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By Root 16010 0

in the corrections and revisions on the typescripts and proofs) remains a virtual document, but the continuous manuscript text can thus be created as something now real. This is what Gabler has done. What he calls the ‘synoptic text’ presents, on the left-hand pages of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, the construction of the continuous manuscript text. The synopsis is accomplished through an elaborately coded system that indicates all Joyce’s revisions, additions, and deletions, including the stage at which each change occurred. Also, the editor’s decisions, including his transcriptions of the manuscript and his choices as to which of Joyce’ variant words (when there is more than one possibility at a particular place) are retained in the continuous manuscript text, are on display for all readers to observe and to assess.

It is accurate to say that the continuous manuscript text was assembled or created or recreated or constructed, but it was not created by copytext editing. Once it was assembled, the continuous manuscript text became the copytext for Gabler's edition, but until it came into existence there was no copytext at all. (Much of the discussion of the edition has been confused on this matter, assuming incorrectly that the Rosenbach Manuscript or the typescript is the copytext for the continuous manuscript text.) Gabler constructed the continuous manuscript text, in his words, ‘as Joyce wrote’ Ulysses. This means building the text up, stage by stage, from the working draft towards the goal of the first edition text as it would have appeared had no mistakes been made. The straightforward reconstruction becomes complicated when documents are missing or when something Joyce wrote on one document was not typed or printed and so not transmitted through the production process.

Like almost all editors, Gabler dismissed as a working principle the concept of ‘passive authorization,’ the idea that because Joyce left an error standing or did not restore a reading as he read proof he must have wanted the resulting reading in the book. But to accompany such a rejection an editor needs procedures to help determine when to accept a reading that the author did not restore and when not. Two procedures are especially important. First, any text handwritten by Joyce was presumed to be authoritative and hence admissible into the text unless it could be proved to be faulty. Conversely, any transmitted (typed or printed) text was considered to be potentially faulty unless it proved to possess authority. Second is Gabler’s ‘rule of the invariant context,’ which means that a word or passage from an earlier document could be admitted into the text only if the context around it (words, sentence, paragraph—the scope of the context varies from example to example) underwent no change, thus remaining invariant. These procedures have led to an important, and controversial, aspect of the edition. Several words and passages appear in the Rosenbach Manuscript but presumably not in the final working draft that was used by the typist and is now lost; these words and passages thus were never typed or printed. When Gabler judged them to be Joyce’s revisions as he made his fair copy of the working draft and when their context remained invariant, he admitted them into the continuous manuscript text on the grounds that they represent the fullest development of the text. Some examples will be given later on.

One further note about the continuous manuscript text: it was not constructed in order to fulfill what is known as ‘authorial intention.’ Gabler's phrase, ‘Ulysses as Joyce wrote it,’ refers to Joyce’s activity as he created Ulysses both in the extant documents and by inference from those documents to the lost ones. The editor studied what Joyce did, not what the editor thought Joyce meant or intended. This makes his edition one oriented towards the text (the author’s text in this case more than, say, the published text) but not towards intention. The framework of genetic editing supplies editors with a set of premises and methods in