Ulysses - Gabler Edition [375]
Gabler decided at the beginning of his work that traditional copytext methods would not work well for the textual situation that Ulysses presents. At least three factors led to this decision: the manuscript, which does provide a beginning-to-end version in Joyce’s hand, is too far removed from the extensively augmented text that Ulysses eventually became; the typescripts and proofs are steps along the way in the process of expansion; and the first edition is too filled with errors.2 Gabler looked to German genetic editing, which is oriented more towards authorial revision than towards transmissional corruption, and also to Fredson Bowers’s work within the copytext-editing tradition on constructed, or what Gabler calls ‘virtual’, documents as copytext. Bowers demonstrated that a copytext can be a lost or virtual document when he edited Stephen Crane’s stories and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. In the case of Crane two surviving versions of a story that each descend directly from a lost original were used to recreate the lost original document, and the recreated document served as copytext. For Fielding the accidentals of one document (the first edition of Tom Jones) were merged with the substantives of another (the fourth edition), and this constructed hypothetical document became the copytext. In the implications of these examples Gabler saw a way of meeting the challenge of the complex textual situation presented by Ulysses. He reasoned that Joyce’s activity on the prepublication documents from the final working draft through to the final page proofs—his manuscript inscription plus all the additions to the typescript and proofs—can add up to a manuscript of the whole book, even though a virtual one. In one of the edition’s major innovations he reconstructs this virtual manuscript, calling it the ‘continuous manuscript’ of Ulysses, and uses it as the edition’s copytext.
In assembling the continuous manuscript the editor makes an important distinction between a ‘document’ and a ‘text’. If an author writes out a story and then returns to its pages twice to revise it, there is only one document but three distinguishable texts (the original story, the original with one set of revisions, the original with both sets). Most of the extant documents for Ulysses contain more than one text. Typical cases are manuscripts with Joyce’s handwritten text plus his subsequent revisions, typescripts with the typed version plus one or two rounds of correction and revision in Joyce’s hand, and proofs which contain the printed version plus Joyce’s corrections and revisions. When documents are missing—as is the final working draft where it served as copy for the typist; three chapters in typescript where the extant fair copy served as copy; and small sections of the proofs—the surviving documents can serve as evidence for the text contained on the missing ones that immediately preceded them. For example, the first set of proofs will show as printed text the material that Joyce presumably entered in his handwritten additions on a lost typescript page. Thus, an editor can reason that while the documents may not all survive, all the text is recoverable either through direct evidence or through recreation by extrapolation from the extant documents. The ‘continuous manuscript’ (the conflation of all Joyce’s handwriting on the manuscript and