In 1908, while living in Trieste, Joyce wrote this sentence
in a notebook: "She came to me silently in a dream after her
death and her wasted body within its loose brown habit gave
out a faint odour of wax and rosewood and her breath a faint
odour of wetted ashes." Telemachus reworks the
sentence not once but twice, making very slight changes each
time, and Stephen is still thinking of it in Nestor
and Proteus.
Joyce juggles the words of the first clause, changing it to "Silently,
in a dream she had come to him," and then to "In
a dream, silently, she had come to him." Both later
versions alter "habit" to "graveclothes."
In the second revision, the graveclothes are no longer "brown."
Both revisions decide that the "odour" of the
wasted body (unlike that of his mother’s breath) is not
"faint." Instead of giving "out" an odour, they give it "off."
Instead of introducing "her breath" with
"and," they do so with a comma. The one significant change
comes when the first passage inserts a subordinate clause
between "her breath" and its "faint
odour of wetted ashes." It is a breath "that
had bent upon him, mute, reproachful." The second
passage decides that, no, the breath "bent over him
with mute secret words."
This searching for an ideal shape within a mass of words
strongly characterizes Stephen’s calling as a poet, and it was
also typical of Joyce’s practice as a prose stylist—both in
the revisions that preceded his published texts, and also, as
the double revision in Telemachus suggests, within
those texts, which tend to revisit and rephrase things already
said.
