GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES - Issue 6 (Spring 2006)
NOTES & ARTICLES - TOOLS & QUERIES - LOST & FOUND - ABOUT GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES
"His Dark
Materials": Joyce's "Scribblings" and the
Notes for 'Circe' in the
National Library of
Ronan Crowley
Into this wild abyss,
The womb of Nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds.
'
After all, the original genius of a man lies in his scribblings: in his casual actions lies his basic talent. Later he may develop that talent until he produces a Hamlet or a 'Last Supper', but if the minute scribblings which compose the big work are not significant, the big work goes for nothing no matter how grandly conceived.1
"Six medical
students under my direction will write Paradise Lost except 100 lines." This
claim of Stephen's does not make it into Ulysses.
John Eglinton's jibe, however, "asked with elder's gall" at U 9.18–19 makes it clear that Stephen has
at some time alluded to his "six brave medicals". The material absent from Ulysses but implied by Eglinton's
question has been known to readers since it appeared in Herbert Gorman's 1939
biography of Joyce.2 There Gorman placed it alongside the Pola 1904 portions of a notebook
Joyce had begun in
Reminiscences of the composition of Ulysses abound with
references to Joyce making notes on little writing blocks; on menus, bus
tickets and in the margins of newspapers; on stray bit of paper or the backs of
advertisements; and, on one occasion, on the cuff of a shirtsleeve. This
heterogeneous array of first-order notes, Joyce's "scribblings", has not
survived. Instead, the extant body of Ulysses notes includes several
notebooks and, in the British Library, loose sheets of notes, more commonly
termed 'notesheets', covered with lists of words and short phrases,
repositories of the original 'off-the-cuff' notes. Prior to the acquisition of
the Léon cache by the National Library of Ireland, only two notebooks were
known to be extant: Buffalo MS VIII.A.5, a commonplace notebook compiled in the
Zentralbibliothek while Joyce
was living at 38 Universitätstrasse Zürich in 1918, and "the deteriorated
notebook" Buffalo MS V.A.2, a repository of late notes for most episodes of Ulysses, intended for
typescripts and placards.7 The C-series of notebooks at
The acquisition of the Joyce Papers 2002 brought the number of Ulysses notebooks known to be extant to
six. The Léon cache includes the so-called "Subject Notebook", NLI MS 36639/3,
and three notebooks designated 36639/4, /5A and /5B. The Subject Notebook is a
mathematics exercise book with pink-red covers. Apparently it was bought and
begun when Joyce was convalescing in
In this paper I examine the expanded genetic dossier of Ulysses note repositories. The
bibliography of the recently surfaced notebooks will be familiar to many, but only
recently have the relationships between these documents and the preparatory
materials that were long known to be extant begun to be established. I examine
the connexion between the National Library's notebooks and Buffalo MS VI.C.7,
and speculate about the implications for Rose and O'Hanlon's reconstituted MS
VI.D.4. I also trace Joyce's use of the notebooks in compiling notesheets BL
"Circe" 16 and 17, the two sides of BL Add. MS 49975/fol. 20.
The harlequined pages of the notebooks contain entries that fall into
the usual lists of words and short phrases, repositories of earlier
"scribblings", familiar from the notesheets and Buffalo MS V.A.2. A few pages
of the smaller of the two pale-blue notebooks, NLI MS 36639/5B, contain notes
in Italian in Lucia's hand. This collaboration between Joyce père and fille raises the issue of the immediate provenance of the entries;
are they first-order notes – "the written symbols of the languid lights which
occasionally flashed across [Joyce's] soul" (LI: 154) – and was Lucia writing
from sore-eyed Joyce's dictation? Or are they second-order remnants of earlier
Italian "scribblings" in Joyce's hand here transcribed by Lucia? Do the entries
borrow from Italian sources to which Joyce had directed Lucia? None of these
explanations is entirely satisfactory but such questions imply the broader
inquiry into the intertextual origin of all the notebooks' entries, an inquiry
vitiated by the lack of any identifying tags to go with the entries. The
earlier 1903–04 notebook acquired by the National Library, NLI MS 36639/2A,
contains, alongside its budgets and passages on aesthetics, excerpts copied
from Ben Jonson, Aristotle, and Yeats, among others. Whereas these latter quotations
are acknowledged as such with authors and titles of works listed, notes on
pages labelled "For Stephen Hero" and "For Dubliners" (and, indeed, in the four
Ulysses notebooks) have no such
indications as to their provenance. Even reading notes cannot be distinguished
from creative acts.
The odyssey undertaken by these "dark materials" across the non-extant
compositional strata remains obscured, "no narrow frith" to cross. But the
material processes by which notes from the second-order repositories entered
the text have been documented. While he generally wrote out his drafts without
using notes, Joyce relied on them for revisions and additions, "sprawled across
two beds surrounded by mountains of notes" (SL: 253). Consulting note
repositories, he mottled notebooks and notesheets with coloured crayons, and
transferred individual entries into his text. In documenting this accretive
process, previous studies have focused on either the intertextual origins of
individual notes (the 'oxcavations' of Robert Janusko and Gregory Downing, for
example, trace the sources of many entries on the "Oxen of the Sun" sheets to
books in Joyce's personal library in Trieste) or on the eventual destination of
crossed-through notes in the published text of Ulysses (see Philip Herring's annotation to his edition of the
notesheets).10 In the wake of the recent acquisitions, however, there are now enough
drafts of individual episodes and so many note repositories available that
familiar elements of the published text can be seen at the moment of their
incorporation into the text of Ulysses
and their corresponding notebook sources can be identified. Notes that are
worked into a draft occasionally drop out again or become altered in subsequent
drafts; this aspect of the compositional process is elided when one can only
correlate notebooks with the published text. The presence of "ousted"
"possibilites" (U 2.50–51) among the
pages of the notebooks alerts one to the other material that did not make it
into Ulysses – the great number of
uncrossed entries in the notebooks. This so-called paralipomenal material had a
curious afterlife after Ulysses was
completed; it was transcribed by Mme Raphael in the '30s into what is now
Buffalo MS VI.C.7 pp. [136–269].11
The four Ulysses notebooks at
the National Library of Ireland were, perhaps accidentally, among some forty
notebooks transcribed by Mme Raphael, and it was long thought that they had
been destroyed after transcription. Accordingly, in his catalogue of Joyce's
manuscripts and letters at
pp. [136–198] of Buffalo MS VI.C.7
comes from uncrossed entries in NLI MS 36639/5A
pp. [202–234] of Buffalo MS VI.C.7
comes from uncrossed entries in NLI MS 36639/5B
pp. [235–254] of Buffalo MS VI.C.7
comes from uncrossed entries in NLI MS 36639/4
pp. [255–269] of Buffalo MS VI.C.7
comes from uncrossed entries in NLI MS 36639/3.
There seems
to be no deliberate order to the sequence of notebooks; presumably they were
handed to Mme Raphael as part of a group of notebooks to be transcribed. Few of
the entries transcribed from the Ulysses notebooks
into Buffalo MS VI.C.7 were used for Finnegans
Wake, but the revelation that MS VI.D.4 is in fact four notebooks may have
implications for Rose and O'Hanlon's Lost Notebook. The Lost Notebook, Rose and
O'Hanlon's reconstruction of a notebook from which Mme Raphael transcribed
unused material (into pp. [232–274] of Buffalo MS VI.C.16), has retained the
catalogue reference Buffalo MS VI.D.7 after the short reconstruction of it
given by Spielberg.13 From their masterly reconstruction, Rose and O'Hanlon show that the
original Lost Notebook would have contained elements drawn from Joyce's reading
in the Zentralbibliothek while
he was living in Zürich in 1918 (and so it is a companion notebook to Buffalo
MS VIII.A.5), and from his reading of the London Times, a biographical dictionary, the TLS and dictionaries of slang, among other texts.
Like VIII.A.5, the Lost Notebook draws on Joyce's reading in classical
mythology around the subject of the Odyssey:
library sources present in both notebooks include Victor Bérard's two-volume Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée and a French
translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric.
The library call numbers for both of these are found in the Lost Notebook. Only
the Lost Notebook, however, contains notes from Walter Leaf's Troy: A Study in Homeric Geography,
which, Rose and O'Hanlon write, first lead Joyce to Bérard (on the other hand,
notes from W. H. Roscher's Ausführliches
Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie are present in only
VIII.A.5). These sources were undoubtedly consulted in the Zentralbibliothek. But taken
together with the
If among the notebooks Mme Raphael transcribed into Buffalo MS VI.C.16 there
were thus two Ulysses notebooks,
unused portions of the first of these became VI.C.16 pp. [232–247], and unused
portions of the second became VI.C.16 pp. [238–274].15 In his preface to the Archive volume
containing the facsimile of VI.C.16 Danis Rose defends the D-series divisions
(with the exception of VI.D.3 which "cannot with certainty be considered a
single workbook").16 The unearthing of the four Ulysses
notebooks at the National Library of Ireland has put paid to VI.D.4's
unity; if the Lost Notebook is also several lost notebooks Joyce's reading of
datable newspapers cannot be viewed as coterminous with his work on classical
sources in the Zentralbibliothek
Zürich. This speculation does not invalidate Rose and O'Hanlon's findings in The Lost Notebook. Their reconstruction,
while it has not received the attention it deserves, deftly corrects Mme
Raphael's mistranscriptions and restores hypothetical deleted entries (which
she would have skipped over). The Lost
Notebook is one of the few critical works which engages with the early
phase of the writing of Ulysses, a
period about which little is known and studies of which are, regrettably,
largely ignored. The elucubrations of Rose and O'Hanlon have dispelled the
darkness surrounding the origins of the Lost Notebook's contents; what remains
shrouded is the precise nature of this missing document.
As well as being mined for VI.C.16, across three of the four Ulysses notebooks in the National
Library of Ireland there is further evidence of large-scale transferral. Almost
all of the "Circe" notes in the three later notebooks, NLI MS 36639/4, /5A and
/5B, that are crossed in green recur on notesheets BL "Circe" 16 and 17 (BL
Add. MS 49975/fol. 20). While a few green-crossed notebook entries do not
appear on the sheet,17 (either an oversight on Joyce's part or evidence of another green-cross
harvesting stage) almost all of the notes on BL "Circe" 16 can be traced to
sources in the notebooks. Likewise for the centre column and some of the margin
of BL "Circe" 17. That the notebook
entries were transferred from the notebooks onto the two sides of the sheet and
not vice versa is evident from Joyce's colour usage: the notesheet
entries are crossed in a variety of colours, indicative of transferral during a
range of writing phases. Their source entries in the notebooks are, as said
above, all crossed in green.18 There is an additional thematic
unity to the notes on BL "Circe" 16 and 17 – in the notebooks the entries are
grouped under "Circe" headings, those that were transferred onto the sheet are
all for, as Joyce called it, the "Messianic scene" (LI: 171). These notesheets
thus represent a deliberate recast of notes from, presumably, already
heavily-mined sources.
The recto of the sheet as it appears in the British Library Additional
Manuscript (BL "Circe" 16) was also the recto from Joyce's perspective – it
contains entries copied from NLI MS 36639/5A, and the early "Circe" pages of
NLI MS 36639/5B, whereas some later entries from /5B are found on the top of
the verso (BL "Circe" 17). The verso also contains entries lifted from NLI MS
36639/4 and a note repository that is no longer extant. Given the thematic
unity of the sheet, and the fact that uncrossed entries remained in the
notebooks by the time Mme Raphael came to transcribe them, the transfer of
material to a sheet was not the result of mining the notebooks for unused
material. The recast was the result of selective runs through the three
National Library notebooks and some other missing note repository.
By collation of the notebooks with the sheet, both Joyce's methods of
culling source notebooks and layering entries onto a recipient sheet are
revealed. The following is BL "Circe" 16. The text has been replaced with a
lorem ipsum; compare Herring's transcript of the notesheet in Joyce's Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum for the original text.19 To aid that comparison, the punctuation of the original has been
retained and initials in the original (such as LB and IHS) and replaced with
capitalized words in the lorem ipsum. The text is colour coded to indicate
source notebooks. Entries transferred from NLI notebook MS 36639/5A appear in blue; those from NLI notebook MS 36639/5B are in red. The notebook page from which each note is lifted
is given after the entry. Entries, or portions of entries, in black have no
known notebook source. As in Herring's transcript, deleted entries are marked
between < > and the colour of cancellation is indicated by means of the
capital letters R [red]; S [slate]; and G [green].
"Circe" 16
LEFT MARGIN HORIZONTAL
|
|
R <Lorem ipsum dolor> |
|
|
|
R <Sit Amet> |
p. [11r] |
|
|
C. Adipiscing |
p. [3v] |
|
|
R <Etiam> |
|
|
5 |
G <tincidunt > |
p. [3v] |
|
|
G <Maecenas> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
nec risus etiam |
p. [3v] |
|
|
R <quis justo aliquam
Tempus> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
G <libro non nunc maecena
& magna DI> |
p. [3v] |
|
10 |
G <Sit Amet!> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
G <Semper> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
G <eget & quis> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
G <augue> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
G <nullam> |
p. [28v] |
|
15 |
G <iaculis ante eu> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
R <ultricies tincidunt magna MI> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
A Risus vitae |
p. [3v] |
|
|
R <Gravida Tellus> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
G <Maecenas> |
p. [3v] |
|
20 |
G <ligla et nun> G <Mauris tempor libro> |
p. [3v] |
LEFT AND RIGHT COLUMNS HORIZONTAL
|
|
|
|
G <At> |
|
|
|
Laoreet |
p. [10v] |
matti's lorem = mauri's placerat |
p. [11v] |
|
|
Felis |
p. [10v] |
eu posuere |
p. [11v] |
|
|
R <ligula purus> |
p. [10v] |
R <non est Vivamus
vestibulum> |
p. [20r] |
|
25 |
R <Atque dolor iaculis> |
p. [10v] |
G <pretium (N. M.)> |
p. [20r] |
|
|
R <Tristique> |
p. [10v] |
G <cras & dapibus
eros porta LEO> |
p. [20r] |
|
|
G <Donec N Ante> |
p. [10v] |
R <donec ac arcu
aliquam> |
p. [10v] |
|
|
R <diam dui> |
p. [10v] |
R <sceleris, sit, amet,
vestibulum> |
p. [20r] |
|
|
G <vitae blandit a 30> |
p. [11v] |
G <feugiat facilisis> |
p. [20r] |
|
30 |
R <nibh fusce> |
p. [11v] |
R <sit amet felis> |
p. [20v] |
|
|
G <at diam consect> |
p. [11v] |
G <con dimen tum sed el
ementum> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
R <DUI ut laoreet> |
p. [12r] |
R <tincidunt> |
p. [20v] |
|
|
sem |
p. [12r] |
G <Arcu Cursus Lectus> |
p. [22v] |
|
|
R <ut & interdum> |
p. [19v] |
G <felis sodales elit> |
p. [22v] |
|
35 |
R <lam at fus Mattis> |
p. [19v], p. [19v] |
|
|
|
|
G <eget Metus hunc proin> |
p. [19v] |
G <VELIT pellents ullamcorpe> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
G <Cursus> |
p. [20r] |
|
|
|
|
R <nibh> |
p. [19v] |
G <nulla a Fermentum & Quam> |
p. [3v] |
|
|
consequat |
p. [19v] |
|
|
|
40 |
G <Adipi Nunc Tellus> |
p. [19v] |
|
|
|
|
G <accumsan urna non
bibendum> |
p. [20v] |
|
|
|
|
R <velit lorem> |
p. [19v] |
|
|
|
|
et felis Mauris faucibus
bibendum |
p. [19v] |
|
|
|
|
Dui nulla interdum
tellus Sed dapibus |
p. [19v] |
|
|
|
45 |
R <scelerisque leo> |
p. [20v] |
G <VELIT ornare erat> |
p. [2r] |
|
|
G <IN bibe massa> |
p. [20v] |
G <lorem quis libero> |
p. [20v] |
|
|
R <AN nisl sed vehicula> |
p. [20v] |
|
|
|
|
R <laoreet dui 10
fuscenec> |
p. [20v] |
R <risus vitae est> |
p. [22v] |
|
|
G <sem per Inter dum> |
p. [20v] |
R <cras ultricies> |
p. [22v] |
|
50 |
NI sit amet Lectus |
p. [20v] |
suspendisse potenti donec ligula |
p. [20v] |
|
|
G <EROS interdum vel> |
p. [20v] |
|
|
|
|
Imperdiet nec |
p. [20v] |
G <accumsan id> |
p. [27r] |
|
|
R <fe lis Aliquam
induces enim mihi> |
p. [20v] |
|
|
|
|
R <egestas nisi hendrerit vis> |
p. [20v] |
|
|
|
55 |
R <Phar etra phas ellus> |
p. [20v] |
|
|
|
|
Veh icula Suspend is Se X
& 2 faucibus sapien |
p. [22v] |
|
|
|
|
R <aliquet sodales nunc elit hendrerit odio> |
p. [22v] |
|
|
|
|
G <non hendrerit felis> |
p. [22v] |
G <URNA in Estabo> |
p. [2r] |
|
|