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.
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