‘The conversation began some minutes before anything was said . . .’: Textual Genesis as Dialogue and Confrontation (Woolf vs Joyce and Co)

Abstract

Writers’ manuscripts, and more specifically their reading notes, are the scene of a process of interaction that can be analysed in terms of conversation. This is particularly apparent in Virginia Woolf’s 1919 notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Woolf’s efforts to come to terms with what she is reading involve a multitude of ‘side participants’, who take part in the exchange. Woolf’s own purpose is constantly shifting in the course of the conversation: she tries to understand the book she is reading and to evaluate it, she strives to absorb its novelty and rejects it as a threatening rival, she is forced to question the norms according to which such an evaluation can be made, she begins to draft an essay about modern novels and she indirectly defines what a ‘woolfian novel’, an as yet non-existent genre, could be.