Joyce’s use of Lists

This note outlines the methodology Joyce used in sourcing from lists the hundreds of names which appear in Ulysses. It was necessary for the scheme of the book to use so many characters as Joyce was depicting the whole city and not just a segment of it. Joyce had an obsession with lists. He obtained names from a variety of sources, including Thom’s Official Directory, The Irish Catholic Directory, newspapers and journals such as the Freeman’s Journal, the Irish Times, the Evening Telegraph, and the list of contents of magazines such as Dana. This essay also illustrates how Joyce drew heavily from the names of his father’s friends. He described his working methods as those of both ‘engineer’ and a ‘scissors and paste man’ and Ulysses ‘as a sort of encyclopaedia’ in a letter he wrote to Carlo Linati on 21 September 1920 when he sent him a schema of Ulysses.