Filling in the Gaps: "Ithaca" and Encyclopedic Generation

This essay examines Joyce's in-process encyclopedism in order to better understand how Ulysses's form took shape as it was written and to argue that once a project becomes encyclopedically impelled, it can never be finished but only stopped. After characterizing the encyclopedic qualities of Ulysses as a compendium of details about early-twentieth-century Dublin and Joyce's characters, the argument turns to a comparison with an important encyclopedic forebear: Émile Zola's twenty-volume novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart. Comparing Joyce's encyclopedic impulse with this capacious encyclopedic example illuminates how and to what degree Ulysses becomes encyclopedically driven while remaining compressed, relatively speaking, to a single volume. Then the focus narrows to an analysis of the "Ithaca" proto-draft, the earliest extant draft of "Ithaca" held by the National Library of Ireland (NLI MS 36,639/13), to examine how the episode grows from a drive to fill in textual holes remaining at the latest stages of Ulysses's composition and to consider what this mode of textual expansion implies for the completion of encyclopedic projects. Ultimately, gaps in a narrative's coverage can always be found, so an encyclopedic project cannot be completed but rather stopped.