What Song the Sirens Sang … Is No Longer Beyond All Conjecture: A Preliminary Description of the New “Proteus” and “Sirens” Manuscripts

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to alert the Joycean community about the existence of two copybooks of exceptional interest among the papers that the National Library of Ireland had just acquired and that were not then accessible to the public. On the basis of notes taken when I had been given the opportunity to study, for a few hours, the manuscripts before they left Paris, I offered a preliminary description of the notebooks and made a few hypotheses about their possible interpretation. The manuscript that I called the “coverless copybook” is probably the most interesting single document in the whole Joyce archive. The part devoted to “Proteus” is the earliest extant Ulysses draft. It does not look like anything else by Joyce except perhaps Giacomo Joyce . I suggested tentatively that it might indicate a temporary “regression” in the direction of the fragmentary form. The part devoted to “Sirens” is less startling in appearance, but I argue that it gives us the opportunity to observe at close range a crucial turning point in the history of Ulysses or even in the history of literature. The last page of the copybook is a set of notes on a Homeric episode, “Lacedemon,” that Joyce never turned into an episode of Ulysses . I have discovered since that it follows closely the text of Samuel Butcher and Andrew Lang’s translation. (See my “An Unwritten Chapter of Ulysses ? Joyce’s Notes for a ‘Lacedemon’ Episode,” in James Joyce: Whence, Whither and How. Studies in Honour of Carla Vaglio , ed. Giuseppina Cortese, Giuliana Ferreccio, M. Teresa Giaveri, and Teresa Prudente [Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, forthcoming].) Again, there is no extant set of notes quite like it. The other manuscript, which I called the “Fuga per Canonem copy-book,” is the first half of a later draft for “Sirens,” now in the Buffalo collection. What is particularly interesting and surprising in it is the inside of the front cover, which gives a list of Italian musical terms under the title “Fuga per Canonem” (Susan Brown has since discovered that the source for this was a superficial reading of Grove’s dictionary of music), and three words in the margin of the first page that seem to be the inception of the “overture” of the episode. In conjunction with the first draft, this allows us to understand how Joyce came to transform a plain dramatic presentation of a Dublin pub scene into the dazzling modernistic episode that is familiar to us.