• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 16215 0

of the names ‘Buller’ at 5.560 and ‘Thrift’ at 10.1259—and to point to one reading that resulted from the editor’s inconsistency in following his edition’s own stated rules of procedure. The passage in question—discussed in Gabler’s ‘Note on the Text’—is at 16.1804-5: ‘was not quite the same as the usual handsome blackguard type they unquestionably had an insatiable hankering after’ should be ‘was not quite the same as the usual blackguard type they unquestionably had an indubitable hankering after.’ In this instance, the editor’s diminished attention to the rule of the invariant context and his mistaking of an authorial revision based on a transmission error for a mere correction led him astray. The items on Kidd’s long lists can be checked individually and will possibly lead to exposure of other errors or debatable readings or decisions, but the tables are constructed so capriciously and idiosyncratically, with so little demonstrated understanding of Gabler’s theoretical assumptions and procedures, and with no coherent or consistent indication of Kidd’s own working assumptions that they can point to errors or misjudgments only by accident. Kidd’s campaign forced a great deal of negative attention on this edition but has ultimately revealed very little at all about it. It is to be hoped that the kind of inquiry that McGann and other critics have called for can now come to the forefront.4

Such an inquiry is possible because, like any responsible editor, Gabler discussed his editorial procedures and laid out his decisions fully in Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. He defines a ‘critical edition’ by ‘the complex interdependence of a text established from the ground up’ as opposed to marking up and correcting an existing text ‘and its interfacing apparatus.’ Many different kinds of critical editions are possible, including a copytext edition or a different kind of nontraditional edition, but for all of them the text itself constitutes only one part. Equally essential is the apparatus, which acknowledges the hand of the editor. Readers should be extremely suspicious of any edition that presents itself as a reading text without an apparatus spelling out all its editor’s assumptions and decisions.

Anyone wishing to follow the logic and procedures that produced the readings in this edition, in other words to listen to the editor speaking as editor, is strongly urged to use the line numbers here to find the corresponding passage in Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, with its synoptic text on the facing left-hand page. Likewise, more detailed explanations of Gabler’s assumptions and procedures are available in his Afterword to the three-volume edition and in his articles ‘On Textual Criticism and Editing: The Case of Joyce’s Ulysses’ and the more extended ‘What Ulysses Requires.’

Michael Groden

August 1993

NOTES

1 The list of References following this Afterword contains bibliographic details about all works mentioned in the text and about some other valuable studies of the edition.

2 Some critics have argued that the first edition can and should serve as the basis for an orthodox copytext edition of Ulysses. The claim can be assessed only when an edition of this kind is actually produced.

3 Gabler has gone on to produce Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in more traditional copytext editions, but even there, as he explains in the Introduction to Portrait, he has resisted emending the copytext solely to fulfil final authorial intention.

4 The above assessments of Kidd’s attacks are elaborated in my ‘Response’ to Kidd’s ‘Inquiry’ and in Gabler’s ‘What Ulysses Requires.’

REFERENCES

Gabler, Hans Walter. ‘Afterword’ to James Joyce. Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Ed. Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984. 3:1859-1907.

————. ‘Introduction’ to James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Gabler with Walter Hettche. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1933, pp. 1-18. Edited