Hades: Comments by Joyce

"It is impossible for me to write these episodes quickly. The elements needed will fuse only after a prolonged existence together. I confess that it is an extremely tiresome book but it is the only book which I am able to write at present. . . . Each successive episode, dealing with some province of artistic culture (rhetoric or music or dialectic), leaves behind it a burnt up field. Since I wrote the Sirens I find it impossible to listen to music of any kind."

(letter from Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 20 July 1919,
Letters 1:128-29, Selected Letters, pp. 240-41)