Joyce was an inveterate reader and notetaker, often reading whatever came to hand. He jotted down words and phrases he found interesting in one of his pocket notebooks. These notes were the foundations upon which his works were constructed. All of the almost sixty extant Finnegans Wake notebooks are part of the Joyce collection at Buffalo. Joyce’s practice of harvesting odd words and phrases from the daily newspapers, magazines and other material of popular culture is illustrated here. As Joyce used these notes, inserting them in drafts for Work in Progress/Finnegans Wake, he would characteristically cross through the entries in different colored crayons, often depending upon when and where he inserted the material in his text.

A. Open at the center of the case is the Criterion, vol. II, no. v (October 1923), in which T.S. Eliot’s seminal essay on the modernist aesthetic, "The Function of Criticism," appeared. Joyce, who probably picked up his issue of the journal at Shakespeare & Co., not only read this essay but, as his note-taking makes clear, continued to read the Criterion, jotting down various names for the devil from Professor Charles Guignebert’s article "Concerning the Devil."

Beside it is the sixth extant Finnegans Wake notebook (VI.B.06, p. 64; compiled in early 1924). Joyce copied only a few words and phrases from the first and second pages of Guignebert’s essay into his notebook. From page 17 the words underlined on the transparency also appear at the top of the notebook beside it: "Tempter," "Evil One," "Prince of Darkness," "Lowest," "Adversary" and "Other."

B. Beginning in 1933, Joyce depended upon an amanuensis, Mme. Raphaël, to transcribe in a large, neat hand his heavily used and barely legible notebooks. This notebook (VI.C.2) is open to a transcription of the same page in the primary notebook, VI.B.06. Here the red cross-out indicates that just "adversary" was used to revise what would become Finnegans Wake.

C. Around the Criterion are three various examples of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake notebooks (left to right: VI.B.16 [1924]; VI.B.36 [1934]; and VI.B.14 [1924]).

D. In the Evening Standard, (London, 3 August 1929), "Books and Persons," Arnold Bennett claims that Joyce’s Work in Progress is "The Oddest Novel Ever Written." Well known critic and author of various reviews of Joyce and other modernists, Bennett praises Joyce’s genius and criticizes his "super-portmanteau" compositional style.

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