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Dominic Janes, Picturing the Closet: Male Secrecy and Homosexual Visibility in Britain

manuscripts and multiple note-repositories’, with an ‘expansion of the text at every stage’ and repeating ‘this process of revision and accretion’ many times (p. 210), but casual allusions to Joyce’s ‘storehouse of notes’ and to individual notes as ‘ordinary building blocks’ (p. 272) risk overly literalising the metaphor of construction. This may seem apt given Joyce’s particular methods, but Crispi overlooks this particularity when positing Ulysses as ‘an exemplary work of narrative fiction for the study of the creative construction of characters’ (p. 1). Furthermore, the book’s focus on Joyce’s use of notes risks distorting his creative process, by excluding other dimensions such as off-the-page creativity. Leaving aside the potential unhelpfulness of ‘building blocks’ as a metaphor for writing, Almuth Grésillon has noted three different meanings in the word ‘writing’: the basic process of scribing itself; the act of producing meaningful forms of language; and the emergence of forms that can be defined as literary. It is in this third respect that Becoming the Blooms is most fascinating, for, as Crispi puts it, ‘it is often astounding to follow the different things Joyce manages to achieve with what appear to be such ordinary building blocks’ (p. 272).