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ULYSSES in Progress
The publication of James Joyce's "Ulysses" crowned years of writing and constant rewriting at almost every stage, so that as many as ten versions exist for some pages. To understand how Joyce worked, Michael Groden traces the book's history in detail, synthesizing evidence from notebooks, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs.
Originally published in 1977.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Originally published in 1977.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
First published January 1, 1977
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 14, 2025
Helpful if you want to learn about how the book developed over drafts, but not what you'd want if you want a guide to help understand Ulysses
December 3, 2016
We understand the world by classifying its objects and organization structurally. We seek order in all things, and when we don't find order we tend to impose our own from the outside. God knows James Joyce did.
Reading Ulysses for the first time, a novice is struck by the extraordinary stylistic mutations that occur throughout the length of the novel. In terms of literary prowess, the last half of the book is lightyears removed from the first half, and the first half is lightyears removed from what anyone else had done up to that time (i.e., about 1914). To some the complexity of Ulysses is an insurmountable stumbling block. Others of us find the challenge itself, lacking in all that came before and in all genre fiction which has come since, to be this book's ultimate appeal.
Michael Groden recognizes that the difficulty of Ulysses is not merely the erudition of its author and its characters and the encyclopedic portrayal of 1904 Dublin, but a consequence of Joyce's radical evolution as a writer during the novel's composition. Groden walks us through that evolutionary and revolutionary process as Joyce turned away from an emphasis on plot and characterization to a focus on style and constructing systems of correspondence that build up an intricate network of symbolism binding all together. In Ulysses in Progress a three-stage production of the novel is proposed. In the first stage, roughly the first half of the book, Joyce conformed to an initial style: a restrained third-person narration with groundbreaking interior monologue limited to two point-of-view characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Joyce adhered to this initial style from the beginning of the novel through the episode of Scylla and Charybdis. In the transitional middle stage Groden finds Joyce breaking away from the interior monologue and experimenting with other narrative framing devices that gravitate toward parody. The seminal examples of this middle stage are found in the episodes Cyclops, Nausicaa and Oxen of the Sun. The hallmark of the last stage, during which the book's last four episodes were written and major changes were made to all that went before, is expansion and encyclopedism, illustrated best in Circe, Ithaca and, to a degree, in Penelope.
Groden's compelling book is written with impressive clarity and concision, considering the difficulty of its subject matter. It is very often illuminating and an eye-opener. To pick out one example, Groden draws narrative parallels between the "hallucinations" in Circe and the gigantic digressions in Cyclops in a manner I haven't encountered elsewhere. In fact, Groden's comments about the distinction between intrusive blocks of gigantic parody and smaller "Butcher-and-Lang" voice usurpations of the text (i.e., the theory that the target of relatively minor Victorian parodies in Cyclops is the Butcher and Lang translation of The Odyssey) or their equivalent are quite savvy. The tale of the years Joyce spent writing Ulysses is dramatic, and while Groden resists the temptation to elaborate on digressions not germane to his immediate thesis, the story he weaves holds the reader's attention and is chockfull of unexpected perceptivity and detail.
I have nothing but praise for Groden's defense of his carefully structured premise, but I am somewhat skeptical of how well his three-stage account of the composition of Ulysses works in practice. The transitional episodes of Wandering Rocks and Sirens, ill-fitting with either the early or middle stage episodes, become orphans. Wandering Rocks is more of a hinging entr'acte coming on the heels of Scylla and Charybdis (wisely Groden proclaims the "novel" ends with that episode), and Sirens, although magnificently experimental and, to some, awe-invoking, lacks the parodic narrative incursions citied by Groden as typic of the middle stage. Moreover, the narrative takeover so prominent in later episodes is already quite apparent in Scylla and Charybdis (and earlier to those looking for it). Not all of these incursions represent late modifications to earlier texts.
While providing a powerful description, or identification, of the process of narrative incursion, Groden neither arrives at a general, overarching theory of the same nor cites the well-known theories of others (e.g., David Hayman's Arranger theory). The narrative distortion, most especially noticeable in the second half of Ulysses, becomes itself an improbably important part of the symbolic structure holding the text together. It seems to me that without coming to terms with the dominating textual sabotage in play throughout Ulysses, no account of the book's assembly can be complete.
Ulysses in Progress is, nevertheless, a significant and very well written analysis of the text, even one of major importance, and I strongly recommend it.
Reading Ulysses for the first time, a novice is struck by the extraordinary stylistic mutations that occur throughout the length of the novel. In terms of literary prowess, the last half of the book is lightyears removed from the first half, and the first half is lightyears removed from what anyone else had done up to that time (i.e., about 1914). To some the complexity of Ulysses is an insurmountable stumbling block. Others of us find the challenge itself, lacking in all that came before and in all genre fiction which has come since, to be this book's ultimate appeal.
Michael Groden recognizes that the difficulty of Ulysses is not merely the erudition of its author and its characters and the encyclopedic portrayal of 1904 Dublin, but a consequence of Joyce's radical evolution as a writer during the novel's composition. Groden walks us through that evolutionary and revolutionary process as Joyce turned away from an emphasis on plot and characterization to a focus on style and constructing systems of correspondence that build up an intricate network of symbolism binding all together. In Ulysses in Progress a three-stage production of the novel is proposed. In the first stage, roughly the first half of the book, Joyce conformed to an initial style: a restrained third-person narration with groundbreaking interior monologue limited to two point-of-view characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Joyce adhered to this initial style from the beginning of the novel through the episode of Scylla and Charybdis. In the transitional middle stage Groden finds Joyce breaking away from the interior monologue and experimenting with other narrative framing devices that gravitate toward parody. The seminal examples of this middle stage are found in the episodes Cyclops, Nausicaa and Oxen of the Sun. The hallmark of the last stage, during which the book's last four episodes were written and major changes were made to all that went before, is expansion and encyclopedism, illustrated best in Circe, Ithaca and, to a degree, in Penelope.
Groden's compelling book is written with impressive clarity and concision, considering the difficulty of its subject matter. It is very often illuminating and an eye-opener. To pick out one example, Groden draws narrative parallels between the "hallucinations" in Circe and the gigantic digressions in Cyclops in a manner I haven't encountered elsewhere. In fact, Groden's comments about the distinction between intrusive blocks of gigantic parody and smaller "Butcher-and-Lang" voice usurpations of the text (i.e., the theory that the target of relatively minor Victorian parodies in Cyclops is the Butcher and Lang translation of The Odyssey) or their equivalent are quite savvy. The tale of the years Joyce spent writing Ulysses is dramatic, and while Groden resists the temptation to elaborate on digressions not germane to his immediate thesis, the story he weaves holds the reader's attention and is chockfull of unexpected perceptivity and detail.
I have nothing but praise for Groden's defense of his carefully structured premise, but I am somewhat skeptical of how well his three-stage account of the composition of Ulysses works in practice. The transitional episodes of Wandering Rocks and Sirens, ill-fitting with either the early or middle stage episodes, become orphans. Wandering Rocks is more of a hinging entr'acte coming on the heels of Scylla and Charybdis (wisely Groden proclaims the "novel" ends with that episode), and Sirens, although magnificently experimental and, to some, awe-invoking, lacks the parodic narrative incursions citied by Groden as typic of the middle stage. Moreover, the narrative takeover so prominent in later episodes is already quite apparent in Scylla and Charybdis (and earlier to those looking for it). Not all of these incursions represent late modifications to earlier texts.
While providing a powerful description, or identification, of the process of narrative incursion, Groden neither arrives at a general, overarching theory of the same nor cites the well-known theories of others (e.g., David Hayman's Arranger theory). The narrative distortion, most especially noticeable in the second half of Ulysses, becomes itself an improbably important part of the symbolic structure holding the text together. It seems to me that without coming to terms with the dominating textual sabotage in play throughout Ulysses, no account of the book's assembly can be complete.
Ulysses in Progress is, nevertheless, a significant and very well written analysis of the text, even one of major importance, and I strongly recommend it.
December 2, 2013
The sheer breadth of research this book must have required is enough to commend it to anyone who wants to know how Joyce wrote Ulysses. Frank Budgen's "James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses" actually has a lot less to say about the second half of its title than you might hope. But this book more than makes up for that deficit - it considers a whole bunch of manuscripts to reach its conclusions. The only downside is that no real analytical conclusions are reached about the book beyond some sort of obvious ideas about how Joyce went from writing a naturalistic novel to something more complicated. But if you're reading this, you probably already knew that.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews