In Ulysses Molly Bloom, the wife of Leopold, comes to life mainly in her husband’s thoughts. Throughout the day he contemplates her affair with a man called Blazes Boylan. Much more than an object of desire and jealousy, however, Molly is also the character who gets the last word. In the book’s final episode, “Penelope,” Molly is not merely breathless but also eloquent, not merely sexually frank but also an engaging narrator and storyteller. Studying Molly’s soliloquy alongside a 1904 letter on view in the gallery from Nora Barnacle to Joyce, one notices a similar lack of punctuation, the sense of pure voice unmediated by irony or craft or literary artifice.

Joyce in exile relied on this residential and commercial directory of Dublin from 1904 to render the intricate urban fabric of Ulysses, which is set that same year. Published annually, Thom’s offers a wide range of information about Dublin, from hackney cab fares to racing calendars and listings of doctors. It contains a detailed street-by-street directory of the city as well as a large folding map. Joyce mined Thom’s for details to include in Ulysses, presenting Dublin with uncanny topographical and historical accuracy. The address 7 Eccles Street, the Blooms’ residence, was listed as vacant in 1904.

“In writing one must create an endlessly changing surface . . .”
–James Joyce, from Arthur Powers’s Conversations with James Joyce

Joyce created lists and charts to help plan Ulysses. This schema, as Joyce called it, diagrams the novel with respect to each episode’s symbol, color, art, organ, hour, scene, narrative technique, and Homeric correspondences. Joyce first collated notes in this scroll format to help certain writers discuss or translate parts of the work; he also made presentation copies for Harriet Shaw Weaver and Sylvia Beach around the time of the novel’s publication. The extensive Homeric links had been elaborated as he neared Ulysses’ completion, when Joyce sought to unify more motifs across episodes and clarify the structure. He later regretted the document’s unauthorized circulation, believing that it detracted from an appreciation of the novel’s overarching form and substance.

This is one of two versions of Joyce's diagram for "Oxen of the Sun"--an episode set in a maternity hospital. The near-illegible words track the month-by-month developments of a human fetus, paralleling the metamorphosis of language Joyce explores through pastiche. In a letter to Frank Budgen, dated 20 March 1920, Joyce wrote that he was hard at work on the episode—"the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition." Joyce related to Budgen a litany of the progression of literary styles he planned to employ, including a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude ("the unfertilized ovum"), early alliterative and monosyllabic English, Anglo-Saxon à la Mandeville, followed by Malory, the Elizabethan chronicle style, Milton, "Latin-gossipy," Burton, Browne, Bunyan, Pepys, Evelyn, Defoe, Swift, Addison and Steele, Sterne, Landor, and Pater, culminating in his identification of English, Irish, American, and Black vernaculars.

Joyce always carried note pads and stray bits of paper in his jacket. According to the painter Frank Budgen, a friend of Joyce’s, “alone or in conversation, seated or walking, one of these tablets was produced, and a word or two scribbled on it at lightning speed.” This aspect of Joyce’s composition process led Budgen and writer Valery Larbaud to compare Joyce to a Renaissance mosaic artist, patiently fabricating large figures of the saints out of tiny pieces of colored stones.

This page of “Sirens” is taken from the “fair copy” manuscript of Ulysses—a term used to describe manuscripts created for presentation, rendered in legible handwriting. Joyce prepared this particular manuscript in order to sell Ulysses in installments to the collector John Quinn.

Before his play Exiles was published or performed, Joyce had sold the manuscript to the American modern art collector and lawyer John Quinn (1870–1924), shown here standing with Joyce and the authors Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford. As scholars have noted, the sale marked a new source of income for Joyce, who struggled to support his family, and signaled his growing status as an author. Quinn’s investment in Joyce persisted far beyond Exiles: he acted as the attorney for Anderson and Heap in the obscenity case against Ulysses in the Little Review and promoted Joyce to American publishers. Among several other works, Quinn purchased a “fair copy” manuscript of Ulysses as it was being written, enabling Joyce to finish the novel.

Joyce made several typed versions of manuscripts before and after sending fair copies to John Quinn. This page from “Sirens” was sent to printers at the Little Review, an American literary magazine, in 1919 for the novel's initial serialization. Joyce’s handwritten revisions date from 1921, however, as he was beginning to assemble and revise his text for the first edition in Paris. 

Among several manuscripts and proofs on view related to "Cyclops" are two pages of what is likely the earliest surviving preliminary draft of the episode and a leaf from the 1919 typescript sent to the Little Review, revised two years later. "Cyclops," as Joyce originally wrote it, never appeared in the magazine in its entirety. Following the US Postal Service’s suppression of two Ulysses issues, the editors preemptively censored the first installment of “Cyclops.” One of Joyce’s passages, which alludes several times to erections, was replaced with an asterisk, an ellipsis, and a telling footnote.

Joyce reportedly wrote a third of Ulysses in proof—a stage in the publishing process that is typically reserved for minor corrections and additions. The large, eight-page format of French galley proofs on view in the gallery, known as placards, offered ample marginal space to accommodate Joyce’s creative practice. This detail of a "Cyclops" placard pertains to one of the passages that Joyce revised most heavily. In addition to the long marginal inscriptions, Joyce’s note in French, indicated with a red A, instructs the printer to insert two new manuscript pages, one of which is on view adjacent to the placard. The lengthy handwritten addition includes a list of “Friends of the Emerald Isle,” parodic names such as “Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone” and “Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant.” Across several stages of the proofs, the dignitaries expanded in number. In a brief note sent to Darantiere's manager, M. Hirchwald, Joyce conveyed another late addition named “Borus Hupinkoff” along with a postscript complaining about imperfections in their typographic character f. A pressman marked his request “trop tard” (too late) and Borus did not appear in editions of Ulysses for sixty years.