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Early draft of the Proteus chapter of Ulysses

This transcription is the oldest surviving Ulysses manuscript, from late 1917.

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Also, a shortish preview of the corresponding genetic close-reading

Ineluctable modality of the visible: it must be that at least if no more. My eyes do not see it: they think it rather than see. These signs I am read and reader: furrows of seawrack, the tide coming in, that rusty boot. Bottlegreen, bluesilver, rust. Yes, coloured signs, limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he has become aware of them before of their colours. How? By knocking his head against them. Go easy. Yes, he was bald and a multimillionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Wait now: limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it is a gate, if you cannot it is a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes hearing his boots crushing the crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it anyhow. Yes I am: a foot at a time. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a precipice now. Fell through the Nebeneinander. Ineluctably. I am getting on very nicely in the dark. My two feet are at the ends of my two legs: nebeneinander. Solid no doubt: made by the hammer of Los. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick.

Won't you come to Sandymount
Madeline the mare?

Rhythm is beginning, you see. I hear. Marching iambs. No agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. Yes, I will. One moment. Has all vanished in the meantime? If I open and see the black adiaphane. Enough. I will see if I can see.

See now. It was there all the time and will be, world without end.

They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently. Frauenzimmer. And flabbily down the shelving shore, their splayed feet sinking in the silted sand. Like me. Like Algy coming down to the mighty mother. One carried her midwife's bag, the other a gamp with which she poked and turned over shells of the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all go back, stranded and twined cables of all flesh. Hello. Telegraphic address: Navel, Paradise. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your navel. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville, one, one, one.

Heva, helpmate of Adam Kadmon, naked Eve. She had no navel. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, or whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Mother, womb of sin.

Wombed in darkness I was too, made not begotten by them, the man with my strange eyes and the ghost with a breath of ashes. They clasped and sundered, they did the coupler's will from before all ages. He willed me and may not will me away now or ever. A lex eterna stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and son are consubstantial? Where is Arius to answer? Luckless heresiarch! In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last with mitre and crozier on his throne, with trussed up vestments, with foul hinder parts.

The seawind romped around him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming: waves. The whitemaned horses, tossing, hundredbridled.

I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship half twelve. By the way, go easy with that money. Yes, I must.

His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to Strasburg terrace or not? My consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your brother Stephen lately? No? Sure, he's not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt Sally? Couldn't he find something better than that eh? And and and and tell me, and how's uncle Si now. O, weeping God! The things I married into. Sir. No, sir. Agonizing God!

I pull the rusty bell of their shuttered house: and wait. Twice. They take me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.

-- It's Stephen, sir.

-- Let him in. Let him in.

A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.

-- We thought you were someone else.

Uncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed in the broad bed extends over the hill of his knees a sturdy forearm. Clean: chested. He has washed the upper moiety.

-- Morrow, Stephen.

He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bill of costs for the eyes of master Goff and master Tandy, filing consents and common searches and a writ of Duces Tecum. The drone of his misleading whistle brings Walter back.

-- Yes, sir?

-- Whisky for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?

-- She's bathing Crissie, sir.

-- No, uncle Richie.....

-- Call me Richie. Malt!

-- Uncle Richie look.... Really....

-- Sit down or will you be knocked down?

Walter squints vainly for a chair.

-- He has nothing to sit down on, sir.

-- He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring our chippendale chair.

All'erta

He drones bars of Fernando's aria di sortita. The grandest number, Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.

His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded and with rushes of air, his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.

This air is sweeter.

Houses of decay, mine and his and all. Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The ragtail rabblement in the liberties. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houhynhym: horsenostrilled Dean, and abbas father what offence set fire to their brains? Paff! Descendo, calve, ut ne nimium decalveris. A garland of grey hair on his comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace (Descende) clutching a basilisk monstrance. Get down, baldpoll. A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar's horns, the snorted Latin of priests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.

And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating it. And two streets off another one locking it into a pyx. And in a side chapel another one taking housel all to his own cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back: Occam thought of that. That's all right fair and square. It must have been one misty English morning. The devil's thought crossed his brain. He gave a side eye in the transept as he brought his host down (he is lifting his) and heard (I am lifting mine) the bells again twang together. Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine Avenue that the woman in front might lift her skirts more in the rain. O si, certo. Sell your soul for that, dyed rags tied round a squaw. More, more than that tell me. On the top of the Howth tram crying to the rain: Naked women! Naked women! What about that, eh?

What about what? What else were they invented for?

You are a highly intellectual fellow, with your Oxford manners. Reading two pages apiece of ten books every night. I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward so seriously, striking looking. Hooray for the God damned idiot! Ay! Ray! Noone saw: tell no one. And your epiphanies, written on green paper leaves, so deeply deep, to be sent to all the libraries of the world if you died, including Alexandria. Someone would read them there in about a thousand years' time, you thought. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these faded pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once..... The fine sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod razorlike, stuck empty shells, unnumbered pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, watercrusted wood. Cakey damp sandflats waited to suck his treading boots, breathing upward sewage breath. He coasted them walking warily. On his left a bottle stood up pitted to its waist in the cakey sand. A sentinel. Isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops farther, and beyond a maze of dark cunning nets: Ringsend: houses of brown sailors and master mariners. Human shells.

He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Dora's. Am I not going there? Seems not. No-one about the strand. He turned and crossed the firmer sand towards the Pigeon House.

-- Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?

-- C'est le pigeon, Joseph!

Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar Minerva. Son of the wild goose. My father's a bird. He lapped the sweet lait chaud inoffensively, a pink young tongue, a plump white rabbit's face. Lap, lapin. He hopes to win something in the gros lots. He tells me all about the nature of woman that he read in Michelet. He will send me la Vie de Jesus by M. Leo Taxil. He has lent it to a friend. C'est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas en l'existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire a mon pere.

-- Il croit?

-- Mon pere, oui.

Schluss. He laps.

My Latin quarter hat. God, we must simply dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other devil's name? P.C.N. Eating fourpenceworth of mou en civet beside belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone. When I was in Paris I used to. Yes, you used to carry old punched tramtickets for weeks in your pocket to be able to prove an alibi if you were arrested on a charge of murder somewhere. Other fellow did it. My double: hat, tie, overcoat, face. Lui, c'est moi. Allee samee.

You walked proudly. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget now who. You were going to do wonders, weren't you? Pretending to speak broken English as you dragged your valise across the slimy pier at Newhaven. Comment? The booty you brought back. Five numbers of Pantalon Blanc et Culotte Rouge: and a blue French telegram curiosity to show.

Nother dying. Come home.
Father.

The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That's the reason why she won't.

Then here's a health to Mulligan's aunt
And I'll tell you the reason why
She always kept things decent in
The Hannigan family.

His feet marched in sudden gay rhythm over the sand along by the boulders of the South Wall. Gold light on the sea, the sand, the boulders, sewage of my brain behind me. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses. Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, froggreen wormwood, her matin incense court the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife: the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In Polidon's Yvonne and Madeleine, belated, newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chausons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan breton. Faces of the Paris men go by, their wellpleased pleasers, curled conquistadores. Noon is near. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer's ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About us the hungry fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi setier. A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron and around the marbleslabbed tables, the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy's fang thrusting between his scandalous lips. Of Ireland of the city of the Dalcassians, hopes, conspiracies. His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its neck tassels at his secrets. Maud Gonne, Felix Faure, licentious men, the ?froken who washed and rubbed his naked body in the bath at Upsala, most licentious custom, bath a most private thing. I wouldn't let my brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I see you! Fang, I feel. Lascivious thing. The blue fuse burns deadly between his hands and burns clear. The loose tobacco shreds catch fire and flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw facebones under his Spaniard's hat. Spurned lover. I was a strapping young bouchal then at that time. I'll show you my likeness one day. Lover, for her love he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, his tanist, under Clerkenwell's walls and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upwards in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. The Paris multitude now he bides, unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations, the dim printingcase, his three taverns, the lair he sleeps short night in, in rue de la Goutte d'or, damascened with old cartoons. Loveless, landless, wifeless, soulless. She is all right without her castoff man, madame in rue ?Git les coeur, canary and two lodgers. ???Geyaroy uin cheeks, a skirt, frisky as a girls'. Spurned lover and undespairing. Mon fils, soldier of France. I taught him ?Oh, the boys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades. Do you know that old song? ???Thus I taught Patrice that old Kilkenny.

-- O, the boys of Kilkenny

They have cast him outward forgotten not he them?, Kevin Egan. Remembering thee, O Sion.

He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots. The wild air greeted him, ?sighing ?on wild nerves, wind of wild air of seeds of fire. Here. I am not walking out to the Kish am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the quaking soil. Turn back. Turning he looked southward along the shore, his feet sinking again slowly in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbacans shafts of light will move ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping this side that side over.the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushed back chairs my obelisk valise, round a table of abandoned platters. Who would clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their blind bodies, the panther sahib and his gunbearer. Call: no answer. He lifted his feet from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take all, keep all, my soul walks with me. So in the moon's mid watches I walk by the path above the rocks, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood. The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back then by the road again to the higher strand behind. He climbed over the ?salvage of weed and sat on a stool of rock, laying his ashplant by him.

The bloated carcass of a dog lay among the oily sedge. Before him the gunwale of a boat, buried in sand. Un coche ensable' Louis Veuillot called Gautier's unwieldy prose. These heavy sands are language that tide and wind have silted here. And these the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats. Sands and stones. Why am I angered? A fool's wrath is heavier than them both. A live dog came into sight across the sweep of sand. Lord, is he going to attack me? I have me stick. Sit still. From farther away walking shoreward across from the coming tide, figures. He is running back to them ?two.

The galleys of the Danes ran here to land, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding the low waves. A school of turlehide whales stranded in the noon, spouting, flapping in the shallows. Then from the cobbled starving city a horde of jerkined dwarfs with flaying knives, running, scaling, hacking ?the green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughter. Their blood is in me, their thoughts are my waves. I was among them on the frozen Liffey, among the hissing resin fires. I spoke to none: none to me.

The dog's bark ran toward him, ceased, ran back. For that are you pining, the bark of their applause? Then live their lives, ?coward as they. He saved men from drowning and you shake at this barking of a cur? But the courtiers who mocked Guido Cavalcanti were in their own house, he meant ?An house of.... We don't want any more of medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he did? There would be a boat near or a lifebuoy. Ay, of course, put there for you. Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned last week off Maiden's Rock whose body they are waiting. The truth now. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Do you see the tide flowing on all sides swiftly sheeting the stretches of sand? If I had land under my feet. I want his life to be still his but mine to be mine. A man. His eyes are fixed on me in horror of death. I... With him together... I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.

A man and a woman. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.

The dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something he lost here in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowflying gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling legs. At the verges of the tides he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His head lifted barked against the noise of the waves. They came towards his feet, shaking ?their ?crests, plashing, breaking, from farther, from far out, waves and waves.

The man and woman waded a few paces into the water and, stooping, soused their bags. Cocklepickers. They lifted their bags from the water and waded out again. The dog yelped and running to them, reared up and pawed them ?+ then, falling on all fours, and again reared up with mute bearish ?efforts. Unheeded he kept beside them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of red tongue lolling from a side of his wolf's jaws. His speckled body ambled in front and then set off forward at a calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, nosing closer, went round it sniffing rapidly like a dog points.

-- Tatters! Here, you mongrel!

The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He ambled back in a curve and on by the edge of the mole, smelt a rock and under a heaved hindleg pissed against it. He trotted on and heaving again his hindleg, pissed against an unsmelt rock. His hind paw then scattered the sand: then his forepaw dabbled and delved. Something he buried there. He scraped in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his paws, soon ceasing. A pard, a panther, vulturing the dead.

With their bags they passed. His large feet out of turned up trousers slapped the damp sand, a dull red muffler strangling his unshaven neck. With slender steps she followed him : the bully and his strolling mort: her spoils slung on her back. Loose sand and shellgrit crusted her bare feet and loose her ?hang trailed about her windraw face. Behind her lord his helpmeet trudging to Romeville. When night hides her body's flaws calling under her fringed shawl from an archway where dogs have mired. Her fancyman is treating two redcoats in O'Loughlin's of Blackpitts. A shefiend's whiteness under her rancid rags. Fumbally's Lane that night, the tanyard smells. My dimber wapping dell.

White thy fambles, red thy gan
And thy quarrons dainty is.
Couch a hogshead with me then
In the darkmans clip and kiss.

A side eye at my Latin quarter hat walking across the sands of this world, driven by the sun's flaming sword, to the west, to evening lands she trudges; schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn in her wake. Moondrawn tides within her a winedark sea, myriadislanded. Behold the handmaid of the moon. The wet sign rules her courses, ?visits her. Rise up, according to the word. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, the pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss.

Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss. No, you must have two of em. Glue em well together : Mouth to her mouth's kiss.

His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air : Mouth to her moombh. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy's. Here, tear the blank end off. Turning his back to the sun he bent across far to a slab of rock and scribbled the words. That's twice I forgot to take some slips from the library. So.

His shadow lay dark over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? To throw an ended shadow from me and call it back to me. Endless, would it be mine? Who watches me here? Who will read ever anywhere these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone in your nicest voice. For the bishop of Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat, the flat cloth of space with signs and emblems hatched on its field. Hold on. Coloured on a flat: yes, that's right. She trusts me; the gentle hand, softlashed eyes. Where am I supposed to be bringing her beyond the veil? The ineluctable modality of ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. Who? Tell that to someone else: ten to one she wears those curse of God stays suspenders and brown stockings. Talk about apple dumplings. Have you no sense? Where are your wits?

Touch me. Soft eye, soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here alone. O, touch me soon or now! What is that word all others know. I will be quiet to leave alone. Sad too. Touch. O touch me now!

He stretched backward at full over the sharp boulders, his hat tilted down on his eyes, cramming the scribbled note and pencil into a pocket. Under its leaf he watched through ?widening peacock lashes the southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpent plants, milk: oozing fruits, where leaves lie wide on waters. Pain is far.

And no more turn aside and brood

Below his feet the water flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No they are passing on up the low rocks, swirling, passing.

Under the upswelling tide he saw the long weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, in whispering water sway upturning coy fronds. Day by day, night by night lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniursias patiens ingemiscit. To no end gathered, vainly then released, forthflowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too, naked before men, naked and unravished, she draws her toil of waters.

At one the boatman said. Five fathoms deep there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he said. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fish, loose ?silly shells. A corpse. rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward. There it is. Hook it quick. Pull. We have him. Easy now.

The drowned manbundle, bag of corpsegas, sopping of foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fatfed, flashing through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. His leprous nosehole ?fronting the sun.

Hauled stark over the gunwale. A seachange this seadeath, mildest of all deaths. Paris medal awarded : beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves no end.

My pilgrim's staff waits to be picked up. On then. Where? To evening land. Evening will find itself. He took the handle of his ashplant, dallying with it still. Yes, evening will find itself, in me, without me. All days make their end. By the way next when will it be Tuesday will be the longest day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. The ?oxford gentleman rhymes. Lawn Tennyson. Gia. For the old hag with the yellow fangs. French gentleman journalist. My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder.

He had taken a dry snot from his nostril and holding it on the crook of his finger, groped vainly for his handkerchief. Forgot it in the Tower. He laid the snot carefully on a ledge of rock. For the rest let look who will.

Behind. Perhaps there is someone.

He turned and saw passing through the air the mast of a ship, her sails braced up, passing on towards Dublin, silently.

The full published chapter is here.

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