton said sharply: 13 Copybooks NLI8_A, _B and _C. 14 The link to my Basic-Hamlet Proposition (2020) is , accessed 1 Febuary 2022. james joyce’s dialogue poetics 245 — I confess it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Plato and Aristotle. — Which of the two would have banished the creator of Hamlet from his commonwealth?, Stephen asked.15 This is strictly foree-play to Stephen’s Shakespeare exegesis which starts in earnest with the ‘What is a ghost?’ soliloquy already quoted, and from which Stephen’s logical soliloquising against the librarians’ scoffings takes its course. We have skipped however in the bantering sequence just given an important intercalation after ‘Aristotle himself was Plato’s prize schoolboy at first’. Formless spiritual essences. Father, Son and Holy Breath. I am the fire on the altar. I am the sacrificial butter. Masters of the Great white lodge. The Christ’s bridesister, moisture of light, born of a virgin, repentant Sophia departed to the plane of buddhi. Mrs Cooper Oakley saw H.P.B’s elemental. Fie! Fie! You naughtn’t to look, missus, when a lady’s a showing of her elemental.16 This is a full-blown ‘stream of consciousness’ silent self-dialogue of Stephen’s. It picks up Rus- sell’s late nineteenth-century secularised conception of art and mock-rechristianises it. It is, at the same time, integral to the bantering sequence about Plato and Aristotle, schoolboys and schoolmen, and Hamlet and his creator in their commonwealth. We may take this sequence in all its elements as exemplary for the mode of realising literature in dialogue through Hamlet 1916 to Scylla & Charybdis of late autumn 1918. What the draft’s basic layer makes manifest is a mode for narrative in dialogue different from that realised for Telemachus. In contrast to Telemachus, the Hamlet/Scylla & Charybdis alternative has one actor protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. It realises the literature in dialogue stance through combining Stephen the orator with Stephen the silent reflecting thinker. His speech-runs, often extensive, are dialogic in themselves both through their rhetoric and through always either provoking or parrying the librarians’ responses. At this overt level, the episode acts out (as it were) a stage play theatrically, as an entertaining playlet titled, say, ‘An Afternoon at Dublin’s National Library’. Yet interwoven into the performable playlet is a dimension of literature in dialogue, that is, in drama mode, that the reader alone is given the privilege to discern and savour. This is the Stephen’s-only mental drama in silent self-dialogues. * * * 15 See above, n. 10. Cf. U 9, 48-60 – giving an example of considerable accretion of text from the basic layer of the 1918 draft, as here shown, to the text of Ulysses, first edition of 1922. 16 See above, n. 10. Cf. U 9, 61-73. hans walter gabler246 The Scylla & Charybdis episode was finished in fair copy on New Year’s Eve 1918. The text at this time gives ample evidence of Joyce’s ease, after five Leopold Bloom chapters, of negotiating silent self-dialogue in an episode’s over-all flow. The extant draft for the chapter antedates the fair copy by only around two months. The cumulative accretion of revisions even during this brief time span comprises a fair number of additions of self-dialogues of Stephen’s – not to mention that such additions further increased through typescript, two typescript revisions and several proofs towards the first-edition text. On the other hand, stripping the draft to its basic-layer text reveals that Stephen’s silent self-dialogues, as an element of the episode’s compositional design, are in full presence already at that earliest material level of the chapter text. The alternation of dialogic soliloquy and silent self-dialogues gives every appearance of being a basic pattern already of the earlier lost instantiation of the Hamlet chapter text, and so of Joyce’s writing it in close succession to the drafting of the opening episode for Ulysses, Telemachus. In his self-dialogues in Scylla & Charybdis, Stephen reflects threefold: on his ongoing overt performance; on his self-awareness and the changes it has undergone; or on moments of memory. What all three modes have in common in narrative terms is that the third-person neutral narrator as mediator of Stephen, the person narrated, has been replaced by Stephen in person as his own dialogic respondent in silent reflection. This suggests that Joyce’s new- found-land of the silent self-dialogue in the stream of consciousness mode is his response as text-dispositioning author to his earlier narrative solution that we pinpointed above from the example of Stephen’s self-dialogic silent rejection of the girl on the steps of the tram in the ‘It was the last tram’ sequence in Portrait, Chapter II. Joyce’s own earlier writing mode has now become the perception text against which he pitches his present urge to find a new narrative solution for conveying Stephen in silent self-dialogue. His reflections on his ongoing overt performance often take the form of unvoiced inter- jections: —As we weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my left shoulder is where it was when I was born though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time so fro [sic] the ghost of unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. At his age I shall see myself as I sit here today but by reflection from that which then I shall be. Got round that neatly.17 The final ‘Got round that neatly.’ is precisely such an unvoiced interjection after the intellectually demanding explication of weaving and unweaving in art as in body. The model of artistic creation that Stephen here sketches out we may even read, under our preoccupation in the present essay, as supporting that very model of generating original writing from perception and perception texts. 17 See above, n. 10. Cf. U 9, 376-386 where the silent comment given in the draft has been altered. james joyce’s dialogue poetics 247 It is possible to dig yet deeper, though. Even just a single-line silent comment given to Stephen can reveal how far back into ultimately Joycean memory its ancestral line reaches. About one quarter into the base text of the 1918 draft, Stephen and the librarians begin to argue about how to judge what the intimacy of William Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway was and how their relationship fared once Shakespeare left for London: Had the sensual poet who wrote Venus and Adonis, do you think, his eyes in his back that he chose in all Warwickshire the ugliest doxy to lie withal? He was chosen more than a chooser. The goddess who bends over the boy is a young, ripe and ardent woman who forces in a cornfield a lover, younger than herself. —Ryefield, Mr Best said. He murmured then with blond delight for all who would hear: Between the acres of the rye These pretty countryfolk would lie Whereupon follows enigmatically Stephen’s one-line silent interjection: Paris: a wellpleased pleaser.18 This is at the draft’s base level one of as yet but few one-line interjections of silent thought into Stephen’s overt oration. What such interjections have in common is a dialogic response to the spoken text into which they are spliced. They sound so frequently as Joyce’s self-dialogue with his text in progress, as self-comments on having managed turns of phrase or complex lines of argument successfully. Happily, he has his alter ego Stephen at hand in the fiction as spokesman for his own satisfaction with what he has artfully achieved. Through subsequent re-readings and re-workings of the chapter text, the Joycean self-dialogues in the guise of Stephen’s silent thought accumulate. Among the chapter’s intercalations of reflections in silent thought, the instance ‘Paris: a wellpleased pleaser’ has an intriguingly complex ancestry. Just how it is sup- posed to reflect on Stephen’s sense of Shakespeare’s predicament uttered in the preceding lines is difficult to pin down, in the first place. At least, though, on second reflection, it might seem possible for the reader to link it back to the Proteus chapter: Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets … In Rodot’s Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties … Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased pleasers, curled conquistadores. (U 3, 209-215) But the connection is in fact not easy to establish on the level of Stephen Dedalus, the fictional character. The paragraph of reference in Proteus is not one in the stream of consciousness narra- tive mode. Stephen Dedalus cannot therefore, as the character in the fiction he is, be altogether plausibly assumed to remember having thought it. The memory, however elusive in Ulysses, is that of James Joyce. Its earliest source is to be found in a collection of prose vignettes Joyce assembled and calligraphed on loose sheets around 18 See above, n. 10. Cf. U 9, 245-268. hans walter gabler248 1914 in Trieste. We are back in those seminal Trieste years of Joyce’s creativity from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man towards Ulysses. A child’s hand (Giorgio’s? Lucia’s?) wrote ‘Giacomo Joyce’ on the front of the notebook cover. This has since been taken as the collection’s title. One vignette in the sequence reads: The lady goes apace, apace, apace …..Pure air on the upland road. Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national deliverance. Bellumo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife: the busy housewife is astir, sloe-eyed, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand…..Pure air and silence on the upland road: and hoofs. A girl on horseback. Hedda! Hedda Gabler! (Ellman 1968, 8)19 This is a vivid scene in the mode of Joyce’s epiphanies of a decade earlier, and similarly composed out of an autobiographic impulse powerful enough to ignite a sudden spiritual manifestation – which we do not, however, have enough extra-textual knowledge to specify. The prose vignette, under the aegis of Joyce’s writing economy, finds re-use. Within two to three years at most since written from what we assume was a moment in Joyce’s experience, it served him as perception text for a largely identical sketch, last in a series of seventeen brief prose vignettes divided off by asterisks in preparation for the Proteus chapter of Ulysses:20 Figure 3 – National Library of Ireland, The Joyce Papers 2002, II.ii.1.a. Notebook, pre-numbering page [9] 7 19 In the holograph original, I relish encountering my family name scripted in James Joyce’s hand. 20 The full sequence of 17 text vignettes between asterisks, of which this is the last, constitutes the first section of the notebook with earliest extant draft writing for Proteus and Sirens, , accessed 1 February 2022. james joyce’s dialogue poetics 249 The densely worked-over draft demonstrates what creative energy went into the re-perception of the perception text from Giacomo Joyce. The result of the authorial working-over of the draft sketch reads: Paris is waking rawly, crude sunlight on her roofs, huddled testudoform. Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife: the kerchiefed housewife is astir betimes, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In Cordelier’s Yvonne and Madeleine belated, refresh their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan bréton [sic]. Faces of Paris men go by, wellpleased pleasers, their curled conquistadores We get some sense of the surge of creativity as well as emotion that energized the enigmatic moment of silent reflection now in Proteus narrated as Stephen’s.21 The creative thought and emotion are in truth James Joyce’s in his real-life authorial presence. It is then once more James Joyce who, maybe two years after writing and working over the ‘Paris is waking rawly’ vignette, and approximately a year after integrating it into the episode text for Proteus, at the moment of composing the Scylla & Charybdis draft, responds again to a flash of memory that he writes in as a spurt of silent reflection into Stephen’s mind: ‘Paris: a wellpleased pleaser’. Stephen Dedalus the fictional character is merely the author’s vehicle for conveying his, the author’s, James Joyce’s, present and remembered thought and feeling. Or does he on top of all that reflect, too, on his ongoing work of writing the present novel, half- way into it by episode count as he meanwhile is? Perceptive reading reception in its full depth potential means reader openness to perception of the fullest real-author dimensions of the text written. True enough, via its antecedent perception texts, the ‘Paris: a wellpleased pleaser’ phrase suggests a Trieste-to-Paris city trajectory. Yet over and above that, as intercalated into Scylla & Charybdis it may in addition reference Paris, infamous ravisher of Helen, causer of the Trojan war – and prize opponent thus of Ulysses.22 Through the Hamlet chapter draft, even at its basic level of inscription that we have isolated, the author in person moves insistently to the fore. While Stephen remains of course in the narrated foreground, James Joyce’s simultaneous presence is in Stephen’s impersonation increasingly to be felt. As the chapter proceeds, Stephen is cast to grow increasingly unsure in his self-estimate: The fabulous artificer, a hawklike man. You flew. What to find? Paris. What did you find? Stephanos Dedalos. Your crown where is it? Here. Young men, christian association hat. Lapwing … Name yourself: Lapwing.23 From memory to re-orient the self grows painful. Stephen recognises his Dedalian flight as his Icarian fall, even though thereby he found Paris and his name (in the pseudo-Greek original). Yet despondent, he feels reduced even to that ground-creeping bird by the image of which Horatio disparages King Claudius’ messenger in the fifth act of Hamlet.24 Still, outwardly the situation in 21 For the state of the text published, cf. U 3, 209-215. 22 Daniel Ferrer, your suggestion (private) helped me at this stile. 23 See above, n. 10. Cf. U 9, 952-954. 24 William Shakespeare, Hamlet 5.2,178. hans walter gabler250 the library remains contained. After an infinitesimal moment in action time, Stephen smoothly continues in his overt delivery. Somewhat earlier he had suffered a stronger memory shock. An attendant entered with a message for Mr Best that Stephen for a second thought was for him. He was caught off-guard and, with a sense of despair, felt defenceless against the influx of memory: —Sir, there’s a gentleman outside to see you. Me? Says he’s your father. Enter Magee Mor: Japhet in search of a son And mine? Hurrying to her squalid deathbed from gay Paris on the quayside I touched his hand. Fine, brown and shrunken. A drunkard’s hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking new tones remembered. The eyes that wish me well. But do they know me? —A father is a necessary evil, Stephen said battling with despair.25 Diverting a memory response is the initial reaction to the attendant’s message. Stephen gasps silently ‘Me?’ off-script of his performance, and a sketchy notation for text composition of other than personal response content (‘Enter Magee Mor: Japhet in search of a son’) encroaches into the draft neither realised nor deleted. The shock of the attendant’s announcement of a man outside ‘says he is your father’ is too strong to fend off: ‘And mine?’ The scene remembered is deeply fraught. In terms of the narrative and our academically critical parameters for assessing composition and guiding our reading of fiction, what we are given to read is fictional Stephen Dedalus in Scylla & Charybdis linked back to fictional Stephen Dedalus in the Proteus chapter at the moment when he received that (mis-spelled) French telegram: ‘Nother dying come home father’ (U 3, 199). By our critical conventions we would leave explication at that. Yet the author of Ulysses dramatically pulls down the fences of academic enclosure. He does so too when he makes Stephen Dedalus remember that he found the name Stephanos Dedalos in Paris. It is James Joyce as the man and author in person who, through the text he has written to be fictionally delivered or thought by Stephen Dedalus, communicates what he felt and thought at a key moment in his life directly to the reader. The situation conveyed in his words through the narrative’s protagonist is his experience. Under the reading contract for fiction, it is recounted as thought and remembered by Stephen Dedalus. Yet what we read and experience is simultaneously not fictional. It is not to be re-experienced in reading merely as invented for the reality-effect of the narrated protagonist in the fictional nev- er-never-land on the occasion of the performance of a playlet at the National Library in Dublin on the fictional date of 16 June 1904. The experience is James Joyce’s personal experience on a real day in March 1903 when, summoned by the telegram, he came home to Ireland and was met on the quayside (in Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire) by his father, John Stanislaus Joyce. The perception-text referent, then, for Telemachus, with Nestor and Proteus, and for the Hamlet chapter as it is progressing to become Scylla & Charybdis, is the man James Joyce. But just what, artistically and compositionally, does Joyce the author do to achieve this double 25 See above, n. 10. Cf. U 9, 819-828. james joyce’s dialogue poetics 251 perspective for the reader? Receptively reading the text written as Ulysses, the novel, the reader yet also receives through the text written the unmediated communication – dramatically un- mediated, it might be said – of the author’s real-life experience and emotion behind the fiction read. Joyce has already given us the template, I suggest, on which in the Hamlet chapter Scylla & Charybdis he modelled the correlation-in-composition and relationship-in-performance of James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus. The logic of the scene as he, Joyce, perceives it when Hamlet encounters the ghost of his father, arises for him, as we noted, from the treble nature of that scene: the play as a whole was written by William Shakespeare. In performance, William Shakespeare the actor took the part of the ghost. The words he spoke as actor were the words written by him as the play’s author. Taking this constellation seriously as Joyce’s perception text for composing his Hamlet chapter Scylla & Charybdis, its interplay of Stephen Dedalus and his author becomes perfectly lucid. James Joyce is the chapter’s text author. By strength of his pseudonym Stephanos Dedalos / Stephen Dedalus he impersonates, he infuses himself into, the protagonist of the playlet in Dublin’s National Library. The text that as actor he speaks is the text he wrote as author. Resurrecting that text in performing it through Stephen, his medium, Joyce is thus, in a manner, the ghost behind the text the reader reads. In that, Joyce composed the episode text for Stephen at two levels, moreover, the overt and the silent, the situation is really fourfold in nature. The silent level Joyce short-circuited as his immediate line of com- munication from author to reader. On that circuit, Joyce is not the ghost behind the text. Not disguised or shielded by the mask of fiction, he communicates directly that he the son – the felt Hamlet of the re-encounter – meets a ghost there on the quayside, his father in ‘questionable shape’: ‘new warmth, new tones’, and ‘[t]he eyes that wish me well. But do they know me?’. Instantly thereupon, though, Joyce the author has his alter ego resume the overt oration: ‘—A father is a necessary evil, Stephen said’. Yet reading Joyce’s message to us we sense his despair in real life at that moment in (photographically speaking) treble exposure with Stephen’s despair, too, and with Hamlet’s. Joyce designs a poetics to compose like Shakespeare, since before him Shakespeare wrote like Joyce. Works Cited Manuscript Source National Library of Ireland, The Joyce Papers 2002, II.ii.1.a. Notebook, pre-numbering page [9] 7, , accessed 1 February 2022. Printed Sources Barry Kevin, ed. (2000), Joyce James: Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press. Ellmann Richard, ed. (1968), Giacomo Joyce by James Joyce, London, Faber and Faber. Ellmann Richard, ed. (1975), Selected Letters of James Joyce, New York, The Viking Press. Gabler H.W. (2004), ‘James Joyce Interpreneur’, Genetic Joyce Studies 4, , accessed 1 February 2022. Gabler H.W. (2018a), ‘ “He chronicled with patience”: Early Joycean Progressions Between Non-Fiction and Fiction’, in K. Ebury and J.A. Fraser, eds, Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: ‘Outside His Jurisfiction’, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 55-75. Gabler H.W. (2018b), ‘ “He chronicled with patience”: Early Joycean Progressions Between Non-Fiction and Fiction’, in Id., ed., Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays, Cambridge, OpenBook Publishers, 47-64, , accessed 1 February 2022. hans walter gabler252 Gabler H.W. (2020), ‘James Joyce’s Hamlet Chapter’, Joyce Studies Annual 2020, 3-15. Gabler H.W. (2021), ‘James Joyce’s Hamlet Chapter: Stepping Stone to Scylla and Charybdis’, Joyce Studies Annual 2021, 178-216. Gilbert Stuart ed. (1966 [1957]), Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, New York, The Viking Press =Letters I. Groden Michael, H.W. Gabler, D. Hayman, A. Walton Litz and D. Rose, eds (1977-1979), The James Joyce Archive, New York-London, Garland Publishing Inc., 63 vols. HarringtonTimothy M.P. (1884), The Maamtrasna Massacre: Impeachment of the Trials, Dublin, Nation Office, , accessed 1 February 2022. Joyce James (1918), [‘Scylla and Charybdis’] autograph draft, three copybooks in National Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/8/A-C. Joyce James (1963), Stephen Hero, ed. by J.J. Slocum and H. Cahoon, New York, New Directions. Joyce James (1984 21986), Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, prepared by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, New York, Garland Publishing Inc., 3 vols. Joyce James (1991), Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. by R. Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and J. Wittier-Fer- guson, London, Faber&Faber. Joyce James (1993), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Contexts Criticism, ed. by H.W. Gabler, with W. Hettche, and J.P. Riquelme, New York-London, Garland Publishing Inc. Joyce James (2007), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by J.P. Riquelme, New York, Norton. Kelleher Margaret (2018), The Maamtrasna Murders: Language, Life and Death in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Dublin, University College Dublin Press. Melchior Claus (1988), Stephen Hero. Textentstehung und Text. Eine Untersuchung der Kompositions- und Arbeitsweise des frühen James Joyce, PhD dissertation, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Bamberg. Quillian W.H. (1974-1975), ‘Shakespeare in Trieste: Joyce’s 1912 Hamlet lectures’, James Joyce Quarterly 12, 1/2, 7-63. Quillian W.H. (1983), Hamlet and the New Poetic: James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press. Yates Frances A. (1966), The Art of Memory, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.