Sewing a Dream Together: 'Work In Progress' 1923–4

In the spring and summer of 1923 Joyce wrote a series of short sketches satirizing figures from irish history and legend. Although commentators such as Richard Ellmann identified these as instances of forward planning by Joyce for Finnegans Wake , they were not conceived in anticipation of the later text, but rather as a series of isolated epiphanies, written without any overall structural framework. The actual composition of Finnegans Wake began when Joyce acquired a travel guide for a holiday in Bognor. This inspired him to write the first stage of a fluid and continuous narrative describing the misadventures of H.C. Earwicker, a British Protestant of Scandinavian descent living in a hostile Free State. Having written what is now Book I, chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake , which describes HCE's fearful noonday encounter with a pipe-smoking figure described as the Cad, Joyce was able to follow this with two more chapters in which the meeting is represented variously as a series of comic but violent confrontations. These were based directly on crime reports in Irish newspapers, which he recorded in Buffalo notebook VI.B.11. Joyce was able to harmonize his borrowed narratives by adapting the same technique by which he had managed the Homeric parallels in Ulysses . In letters written at the time to harriet weaver he referred to this device as 'metempsychosis', at the same time applying the terms 'jigsaw puzzle' and 'Mah Jongg' to the methods by which he ordered his 'stolentelling' into a narrative sequence, made up of discrete episodes which he later named and listed in another notebook (VI.B.1). Joyce's compositional usage is demonstrated by juxtaposition of sources and early drafts. By the beginning of 1924 Joyce had established the HCE household and he further refined his use of metempsychosis by devising the so-called 'Sigla' system of correspondences for household members, which in turn allowed him to accommodate the characters from the initially unconnected early sketches, although the sketches themselves were not to find a place until the final stages of composition.