10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 r oger l üDeKe The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland Faintly, under the heavy summer night, through the silence of the town which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no carresses [sic] move, the sound of hoofs upon the Dublin road� Not so faintly now as they come near the bridge; and in a moment as they pass the dark windows the silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow� They are heard now far away-hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as diamonds, hurrying beyond the grey, still marshes to what journey’s end - what heart-bearing what tidings? (Joyce, “Epiphanies’’ 37) Something out there slowly approaching with the flair of newness and some vague promise to overcome an urban life lacking in passion and dreams - suddenly a break into the inert silence and the tacit call to a journey into the unknown. This short text enacts adventure fiction in its most basic form. Composed between approximately 1901 and 1904, it is part of James Joyce’s earliest written work for which he chose the label “Epiphanies”� Forty of these epiphanies have survived� Blending his writerly life with his fictional world is a trademark of Joyce’s literary practice� Accordingly, the concept of epiphany also forms a crucial item on the aesthetic agenda of Joyce’s fictional alter ego Stephen Daedalus in Stephen Hero, the first version of what would eventually become Joyce’s 1914 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which Daedalus was renamed to Dedalus: By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation […]� He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments� (Joyce, Stephen Hero 1 211) The propensity of these epiphanic moments for adventure is not least owed to their specific quality of time. The entire chronotope of the adventure story, Mikhail Bakhtin has argued, lies in the “gap, the pause, the hiatus that appears between […] two strictly adjacent biographical moments” (89) of the protagonist’s life� Similar to the passing hoofs in Joyce’s epiphany, adventures 1 Henceforth shortened to SH in in-text citations� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 282 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 have the momentary ability to kick us out of the ho-hum flow of our everyday routines� “[T]he most general form of adventure”, writes Georg Simmel in his seminal Das Abenteuer, “is its dropping out of the continuity of life” (222)� In spite of their radically discontinuous quality, adventures are however not entirely separable from the rest of our common life� Adventures, it can be further argued with Simmel, form intense moments of meaning and of being which interrupt the habitualized patterns of our life; and for this reason, adventures challenge us, artistically no less than existentially, in our capacity to re-embed these extraordinary points in time into the regular rhythm of our ongoing work and existence, into the made-up tales and storylines of our life� Such adventurous moments, for which Joyce single-handedly recycled the expression ‘epiphany’, are crucial for the protagonist’s artistic development in Stephen Hero� So much bigger the surprise, then, that the term completely disappeared after Joyce had transformed this first draft of a novel into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man� Here, the word ‘epiphany’ is not even mentioned once� In fact, when the label has one last re-appearance in Joyce’s work, it is only referred to with utter sarcasm, as the following interior monologue of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses demonstrates: Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years […]� (Joyce, Ulysses 2 141-143) Whether ‘adventure’ is derived from adventus (advent), from the plural neutral of the future participle of advenio (to arrive), or from eventus (event), the common denominator of all these different etymologies, as Giorgio Agamben has noted, is that “the term designates something mysterious or marvelous that happens to a given man, which could be equally positive or negative” (23)� From the very start of his career as a writer, Joyce aimed for this appearance of something out of the ordinary and out of the orderly, and he tried to bring this adventurous potential into literary being by composing what he understood to be ‘epiphanies’� The fact that from Stephen Hero to Finnegans Wake, “three-quarters of Joyce’s epiphanies are reused in his later works” (MacDuff loc� 180) bears witness to the abiding importance of epiphany writing for Joyce’s literary career� 3 Nevertheless, the poetological terms and the poetic practice by means of which Joyce began to realize this aesthetics of 2 Henceforth shortened to U in in-text citations� 3 The only exception is Dubliners which does not include any epiphanies - at least none of those that have made it down to us� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 283 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 epiphany appear to have soon proved insufficient for how he wanted to conceive of, and actively pursue, his actual writerly life� “[W]hen we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology” (Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 4 176), Stephen tells his friend Lynch in Portrait, and for reasons the present article finds worth examining, the original notion of epiphany, as defined in Stephen Hero, was no longer eligible for this aesthetic enterprise� Following the genetic traces of Joyce’s epiphanies in Portrait and Ulysses, I will show how his homegrown poetics of epiphany was soon caught up by a writerly force that is aptly described as ‘adventurous’� The idea of the epiphany as self-sufficient and enclosed as “the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (SH 211) was transformed into a poetic practice proceeding towards a fundamentally uncertain future of artistic and existential import� 5 Fashioning his writerly life along these radically temporal terms, Joyce remodeled his original notion of epiphany from a “spiritual manifestation” (SH 211) into a mode of being, from a phenomenon of aesthetic perception and of cognition into a matter of writerly life� 6 In this way, it is possible to describe the becoming of Joyce’s literary existence as an adventure in the original sense of ἐπιφάνεια, a word and concept for which, over the course of a long tradition, the Latin translation adventus has etymologically asserted itself� 1. The following passage is taken from the second chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man� Mirroring his own artistic practice once more onto his fictional universe, Joyce has the protagonist take the same epiphanic stance towards his surroundings as the author’s younger self: “[Stephen Dedalus] chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret” (P 56)� Immediately after this, we are given a sample of these acts of chronicling: 4 Henceforth shortened to P in in-text citations� 5 This temporal notion of adventure is also at the center of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s study L’Aventure, l’Ennui, le Sérieux: “L’avenir est ambigu d’abord parce qu’il est à la fois certain et incertain� Ce qui est certain, c’est que le futur sera, qu’un avenir adviendra; mais quel il sera, voilà qui demeure enveloppé dans les brumes de l’incertitude” (59)� 6 Sangam MacDuff’s thorough study on Joyce’s epiphanies clearly bypasses this ontological turn� Instead, it claims that Joyce’s early concept develops into an epiphany of language in which the latter becomes the medium of its own disclosure� Strongly inspired by post-structuralist theory, for MacDuff this epiphanization of language amounts to the awareness that sense-making in and through language forms nothing less and nothing more than an open-ended process� 284 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt’s kitchen. A lamp with a reflector hung on the japanned wall of the fireplace and by its light his aunt was reading the evening paper that lay on her knees� She looked a long time at a smiling picture that was set in it and said musingly: —The beautiful Mabel Hunter! A ringletted girl stood on tiptoe to peer at the picture and said softly: —What is she in, mud? —In the pantomime, love� The child leaned her ringletted head against her mother’s sleeve, gazing on the picture, and murmured as if fascinated: —The beautiful Mabel Hunter! As if fascinated, her eyes rested long upon those demurely taunting eyes and she murmured again devotedly: —Isn’t she an exquisite creature? And the boy who came in from the street, stamping crookedly under his stone of coal, heard her words� He dropped his load promptly on the floor and hurried to her side to see. But she did not raise her easeful head to let him see� He mauled the edges of the paper with his reddened and blackened hands, shouldering her aside and complaining that he could not see� (P 56) This passage is the first in a sequence of three short descriptions that are all marked by the same beginning: 1� “He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt’s kitchen�” (P 56) 2� “He was sitting in the narrow breakfast room high up in the old darkwindowed house�” (P 56) 3� “He was sitting in the midst of a children’s party at Harold’s Cross�” (P 57) As mentioned earlier, although the word ‘epiphany’ did not make it into Portrait, individual pieces of Joyce’s actual collection of epiphanies in fact did� The second and third sections in the sequence just quoted give evidence of this, as these passages are clearly derived from Joyce’s stockpile of epiphanies: number 3 and 5 respectively, if we follow the arrangement suggested by Robert Scholes and Richard M� Kain (13, 15)� Passage 1, which interests me here, could therefore also be based on a piece from the collection of epiphanies, although no longer existing� Otherwise, Joyce has just emulated the epiphanic quality of this passage from scratch� Again, passage 1 demonstrates the adventure potential of Joyce’s practice of epiphany� Here, it is the nomadic existence of the travelling actress that invokes thrilling journeys into realms of exquisite mystery� As Simmel has noted (and perhaps also slightly overstated) “our linguistic custom hardly lets us understand by ‘adventure’ anything but an erotic one” (227)� As far as this goes, “the beautiful Mabel Hunter” (P 54) joins the ranks of numerous other adventuresses forming the subject of young Stephen’s amorous desires, among these no less a character than Mercedes, the heroine of Alexandre Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte-Cristo; whenever “he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood” (P 54)� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 285 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 With regard to the Mabel Hunter episode, it is crucial to note that the scene presents in fact the perfect example of an epiphany in the process of utter failure: to begin with, Stephen, the epiphanic chronicler, is radically excluded from whatever could be a possible adventure� Like the little boy with his six and a half kilos of coal on his shoulders, he simply does “not see”� Nothing is revealed; the act of sensing an extraordinary moment of life in an uncertain future is precisely not coming to pass� The impact of this failure is not least tangible in how this passage is narrated� The opening suggests that it is Stephen “who chronicled with patience what he saw”. However, Joyce’s younger fictional self is not granted this privilege; instead, Joyce has the narrator take the part of the chronicler� Of course, even thus, Joyce could have marked his character’s vision by means of a point-of-view narration (focalisation interne in Gérard Genette’s terms (10-11))� But, again, this is exactly not the case here: it is the narrator’s perspective prevailing all along the way� In terms of the narration as well, then, Stephen does “not see”� He is not even given a glimpse into the extraordinary life of the beautiful actress� Adventure is clearly not taking place here� In Old French, aventure can mean ‘accident’, ‘event’, ‘dangerous enterprise’, ‘knightly trial’, ‘destiny’, ‘heroic deed’ on the one hand and, on the other hand, the ‘narration thereof’ (Lebsanft 311)� 7 Giorgio Agamben has followed the traces of this double meaning in the lais of Marie de France� With regard to the co-existence of the adventurous event as well as its narration, he has argued “that the adventure does not precede the story […] but remains inseparable from it from the beginning”; and, as a result of this “inseparable unity of event and tale, thing and speech”, Agamben concludes that “the adventure cannot but have a properly ontological meaning beyond its poetological value” (30, my italics)� 8 Joyce’s juvenile poetics of epiphany seems to have eventually become inadequate for the genuine adventure of this literary ontology� As we have seen, the original notion comprises moments of outstanding cognitive and perceptual value, a “sudden spiritual manifestation” (SH 211), which, however, do not fully extend into a form of being in-and-with the world� Epiphanies, the protagonist of Stephen Hero explains to his friend Cranly, reveal the “whatness” of things, their soul: “The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant� The object achieves its epiphany” (SH 32)� The scholastic notion of quidditas is central in Stephen’s aesthetic discourses, both in Stephen Hero and in Portrait (P 179)� Yet, as Umberto Eco has famously argued, what makes this concept of “whatness” in medieval philosophy crucially dif- 7 My thanks for this reference go to Martin Baisch� 8 See also Strohschneider 380� 286 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 ferent from Joyce’s appropriation of the term is that in the former it represents a strictly ontological (and theophanic) category (26-27)� For Joyce, by contrast, quidditas represents a singular moment of insight surpassing the ordinary state of perception and cognition: the epiphanic experience of whatness refers to a superior degree of comprehension achieved by an aesthetically sensitized subject� It does not expand into a mode of being in and with the world� Moreover, the passage from Stephen Hero quoted at the beginning of the present section makes it very clear that at this stage of his artistic progress, Joyce restricts the value of epiphanies to written artefacts: “it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care” (SH 211)� However, epiphanies-as-written-documents are invariably removed from epiphanies-as-extraordinary-moments-of-being� The outcome of writing, they depend on complex technical and semiotic mediation, not unlike the process of the chronicling and gazing staged in the Mabel-Hunter episode� The mediated presentation of the adventurous actress includes a “lamp with a reflector hung on the japanned wall of the fireplace” and an evening newspaper in which the picture of the beautiful Mabel is “set”, reachable “only on tiptoe” and with “reddened and blackened hands” (P 56)� In addition to this, there is a series of different spectators that the narrative agency interposes between the protagonist and the readers on the one hand and, on the other hand, the object of what protagonist and readers so fervently desire to see� Because of this mediate structure, the act of noticing epiphanies, let alone the act of noting them down, is ever delayed: it comes at a time when the genuine moment of marvel is already bound to give way to the commonplaces of an author’s writerly life and work� Epiphanies, in other words, are substantially flawed by the attempt to record them on paper which forever excludes them from the adventure proper - a critical point that has often been raised against adventure literature, too: “Ainsi l’aventure est en quelque sorte une œuvre fluente et mobile et toujours inachevée; et vice versa on pourrait dire (si l’aventure n’exigeait le mouvement) que l’œuvre d’art est une aventure immobilisée” (Jankélévitch 95)� 9 Realizing adventure not just as a manner of writing but as a mode of writerly being was the true challenge for Joyce� It meant to transform the concept of epiphany from an epistemological into an ontological category� What Joyce had earlier referred to as “epiphanic” required to be made an integral part of his literary existence and not just a linguistic reality ‘in the head’� The next section will argue that Joyce achieved this goal by transposing the vital dynamic of adventus onto his own practice of writing� 9 See also Krüger; including comprehensive references to Blumenberg� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 287 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 2. First traces of this artistic development show towards the end of Portrait� This is where the epiphany with which this essay set off has a wondrous re-entry - this time transformed into a truly adventurous mode of being: 10 April: Faintly, under the heavy night, through the silence of the town city which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no caresses move, the sound of hoofs upon the Dublin road� Not so faintly now as they come near the bridge; : and in a moment as they pass the darkened windows the silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow� They are heard now far away-, hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as diamonds gems, hurrying beyond the grey, still marshes sleeping fields —what heart? —bearing what tidings? (P 212) 10 Not so much the alteration of individual words but the new setting in which Joyce has placed his early epiphany makes all the difference here� Originally, in the epiphany, the passage was a self-sufficient piece of text recording an extraordinary, albeit very vague, experience� In Portrait, the same text is included in Stephen Dedalus’s “Journal” with which Joyce’s novel ends, containing entries from the month before the protagonist finally leaves Dublin. Famously, Joyce’s own departure from Ireland to Paris on 1 December 1902 marked an important turning point in his biography� After coming back to Dublin on 11 April 1903 to honor his dying mother, he met Nora Barnacle, and they both set off to the Continent on 8 October 1904 to never settle in Ireland again� In a textual milieu so full of future potential from the past, the rather abstract call to a journey of unknown bearing turns into a very concrete component of Joyce’s and Stephen’s life; and not least does it invoke an adventurous escapade of the amorous kind: the elopement with the subject of their respective desires, “E[mma]� C[lery]�” in Stephen D[a]edalus’s and Nora Barnacle in James Joyce’s case: “11 April: Read what I wrote last night� Vague words for a vague emotion� Would she like it? I think so� Then I should have to like also” (P 212)� Crucially, Joyce and Stephen refer to the journal entry from the previous night in the explicit terms of a piece of writing� Whereas the original epiphany stood as an isolated piece of self-secluded text, the same passage is now addressed as a sample of writing� In this way, it begins to form part of an open-ended process of artistic composition, incorporating the adventurous becoming of the author’s and his fictional Artist’s biographies� 10 In this quote, the strikethroughs and bold words mark the changes from the original epiphany - cited at the very beginning of this paper - to Portrait� Bold words equal additions, strikethroughs are deletions� 288 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 In the original epiphany, “the silence […] cloven by alarm as by an arrow” did not so much as crack, and adventure time in the potential fullness of future artistic articulation was unable to pour into the self-sufficient silence of the epiphanic present: the future journey into the unknown was as intensely invoked by the short-lived hoofs speeding into an unknown direction as effectively brought to an eternal standstill within the confines of a perfectly chiseled little piece of text. In the new milieu of his first novel’s ending, by contrast, Joyce regains his early epiphany in its genuine quality of adventus: as a way to expose his (fictional) self to a writerly career of indeterminate bearing, approaching from indefinite times and places yet to come. As we will see in the following, it was Joyce’s next novel, Ulysses, that became the work in which he realized this potential by making the adventure of his character a vital part of his own writing practice and, vice versa, by making his own writing practice a vital part of his character’s adventures� I will concentrate on the third chapter of Ulysses - commonly known as the “Proteus” episode according to the two schemas distributed by Joyce among his friends - which also contains the aforementioned dismissal of the “deeply deep” epiphanies� Here, we witness Stephen Dedalus walking along Sandymount Strand in the direction of Dublin Centre� Towards the end of the chapter, he re-embraces his literary ambitions, and he begins to write� This is how the passage has been preserved in one of the earliest surviving drafts of Joyce’s novel: +something he has twice forgotten in a dream He turned his back to the sun and, bending across towards a slab of rock, scribbled the word�+s� 11 Joyce, “Proteus - Proto-Draft” MS 36,639/ 7/ A The nine manuscript pages from which this passage is derived include a series of 17 short segments, separated by horizontal lines of asterisks, which Joyce probably wrote between early and mid-1917 (Crispi n� p�)� The textual design explains why the segments have been compared with Joyce’s collection of Epiphanies from 15 or so years earlier: Crispi has referred to them as an “integral, epiphany-like set-piece” (n� p�), Sam Slote has described them as “in- 11 My warmest thanks for the deciphering of the Proto-Proteus draft as well as for many inspiring talks and thoughts go to Hans Walter Gabler� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 289 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 dividual epiphanic units” (n� p�)� 12 In this way, the “Proto-Proteus” segments offer the perfect opportunity to study how Joyce has transformed the poetic concept of epiphany into an integral part of his writerly being� Drafts of the ‘Proteus’ episode from Joyce’s Ulysses ‘Subject’ Notebook (MS36,639 / 07 / A), reprinted with permission from the National Library of Ireland The text just quoted is part of the second to last item of this collection� As the facsimile of the manuscript shows, Joyce immediately replaced the one succinct “word” by “words”. In the final 1922 version of his novel, the definite 12 In terms of the genesis of Ulysses, the “status of this draft”, writes Crispi, “is hard to define. Is it simply the accidental appearance of a composition in process, a succession of passages that Joyce wrote in this copybook? Or is it a stylistic device reflecting a deliberate aesthetic choice, a mode of presentation that was later discarded in favor of a different option? [Daniel] Ferrer [55] suggests that it is the latter, while I [Crispi] believe it is the former� I would argue that this manuscript is a transitory collection of blocks of text, based on previously written material (possibly in more than one manuscript or on disparate sheets of paper) that Joyce merely consolidated in this document� I maintain that this manuscript served as a temporary repository for these discrete textual fragments on their way towards a more fully elaborated draft […]” (Crispi n� p�)� Sam Slote has concurred with Crispi’s view: “I would propose that Joyce, at this early stage of the development of ‘Proteus’, conceptualised the episode as a series of discrete units that would be rearranged and linked together through additional material into one more-or-less integral narrative thread� In other words, the fragmentary arrangement was fungible” (n� p�)� 290 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 article of “words” is also deleted, making of Stephen’s writing a radically unspecific activity: “Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words” (U3 406-7)� Not so much what is written (“scribbled the word” > “scribbled the words”) but the sheer act of writing itself (“scribbled words”) is finally put into focus. Likewise, and as yet another result of Joyce’s revisions of his early text, the content of Stephen’s composition is no longer mysteriously regained from what has been “twice forgotten in a dream”� Instead, in 1922 the adventurous nature of “something mysterious or marvelous that happens”, to quote again Agamben’s explication of adventure, has been fully transposed to the material reality of a simple piece of paper: “That’s twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter” (U3 407)� As short as it is, this phrase is also representative of the third episode of Ulysses as a whole, which, as many other chapters in Joyce’s novel, is rendered mostly through interior monologue, including Stephen’s perceptions, daydreams and thoughts� Genetically speaking, the stream-of-consciousness style forms the exact continuation of Stephen’s diary in Portrait� 13 And in Ulysses no less than at the end of his first novel, a good amount of artistic energy is put into fleshing out the adventus quality of writing: His shadow lay dark on the rocks as he wrote, ending� Why not endless? +till the farthest star? (Joyce, “Proteus - Proto-Draft” MS 36,639/ 7/ A) The adventurous outreach into the “endless” parts of space and “till the farthest star” connects Stephen’s shadow play of writing with the movement of the sun and the distant stars� The association of Stephen’s writerly gesture with processes on a cosmic scale is further underlined in the final version where - directly after “farthest star? ” - Joyce has added the following passage: Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds� Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars� (U3 409-412) In the same way as Portrait, Ulysses deals with a fictional character trying to become a writer; and given their autobiographical foundation, both works tell the story of a young man who eventually became the author of the novels we 13 Similarly, MacDuff has argued that it is the combination of “the lyrical-symbolic mode of the dream epiphanies” which creates “an unbroken flow of associations” and “Stephen’s diary” including “frequent ellipsis” that “plays a key role in shaping Dedalus’s stream-of-consciousness style in Ulysses” (loc� 1704)� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 291 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 are holding in our hands: “Inevitably when we contemplate Stephen’s artistic productions”, writes Robert Kellogg, “we are led to a consciousness of his being […] the future author of the work in which he is himself a character” (166)� In Ulysses, the fusion of James and Stephen reaches a notable peak: in the passage just quoted, this amalgamation is indicated by a characteristic use of the firstand third-person pronouns: “Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash […]” (U3 410-11, my italics)� In addition to the Hiberno-English colloquialism, this can be read as James referring to himself as “Me”, wearing one of Stephen’s props: the ashplant� At the same time, it is also possible to read “Me” as Stephen referring to himself and to read “his” as signifying his real-life creator� In other words, Joyce is sitting here with Stephen’s walking stick, and Stephen is sitting there with Joyce’s - a reading which is not least supported by the fact that the costume of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses is strictly identical with how Joyce used to fashion himself after his return from Paris to Dublin in 1903, including the notorious ashplant as well as “a Latin Quarter hat” which is also referred to in “Proteus” (U3 174) (Colum 36)� The reference to the “augur’s rod of ash” evokes the ancient priestly practice of divining the future by reading the flight of birds in the sky. In this way, Stephen’s and Joyce’s walking stick is transformed into a “lituus, a staff with one curved end that Roman priests used to consecrate a sector of the sky before reading the appearance of birds for omens” (“Ashplant”)� On the one hand, the passage revives an archaic gesture of quasi-writing from the ancient past, thus rooting the order of temporal events in a stable metaphysical foundation� At the same time, the “augur’s rod of ash” downscales this cosmic proportion by re-embedding it into the timelines of Stephen’s personal and his creator’s writerly past: in the last chapter of Portrait, Joyce’s fictional doppelgänger is seen on the steps of the National Library in Kildare St�, Dublin, watching the birds in the sky “[f]or an augury of good or evil” (P 189)� 14 Recalling the “inseparable unity of event and tale, thing and speech” that Agamben locates at the heart of the medieval aventure, Stephen’s aesthetic production and Joyce’s artistic practice form an indivisible whole: I throw an ended shadow from me and call it back� […] 14 The fact that in the same passage, Stephen also recalls the Egyptian God Thoth disrupts this trans-textual site of writing even further by stretching it back into an immemorial mythical past in which this cultural practice is supposed to have its origins: “Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon” (P 189)� “Thoth’s orginal name was Djehuty (also dhwty) meaning ‘He Who is Like the Ibis’, that is, a sacred bird in ancient Egypt” (“Thoth”)� 292 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 I throw and call it back�, writing these words� Who will read them? Who sees me? +Who sees me? Who will read them? (Joyce, “Proteus - Proto-Draft” MS 36,639/ 7/ A) In this drift towards an unforeseeable future, the disruptive rhythm of Stephen’s actions emulates the temporal quality of adventus including extraordinary moments of potentially existential and artistic import: “Who sees me? Who will read [these words]? ” Inversely, Stephen’s adventure of writing requires Joyce to constantly “call […] back” these moments of meaning and of being in order to re-organize them into the flow of his own ongoing writerly work and existence, a process of which the Proto-Proteus segments themselves bear impressive testimony. After five or so years of writing “Proteus”, in the final version of the novel, Stephen’s shadow on the rock - “an this ended shadow” (Joyce, “Proteus - Proto-Draft” MS 36,639/ 7/ A) - will have become the exact equivalent of those “Signs on a white field” (ibid�) that Joyce himself left on the paper which we have been in the process of deciphering here, now: “Who watches me here? Whoever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field” (U3 414-415)� The author of Ulysses has, in other words, achieved a poetics of epiphany by transforming its inherent potential of adventure into a mode of writerly being in and with the world� Surpassing a merely linguistic existence on paper, The Adventures of James Joyce unfolds between different places and phases of biography, between different faces and masks of authorship, between the singular moves and grooves of an outstanding craft and, all said and told, a rather unspectacular life� Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio� The Adventure, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa� Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2018� “Ashplant�” The Joyce Project, www�joyceproject�com/ notes/ 010099ashplant�htm� Accessed 1 Apr� 2020� Bakhtin, Mikhail M� “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics�’’ The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist� Austin: U of Texas P, 1990, pp� 84-258� Blumenberg, Hans� Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, translated by Steven Rendall� Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1996� Colum, Mary, and Padraic Colum� Our Friend James Joyce� New York: Doubleday & Company, 1958� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 293 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 Crispi, Luca� “A First Foray into the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce Manuscripts�“ Joyce Studies, vol� 11, https: / / www�geneticjoycestudies�org/ articles/ GJS11/ GJS11_Crispi� Accessed 1 Apr� 2020� Eco, Umberto, and David Robey� The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce� Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP , 1989� Ferrer, Daniel� “What Song the Sirens Sang … Is No Longer Beyond All Conjecture: A Preliminary Description of the New ‘Proteus’ and ‘Sirens’ Manuscripts�” James Joyce Quarterly, vol� 39, no� 1, 2001, pp� 53-67� Genette, Gerard� Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. New York: Cornell UP , 1983� Jankélévitch, Vladimir� L’Aventure, l’Ennui, le Sérieux� Paris: Flammarion, 2017� Joyce, James� A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, edited by Jeri Johnson� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2000� ---� “Proteus - Proto-Draft�” MS 36,639/ 7/ A. Dublin: National Library of Ireland� ---� Stephen Hero, edited from the Manuscript in the Harvard College Library by Theodore Spencer� A New Edition Incorporating the Additional Manuscript Pages in the Yale University Library� New York: New Directions Books, 1963� ---� “The Epiphanies�” The Workshop of Daedalus, edited by Robert Scholes and Richard M� Kain� Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP , 1965, pp� 3-51� ---� Ulysses: The Corrected Text, edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior� New York: Random House, 1986� Kellog, Robert� “Syclla and Charybdis�” James Joyce’s Ulysses. 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Poetik und Ethik eines Narrativs zwischen Wissenskultur und Weltverhalten� München: Fink, 2018� Lebsanft, Franz� “Die Bedeutung von Altfranzösisch Aventure� Ein Beitrag zu Theorie und Methodologie der Mediävistischen Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte�” Im Wortfeld des Textes: Worthistorische Beiträge zu den Bezeichnungen von Rede und Schrift im Mittelalter, edited by Gerd Dicke et al� Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006, pp� 311-337� MacDuff, Sangam� Panepiphanal World: James Joyce's Epiphanies, Kindle ed� UP of Florida, 2020� Scholes, Robert, and Richard M� Kain, editors� The Workshop of Daedalus� Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP , 1965� Simmel, Georg� “The Adventure�” Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone� Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1997, pp� 221-232� Slote, Sam� “Epiphanic ‘Proteus’�” Joyce Studies, vol� 5, https: / / www�geneticjoycestudies� org/ articles/ GJS5/ GJS5lote� Accessed 1 Apr� 2020� Strohschneider, Peter� “Âventiure-Erzählen und Âventiure-Handeln� Eine Modellskizze�” Im Wortfeld des Textes: Worthistorische Beiträge zu den Bezeichnungen von Rede und Schrift im Mittelalter, edited by Gerd Dicke et al� Berlin: 2006, pp� 377-84� “Thoth�” Ancient History Encyclopedia, www�ancient�eu/ Thoth� Accessed 1 Apr� 2020�