CUNY Academic Commons

Because it is impossible (and illegal) to download these images, I’ve simply pasted the URL above. The link is directed to the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce collection; the library has very helpfully digitalized a great deal of its extensive manuscripts. The specific images you will see if you scroll down are handwritten drafts of the “Eumaeus” chapter of Ulysses, begun in July 1920 and worked on up until the publication of Ulysses in book form on Joyce’s 40th birthday, 2 February 1922. I chose them because of one of Bloom’s thoughts during the chapter: “He could hear, of course, all kinds of words changing colour like those crabs about Ringsend burrowing quickly into all colours of different sorts of the same sand where they had a home somewhere beneath or seemed to.” This particular Bloomism is fascinating when you compare the manuscripts, insofar as it reveals Joyce’s tendency, which becomes exaggerated in Finnegans Wake, to incorporate the contingencies of his daily writing into the final text itself. Here such a contingency is the method he had adopted of using many different colors of crayon to keep track of where and what he had used in his composition as he progressed through drafts toward the typescripts. If you look at the manuscripts you literally see different-colored words. In the text, “words changing colour” expresses Bloom’s synesthetic appreciation for the aural dimension of language, while also echoing Stephen Daedalus’s earlier Protean walk on the beach near Ringsend, where he contemplates the “various forms” of “sea change.” I find this sort of correspondence between the material context of composition and the composition itself really interesting. Since I had to upload a file, I’ve uploaded an image of a single page of the “Eumaeus” manuscript from the BBC’s website. The actual page was sold to a private collector in 2001 for £900,000.