Ulysses - Gabler Edition [374]
The critical and synoptic edition of Ulysses needs to be understood in terms of the assumptions and methods of most Anglo-American editing today, because it both follows them and departs from, even challenges, them in important ways. In the method that has come to dominate Anglo-American editing, an editor studies all the relevant surviving documents for the work in question and selects one version as the copytext. The documents include any notes, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs that are extant, plus printed versions in which the author was involved. The copytext, usually the first edition or, if available, the author’s manuscript, is the basic text that the editor will follow for such matters as spelling, punctuation, etc., in places where the evidence is inconclusive, and for all the words except when differences between documents indicate author’s revisions and so call for the editor to alter the copytext’s words on the basis of one of the other documents. In the terminology of editing and textual criticism, the words are called ‘substantives,’ spelling and punctuation are matters of ‘accidentals,’ inconclusive readings are ‘indifferent’ ones, and the editor’s alterations of the copytext are called ‘emendations.’
The resulting text, eclectically blending authorial corrections and revisions with the system of accidentals from the copytext, was eventually epitomized as fulfilling the author’s final intentions. This method of copytext editing producing an eclectic text offers the editor a way of dealing with gaps in the historical record and with seemingly equal choices among variant readings (when in doubt, follow the copytext). It strives as well to rescue the author’s text from its ravagement through time at the hands of the scribes, typists, publisher’s editors, and printers who were allowed to alter, and presumably corrupt, it. But it also tends to suppress the historical determinants that originally affected the work and its production in the name of the author’s final intentions because the eclectic edited text is an idealized construct that appears to transcend time by recreating the ‘purity’ of the author’s isolated conception. The editor is also able to disappear behind the author, since the edition will likely be presented as the author’s (the editor fulfilled the author’s intentions) rather than as the editor’s (the editor started with some basic premises and made many decisions and choices in order to produce the edited text).
It is easy to disappear behind the towering figure of James Joyce but difficult to adopt a more visible editorial stance that reveals the editor, as well as Joyce, at work. Yet for Hans Walter Gabler as an editor, Joyce’s methods of writing Ulysses and the surviving evidence regarding that work called for a visible stance. An astonishing array of materials—especially prepublication documents—has survived; they open up the whole process of Joyce’s composition of the work for the purposes of editing, but at the same time they leave tantalizing and important gaps. Joyce wrote Ulysses episode by episode, and the process is almost entirely one of growth and expansion. After compiling notes and rough drafts, Joyce brought each of the eighteen episodes to a temporary finish in a final working draft that he gave to a typist. For eight full episodes and part of a ninth, Joyce apparently made a fair copy of this draft, making some changes as he went along; for these pages the working draft has not survived. (The surviving manuscript, partly the final working draft and partly Joyce’s fair copy, is called the Rosenbach Manuscript after the museum that owns it.) Each episode was transcribed by a series of typists and printers, and some sections were set in proof as many as eight or nine times. Joyce often