Sir, - Stephen James Joyce (June 28th) seeks to restrict the general public to what he and a coterie of academics understand Joyce's Ulysses to be, and to impose upon others their notion of the "respect" due to the text. But, as I argue in the Introduction to (my edition, there can be no definitive edition of Ulysses: no ideal version exists. There is no single, perfect, legible manuscript and set of instructions to typesetters on how to present that perfect text in book form. There can only be alternative editions in which different ends are realised, either well or badly.
The "Reader's Edition" was prepared in order to re-establish Ulysses as a novel to be read, rather than a text to be studied annotated. To achieve this end, I first prepared an author-centred manuscript-attested "critical edition", in the process establishing for the first time the actual development of the text from its beginnings (notebooks) to its end (page proofs), following it as Joyce, sometimes imperfectly, processed" it from draft to draft. To convert this into a reader's edition - which by definition does not contain a critical apparatus or list of variants - required making editorial decisions at every point of contention. Most importantly, hundreds of manifest errors in the syntactical structure have been corrected. These interventions in the raw text were based on Joyce's working methods and on common sense. In these endeavours I have undoubtedly made some local mistakes, but, I trust, not very many in comparison with the global improvements effected. In addition, the entire book was redesigned for a modern audience. The new design is most visible in the "Circe" episode, where Wilf Dickie of Picador and I completed the task begun by John Ryder in the 1960 Bodley Head edition.
Some minor typographical features have been altered for ease of reading. I reduced somewhat the overabundance of compound nouns and adjectives ("lookingglass", "wellknown" "illusing", "bullockbefriending") by inserting hyphens where required or converting to two-word forms. In one of the two versions given of "Penelope" J restored the apostrophes present in the manuscript (as recommended by Vladimir Nabokov). I eliminated as far as possible Joyce's (generally trivial) misspellings or irregular spellings And finally, as modern readers are unlikely unaided to recognise allusions to the popular culture of the turn of the century, to orient readers I occasionally italicised titles and lines of songs as, for example, sung or hummed by Molly Bloom.
These, then, are my sins" that have occasioned the most intemperate, personally offensive and disproportionately vituperative reactions that have been heard in literary circles for a decade.
To conclude, as Stephen James Joyce does, that I have "raped"
Ulysses, is to admit to a profound incomprehension of the innate instability of Joyce's text and of the rationale behind the present edition. It also betrays a disregard of the history of Ulysses: the apostrophes and accents, for example, appeared in Molly's monologue in the French translation, first published in 1929. Was that "rape"?
If anyone wishes to read a version of Ulysses that retains the errors and incoherencies and the typographical peculiarities of its former manifestations, which some credulously interpret as being the essence of Joyce's creativity, there are three alternative distinct editions readily available. For those whose lives are shorter and want simply to enjoy Ulysses, to read the novel as Joyce meant it to be read, as a single coherent whole, there is the Reader's Edition. It is Stephen Joyce and his allies frozen in academia, not I, who are seeking domination over the text. His disclaimer aside, Mr Joyce is seeking here, as often before, to suppress scholarship. - Yours, etc.,
Strawberry Beds,
Dublin 20.