![]() ![]() “The large crayons thus helped him see what he was writing, and the white coat helped reflect more light onto the page at night.”Ĭrayons also had a place in his intricate revision process. “Joyce used a different colored crayon each time he went through a notebook incorporating notes into his draft,” writes Derek Attridge in a review of The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo, a compilation of all the extant working materials for Joyce’s final novel. He also calls Joyce’s colored crayon method part of “a scrupulousness which has never been satisfactorily explained” - but then, much about Joyce hasn’t, and may never be. Painstakingly, it turns out, and not just because of the infamous difficulty of the text itself: he “wrote lying on his stomach in bed, with a large blue pencil, clad in a white coat, and composed most of Finnegans Wake with crayon pieces on cardboard,” writes Brainpickings’ Maria Popova. By the time Joyce finished his final novel, the eye problems that had plagued him for most of his life had rendered him nearly blind. ![]() ![]() Even the most avid James Joyce fans surely have times when they open Finnegans Wakeand wonder how on Earth Joyce wrote the thing. ![]()
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