ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that postcard materialities structured James Joyce’s early attempts at self-definition and at establishing a relationship with Nora Barnacle and that they became a recurring motif of writer–reader relationships in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It analyses the strategic deployment of postcards in Joyce’s correspondence and fictional works and highlights their incomplete representations in the published Letters. It argues that the “U.P.:up” postcard enigma from Ulysses functions as a literary precursor to the epistolary chaos of Finnegans Wake, a prescient fictional experiment with postcard materialities that would shape the confused epistolary multiplicity of Joyce’s 1939 novel.
