VI.B.3.060 Isolde
VI.B.3.061 Trist/ Is-
VI.B.3.063 Is
VI.B.3.065 Is
VI.B.3.076 Is
VI.B.3.077 Is
VI.B.3.079
VI.B.3.080 Is
VI.B.3.081 Is
VI.B.3.085 Is
VI.B.3.086 Is
VI.B.3.104 Is
VI.B.3.108 Is
VI.B.3.111 Is
VI.B.3.121 Is
VI.B.3.123 Is
VI.B.3.124 (Is)
VI.B.3.126 (Is)
VI.B.3.127 Is
VI.B.3.128 Is
VI.B.3.130 Is
VI.B.3.131 Is
VI.B.3.132 Isolde
VI.B.3.133
VI.B.3.134 Is could lisp
VI.B.3.140 Tris/ (Is)
VI.B.3.142 Trist (et Is)
VI.B.3.143 Is / 
VI.B.3.144 Is
VI.B.3.154 Is
VI.B.3.160 (Is)
June-August 1923
VI.B.25.147 Is
VI.B.25.164 Trist /I
VI.B.25.166 Is
December 1923-February 1924
VI.B.6.100 & I
VI.B.6.101
VI.B.6.102
VI.B.6.112 incest applauded in Eden
Commentarium in Librum Geneseos 257. [Where did Cain's wife come from? Undoubtedly from the daughters of Adam—and he had many—or at least from the descendants of Adam. At the beginning of the world it was necessary that sisters marry brothers, as Augustine, Chrysostomus and Theodoretus observe, which is otherwise prohibited by natural law.]
VI.B.6.115
VI.B.6.188 Lucia/Giorgio
March - June 19234
First Draft: II, iv, a "Tristan and Isolde" (MS 47481, 94ab; MS 47480, 267b, FW 383 "Sea Swan's Song")5
In 1924, taking notes for the unnamed book that would eventually become Finnegans Wake, Joyce recorded a few words from Chateaubriand's Oeuvres choisies illustrées III, Mémoires d'outre-tombe: "palpitant de respect/ et de volupté" [VI.B.5.119]. The longer passage from which this quote is taken concerns a phantom: "And so I imagined a woman made up of all the women I had seen [...] A young queen comes towards me, bedecked with diamonds and flowers (it was again my imagined sylph); [...] I fall at the knees of the sovereign of Enna's lands; the silken waves of her loosened diadem fall caressingly on my brow while she leans her sixteen year old head over my face, and her hands rest on my breast throbbing with respect and voluptuous delight" (39 ).
This fragment expresses an imaginative propensity that was already implicit in Joyce's preparatory notebooks. That is, it makes explicit Joyce's intuitive merging of notes from the observation of daily life with notes from myth and other written sources, in this case, fusing the observed experiences of his daughter into a composite image of emerging womanhood: "And so I imagined a [young] woman made up of all the women I had seen...my imagined sylph."
If we remember this combinative strategy, used in pursuit of creating a universal family in the Wake, we can see how Lucia becomes a formative aspect of a larger, polyvalent, constantly modulating "younger woman" or daughter figure. In one of the earliest of Joyce's notebooks, VI.B.10, Lucia is simply referred to by name: "Lucia has an exquisite handwriting (leisure)" [VI.B.10.049] or "Lucia cooking reads" [VI.B.10.070] or "McAlmon/can see Lilian/Gish/ in Rome/ (Lucia)" [VI.B.10.066]. These unmistakably specific notes occur in proximity with other notes that lack such specificity, but which suggest, by their location and by their reference to the dilemmas of young womanhood, that they could refer to her: "Mater smells incest" [VI.B.10.045] or "abortionist" [VI.B.10.111].
By March 1923, when Lucia was fifteen, she or the daughter figure had acquired the nickname "Is" and Giorgio the nickname "Trist." Already Joyce had begun to figure his daughter and son in a contemporary retelling of a Celtic tale of long-standing interest to him, the story of Tristan, King Mark and Isolde, where an aged king must face the illicit love between his "daughter/wife" and a young knight. Its many retellings (Joyce noted those by Binyon, Tennyson, Wagner, Michael Field, Swinburne, Arnold, Debussy and Gordon Bottomly [see JJA 31:87]) create and recreate an archetypal pattern: the moment of regeneration, that is, the moment when age, wealth and power must bow to the erotic energy of youth. This, too, will become one of the overarching patterns of Joyce's book, where time and again, in constantly changing circumstances, an older male figure, finding himself replaced by a younger male, compensates for decreasing vitality by an amplified voyeurism. What is the younger generation up to?
It is not surprising, then, to find Joyce taking notes about his family at the same time that he was exploring how to universalize the material so observed. While Lucia was going out into life, learning to dance, meeting Raymond Duncan and the young people involved in that idiosyncratic circle, Joyce was watching her and listening to her characteristic manners of speech and behavior. In notebook VI.B.3 (March 1923), one can see Joyce speculating about the archetypal nature of the "imagined sylph" he is beginning to construct as well as collecting specific characteristics that Lucia/Issy, the real "sylph" of his acquaintance, possesses: In the earlier notebook, for example, "Lucia" had beautiful penmanship; in VI.B.3 she has begun her transformation into an Isolde character, as if an Irish princess had similar traits: "Isolde-ornaments/her father's calligraphy" [VI.B.3.010]. Similarly, Joyce speculates about what this character might become: "Is description of/ [??]" [VI.B.3.000], jotting down possibilities: "Is (a Tocher)" [G. Tochter. A daughter] [VI.B.3.002]; "Is & transubstantiation" [VI.B.3.007]; "Is-sponsa/ Trist" [L. sponsa. A bride] [VI.B.3.031]. He imagines his young "woman made up of all women" as both a daughter and a bride who shifts from one specificity to another, just as her description morphs from English to German to Latin, the polyvalence of language itself employed as a mark of her emerging, shifting nature.
For all of its scrawled anticipation of a universal character, notebook VI.B.3 is filled with what we can only imagine are specific observations of a young girl at hand. How does she speak? What does she say? "Is-they haven't/ the heart to make/ a cup of tay (/Bretonnes/)" [VI.B.3.008]; "(Is) I'm so glad/ to have met you/ awfully bucked" [VI.B.3.021]; "Is when she first/ counted 15 then 14" [VI.B.3.076]; "Don't forget me, Is cried/ - interval of 5 minutes" [VI.B.3.081]. What are her teenaged idiosyncrasies? "Is-moustaches/ of beer" [VI.B.3.016]; "Isolde whistles" [VI.B.3.041]; "Is washed hall/ by standing wet/ umbrella in corner" [VI.B.3.051]; "Is had 15/ in P.O. Savings Bk" [VI.B.3.065]; "Is learned Fr/ from cook/ -chef" [VI.B.3.052]; "Is cleans flue/ with blazing/ Irish Catholics" [VI.B.3.048]; "Is's musical sneeze" [VI.B.3.077]; "Is climbs tree" [VI.B.3.133].
Emerging out of these notes is a picture of a spirited child, still harking back to the comedic Charlie Chaplin mimic-someone who hates housework, does it in creative, unorthodox ways, reads while cooking, whistles, has a "musical sneeze," climbs trees, loves nature, learns French and lisps while she does it [VI.B.3.134] or sings "Molly/ Bawn, it is a / Charming Girl I/ Love" [VI.B.3.056]. In many ways, Joyce's observations are those of a father noticing a charming tom boy settling reluctantly into the assigned tasks of family responsibility.
But the far more dominant pattern in the 1923 notebooks concerns the interaction of Issy and Tristan, where the note taker's observations focus on budding sexuality. Tristan, of course, both is and is not Giorgio, in the same way that Issy anticipates a more universal figure of young womanhood, but it is important to notice that the notes in 1923 and 1924 are specific, not yet dispersed into a more collective vision of emerging manhood; they are not attributable to any known versions of the already existing Tristan and Isolde stories (as are, for example, the notes from the Exiles II section of Scribbledehobble6), and, at least in some cases, are unmistakably located at home: "Trist-Go away from/ me you-/ (she goes) O come back" [VI.B.3.001]; "Trist picks up/ her handker/ with his foot" [VI.B.3.026]; "Trist narrat/ -Hoh! Is screams/ Heh-etc" [VI.B.3.037]; "Papa Is goes to/ bed in socks" [VI.B.3.049].
Joyce notices the young woman's appearance and her concern with her appearance: "description of Is's mouth" [VI.B.3.036]; "Position of I's legs" [VI.B.3.040]; "her lips, paint/ her feet" [VI.B.3.133]. And he notices more than her socially "assembled" appearance: "Is's piss liquid sunlight/ Fingerprints on her drawers/ Lover's silences" [VI.B.3.038]. Then he speaks about ways of behaving: "they dissimulated/ themselves (T & I)/ Or has she?/ His stratagem/ Trist pinches her" [VI.B.3.039]. Later he observes, "Defloration begins/ & ends with/ hate (cf T & I)" [VI.B.3.052], and still later, he records an implied conversation: "Trist-He-You?/ Is- (nods, nods, nods,)/ 7 times/ Is swoon & unconscious/ undid his [tr] etc/ Is's Pop and Mop/ (Pa & Ma)" [VI.B.3.061].
Joyce's notebooks served many functions: sometimes they recorded phrases from influential books, sometimes they recorded abstract ideas that might be used as subtext or structure, sometimes they recorded observations; and he felt no need to distinguish among these categories as he noted them down. They simply co-habit the pages, reminders of both the esoteric and the commonplace, united by their potential usefulness to an emerging vision. This polyglot assembly prevents a biographer from using the material as unambiguous evidence, but one can notice a constellation of associations—it is this constellation and not another—that illustrate how the son and daughter figure in the writer's imagination.
At the least, they are extraordinarily close and unambiguously responsive to one another. It is impossible not to notice that by the summer of 1923, when Joyce began notebook VI.B.25, the question, "how close?" has returned to him: "Trist gives I young photo — think/ of me so" [VI.B.25.164]. The issue remained into the early part of 1924, when, in notebook VI.B.6 he recorded: ". Feel that/ I. How you love me?" [VI.B.6.101]. He then, in reading Commentarium in Librum Geneseos, noted "incest applauded in Eden" [VI.B.6.112], as a reminder of the fuller text, which asks, ["Where did Cain's wife come from? Undoubtedly from the daughters of Adam—and he had many—or at least from the descendants of Adam. At the beginning of the world it was necessary that sisters marry brothers, as Augustine, Chrysostomus and Theodoretus observe, which is otherwise prohibited by natural law" 257]. Note VI.B.6.115 mentions "incest Byron & sister."
By the time Joyce wrote a fair copy of Tristan and Isolde (Book II, iv), Trist had become a "handsome sixfoottwo rugger and soccer champion" and Issy "the belle of Chapelizod." The couple meets on board a ship in moonlight; he tries to woo her with poetry ("in decasyllabic iambic hexameter"); they gaze at one another amorously; he persists with ludic verbiage. "When he had shut his duckhouse," they kiss; and one sees that Isolde is no longer either medieval or a fifteen-year-old Parisian teenager, but a twentieth century "strapping young old Irish princess" who is six feet tall, skinny, red headed, and anxious to escape from her aged husband, the "tiresome old King Mark, that tiresome old pantaloon ourangoutan beaver with his duty peck & his bronchial trouble in his tiresome old twentytwoandsixpenny shepherd's plaid trousers." All that remains of behavior observed in 1923 are a few phrases—the lovers "dissimulated [themselves] behind the chief steward's stewardess's cabin" [see VI.B.3.081] and the odd fact that a six foot flapper speaks with the words of the young Lucia: "I'm so real glad to have met you, Tris, you fascinator, you! she said, awfully bucked" [see VI.B.3.021].
Joyce has begun his transformation of the younger members of his family into the comic universality of young adulthood, but what he knows of that generation still bears the specificity of his children's lives: Issy still whistles, drops handkerchiefs, waits for her male counterpart to pick them up with his feet, worries that she'll be forgotten, and admits that she is totally dependent upon the affection of whoever the departing man is: "No come back, she cried. How sweetly you have responded to me. I can't live without you! I so want you!"7
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1The following discussion of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake notebook observations supplements the summary chapter about the Wake at the end of my published biography of Lucia Joyce (chapter 16). In this supplementary material, the "sigla" for the daughter figure from Joyce's notebooks forms a kind of additional infrastructure of the biography, arranged chronologically and placed next to the actual events of Lucia's life. They show what Joyce observed about Lucia as she grew and they indicate her consistent influence on the final text of Finnegans Wake. They also indicate the composite nature of the daughter figure in the Wake, as Joyce merges experiential observations with notes from other sources about adolescent girls emerging into womanhood, figures like Alice Liddell from Alice in Wonderland, Isa Bowman, "Peaches" Browning, Isolde from Tristan and Isolde, Edith Thompson from the Trial of Frederic Bywaters and Edith Thompson, Lot's daughters, and so forth. In the early notebooks, the daughter is indicated by the nickname "Is" or "Issy" or "Isabeale" or some variation of the name "Isolde." Later, she, like all of the other major characters, acquired a symbol, , which could also appear on its side, facing either left or right. When used in combination with the symbol  , Joyce was usually referring to some aspect of the love triangle in Tristan and Isolde.
As Joyce moved from observations of Lucia to the final construction of Finnegans Wake, he went through numerous drafts. Following these drafts lets us see, in a way that is rarely available to scholars, the transposition of life into art. As Joyce progressed from watching his adolescent daughter, he joined her, in his imagination, with the situation of other young women entering into life for the first time. He shows them learning about the nature of human intimacy, the anatomy of sex, the secrecy, suspicions and possibilities for betrayal that can accompany sex, and the complexities and ambiguities of human emotional attachments. Of particular interest to me, was Joyce's propensity to align Lucia with "triangles" and with close brother-sister relationships in history and literature. That is, one of his basic instincts led him to figure her as (for example) Isolde in the the story of Tristan, King Mark and Isolde, where, interestingly, the triangle is transposed to Shaun, Earwicker and Issy, that is, to the Wakean characters associated, in familial terms, with Giorgio, Joyce and Lucia. This triangular pattern and the brother-sister attachment pattern are insistent in Joyce's notebooks, in his drafts and in the final version of Finnegans Wake. The triangular pattern is also insistent in my biography of Lucia, as published, but, with the addition of this notebook and draft evidence, the assertion of these heavily weighted familial relationships is even more compelling than in the published version made available to scholars and reviewers. In fact, given the consistency of Joyce's evidence, a biographer would have been irresponsible to create a narrative without these emotional constellations.
Here you will find an additional infrastructure for my biography, given in the form of citations from the notebooks, for scholars who are interested in tracing most of Joyce's observations of the Lucia/Issy character. Also included are several examples of the transformational use of such material that I did not include in the final version of the book; that is, in the published book, I used only material from Finnegans Wake and not the genetic material leading up to it, the material that shows Joyce's chronological observation of Lucia and his transformational use of it.
2The dates used throughout, unless otherwise noted, are from the "Date of Compilation" introductory sections of the published 'Finnegans Wake' Notebooks at Buffalo. Eds. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, Geert Lernout (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Pulblishers, 2001). When there are explanatory notes, they are also from this source.
3The notations, giving notebook numbers and page number from the notebooks, are also from The 'Finnegans Wake' Notebooks at Buffalo.
4These dates are from David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of 'Finnegans Wake.' Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963.
5For another, entirely different explication of the evolution of this section, see David Hayman, The 'Wake' in Transit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 56-92.
6James Joyce, Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for 'Finnegans Wake, ed. Thomas E. Connolly (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961), 271-300.
7See David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of 'Finnegans Wake (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 208-209.
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