Don't worry about this. Every book has mistakes in it.
- James Joyce to Sylvia Beach, about his volume Pomes Penyeach, June, 1927
THE situation regarding the text of Ulysses is catastrophic. It has now become a serious obstacle to reading the book at all. There is a bitter irony in the fact that one of the master works of Modernism, a monumental text supposedly under complete authorial control, more permanent than bronze, should now lie dispersed, in fragments, outside anyone's control. What is the point of being told, as we once used to lie, that every word in the book has its special place and its particular function if we cannot be sure what those words are?
Rather than engaging in lamentations or indulging in pointless anger, it is probably more profitable to examine how things came to this parlous pass and to see if there are any ways out of it.
The problem with the text of Ulysses came to widespread attention only around the late 1970s, when the publicity drum for the Gabler "Corrected Text" began to be beaten loudly in advance of its appearance. But in fact the relative lack of awareness of this issue in, say, the 1960s, was a state of false, if now intensely desirable, innocence.
The first edition of Ulysses in 1922 contained the following bleak notice: "The publisher asks the reader's indulgence for typographical errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances." The circumstances were indeed exceptional (though the errors were not merely typographical): Sylvia Beach had never published a book before; it was printed by a, very professional firm but of course in a language with which the printers were not familiar; and the text itself was of an unparalleled complexity, with extensive additions and alterations being made up to the very last minute.
Joyce was aware of the deficiencies of the first edition but unfortunately his attempts to correct them were haphazard and incomplete; such as they were, they never resulted in a later edition that could in any sense be called authoritative. On the contrary, each succeeding edition, while making some corrections to preceding ones, added a quota of errors of its own.
When Hans Walter Gabler set to work to produce the first scholarly edition of Ulysses, he decided, in view of the state of all the editions previously published, to go back to the manuscripts and type scripts and start afresh, rather than attempt the possibly easier task of emending a preexisting edition. This root and branch approach may well have seemed eminently sensible, but it was here, alas, that the real misfortune lay. For Joyce's manuscripts and typescripts are in a very complex state, with many key documents missing and considerable uncertainty over the chronological position and apparently self contradictory nature of several others. Gabler was thus forced to extrapolate (not invent) what he called a "continuous manuscript text" which then served as the "copy text" for his "corrected text".
It should be stressed that Gabler's edition is in no sense a disaster: it is in most respects a careful, conscientious attempt to produce some certainty out of fairly intractable material. (The fact that one or two egregious errors were spotted by the edition's principal opponent, John Kidd, did not mean that the text was necessarily teeming with other, less obvious errors: it was not.) "What fatally undermined it were the extravagant claims made on its behalf by the publishing industry and, even more, culpably, by several academics and writers who knew little about the matter but were quite prepared to make public pronouncements on it.
(The media, needless to say, reflected and magnified these "voices of authority".) Given this situation, the edition's claim to be the solution to the Ulysses problem could not stand.
The question of authority here is crucial. There is little doubt that the past twenty five years, say, have been marked by a crisis of literary faith that is comparable to the crisis of religious faith of the Victorian era. Of this crises, the Ulysses controversy is an epiphenomenon, and the crisis itself may well be an epiphenomenon of a larger crisis of faith in authority in general. We have had to abandon the belief that literature makes us better persons, or that it necessarily produces an ideal community of readers and interpreters. We have had to abandon the belief in literary texts as a source of fixed and timeless meaning. We have had to abandon belief in the author as the controller and determiner of all the implications of his or her writings.
It may be that now we shall have to abandon the belief that there is just one Ulysses and accept the idea that there may be a plurality of texts bearing that name, each with some validity. Danis Rose's new edition seems to be predicated on that position. In such a situation, personal preference is all there is to go on. My own (pending the proper evaluation of the new Rose edition), is for the Gabler version. But it can only be a personal preference.
Joyce's comment to Sylvia Beach, the epigraph to this article, should not be taken as his final view of the matter. He was frying to reassure a publisher who had just brought out a book for him and he was far from indifferent to the fate of his texts. But it contains an element of balance and of dispassionate observation that has been missing from this entire debate. It may also be taken as a hint, which I would endorse, that it is now time for the scholars to get off Joyce's back, or at least his coattails. They have done their best, or their worst, and left us in the situation we are in. Another piece of Joycean wisdom might form a fitting epitaph to the Ulysses controversy: "and, sure, we ought really to rest thankful that at this deleteful hour of dungflies dawning we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves, fare it or leaf it".