There is a compelling case for the Government to step in and seek to acquire the James Joyce manuscript which is being auctioned in New York on Thursday. The document, a late working draft of the Circe episode of Ulysses, will be sold at Christie's and could fetch up to $2 million. Even at that price, it would be well worth bringing to Ireland.
This is a truly important manuscript, a genuine trace of Joyce's amazing creative energy in the writing of Ulysses. For well known reasons, ("It seems history is to blame") there are very few Joyce manuscripts in this State. The National Library possesses the fair copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, given - repeat, given - to it by Harriet Shaw Weaver in the late 1940s. But that is all.
The emergence of this manuscript came as a major surprise and certainly disturbed settled assumptions that no major Joyce material was still likely to appear, that it was all already stored away in libraries. Nonetheless, it still does not seem likely that much more of this quality is awaiting discovery. This may well be the last chance for the State to acquire a significant item of Joyce material.
In scholarly terms, the ultimate fate of this manuscript is a matter of some concern. It would not be desirable that it should end up in private hands, even if that private individual is well disposed to Joyce scholarship. Access would remain a matter of privilege and therefore of some risk. And if it is to go to an institution, the location of that institution is a matter of some importance.
One reason is that copyright in this manuscript, as in all of Joyce's writings, remains vested until 2012 in the James Joyce Estate. This means that while the document is, of course, the property of the owner, all rights of reproduction of its words are controlled by the estate. In this situation, it might happen that the one place where this manuscript could be examined would be where it is actually located. Even overseas scholars, I have good reason to believe, would agree that an institution such as the National Library would be an ideal repository.
The importance of this document would be obvious to anybody who saw it when it was displayed in the James Joyce Centre in Dublin recently. On April 19th, 1921, Joyce wrote to the New York lawyer, John Quinn, to whom he was selling the manuscript of Ulysses in instalments: "I hope you received the MS of `Circe' and `Eumeus' [two of the book's episodes]. As a curiosity I threw in also the 8th draft of the former." This "eighth draft" is the manuscript which is now to be auctioned.
It had long been thought that all of the Joyce material that Quinn received had been disposed of in the auction of his collection in New York in 1924. This manuscript, however, was not included in that sale. It remains to this day in the possession of Quinn's descendants, unknown to the Joyce industry. It says something about that industry, perhaps, that while the implications of Joyce's work have been explored up to the furthest reaches of literary theory - and beyond, in the eyes of some - the possible fate of this draft was, apparently, never followed up.
The fact that the writing of "Circe" required so many drafts is not surprising. It is by far the longest episode of Ulysses, and, although not the most difficult to read, posed particular challenges in the writing. It is set in the brothel quarter of Dublin, where both Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus end up after a long day.
That evening quickly deteriorates into a sustained phantasmagoria, narrated in a semi-dramatic, almost cinema screenplay style. The usual difficulty in Ulysses of distinguishing between what is "really" happening and what is just a projection of the characters' minds here becomes the basic principle of construction of the episode. At any point, given any hint, the whole story can take off into an imaginary scene that is a reflection of the characters' deepest fears and fantasies.
The already narrated events of the day recur, but almost unrecognisably due to the distorting pressure of the characters' inner lives upon them. As Ulysses episodes go, it is action-packed: Stephen finally confronts the ghost of his mother, Bloom undergoes - and survives - an imaginary ritual debasement and humiliation at the hands of the brothel-keeper Bella Cohen, Stephen is knocked down by a British soldier and Bloom comes to his rescue.
Crucially, it is the episode where Bloom and Stephen, having skirted each other all day, finally come into contact. And through it all moves Leopold Bloom, "unconquered hero", maintaining a quality of moral detachment which is the equivalent of the mythical herb moly whereby his great prototype, Odysseus, keeps himself safe from the clutches of the witch Circe in The Odyssey.
Given all these complexities, any new manuscript discovery is very welcome for the light it can throw on the episode's development. The manuscript now up for auction is a very late draft, written just before the fair-copy Rosenbach manuscript which was on display in Dublin during the summer and autumn. It is a draft of the entire episode, although the ending, in which Bloom has a vision of his dead son, was not yet written. It is quite legible, by Joyce's standards, and is in very good condition.
Being a working draft, there are plenty of insertions and additions in the generously wide margins that Joyce allowed himself. There is quite a lot of very interesting rewriting: Joyce not merely expanded the text, he also improved it as he went back over it. As he transferred the text to the next stage of the writing - probably the Rosenbach manuscript - he crossed out each block of writing in blue crayon - large Xs which form a delicate pattern across the manuscript, but do not affect its legibility.
There are many important differences between this draft and the published book. These will require a great deal more study, but one can mention the reappearance early on of the milk-woman of the first episode - a passage completely missing from the published text. The already vexed and possibly insoluble problem of Bloom's budget is rendered probably even more obscure by the presence in this draft of altered expenditure figures. And on the backs of some of the pages there are various notes - not all to do with "Circe" - that will certainly repay further exploration.
In view, then, of a) the manuscript's undoubted authenticity - the voice may be the voice of Bloom but the hand is the hand of Joyce - and b) of its obvious importance, this is undoubtedly a time for the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands and the National Library to put their collective best foot forward. This document is as much a part of Ireland's heritage as the Rock of Cashel or the Cliffs of Moher, to name but two.
If this were another paper, I would no doubt at this point be writing: How about it, Sile? (Oops, I just have.) But if that phrase sounds excessive, it is worth bearing in mind that 2004, the centenary of Bloomsday, is only a few short years away. There could be no better way to mark it than by the acquisition for this State of what may well be the last major Joyce manuscript to become available on the open market. So, how about it, Sile?
Terence Killeen is a literary critic and an Irish Times journalist
