Once upon a time— or, to be somewhat more specific, one day in the early months of 1929— Joyce wrote this phrase in a notebook:

This, as hearty readers of Finnegans Wake will recognize, is the earliest version of what will become this:

And readers of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will recognize that as rather similar to this:

But what exactly is the relationship between these three texts? To what extent is it correct or even adequate to call the second a “parody” of the third? By the same logic, can we call the second also a kind of parody of the first? And is it safer— or even riskier still— merely to state that what we are looking at are three different versions of the same text? Especially significant, and especially vexing, is the fact that all three of these passages are revisions of revisions, that there is no extant origin point for this writing (we have no opening to Stephen Hero, a damaged fossil).

Genetic inquiry is above all else the determination of the relationships between texts that are in some sense variants of one another, though these determinations can remain as provisional as the relationships can be multidimensional. Other hermeneutic methods might well envy the weight of documentary evidence that genetic studies depend upon and in turn the provability that they can claim as a result, yet it is this very room for uncertainty and contrary possibilities that identifies such studies as a form of literary criticism. Just as a reader comparing a translation to an original may trace any number of other possible renderings, while the unfortunate translator must commit to a single choice, the genetics scholar can entertain and explore various hypotheses without, unlike his poor cousin, the textual editor, having to choose just one and live with it.