Conan Doyle, James Joyce, and the Completion of Ulysses

As he was revising and inserting details into the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses in the fall of 1921, Joyce consulted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s history The Great Boer War that, in turn, inspired him to develop the figure of Lieutenant Stanley Gardner, who first appears in the erotic memories of Molly Bloom in this last episode of the book. The essay traces Joyce’s creative process during the final months of his completion of Ulysses, epitomized in the genesis and belated evolution of Lieutenant Gardner. As Gardner grew in significance, he prompted a series of additions elsewhere in the text referring directly and indirectly to Joyce’s most important source for this figure. These references to Conan Doyle spiral out of the most literal example of literary indebtedness in Ulysses, Bloom’s Capel Street Library book, which happens to be Conan Doyle’s autobiographical novel The Stark Munro Letters (1895), a work that anticipates Joyce’s critique of British Imperialism in Ulysses.