Ulysses - Gabler Edition [339]
Trieste-Zurich-Paris
1914-1921
AFTERWORD
Praised as an epochal scholarly event and denounced as a scandal, the critical and synoptic edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses first published in 1984, together with the corrected text that was published separately in 1986, has received extraordinary publicity for a work of its kind.1 Its editing procedures have lifted the general public, students, literary critics, and scholars—the vast majority of whom are not themselves editors—to a heightened awareness of textual editing. With readers now beginning to realize that editions should be scrutinized and assessed as carefully as interpretations have always been, users of the 1986 reading text—which in this new printing remains available worldwide—need to be aware of how Hans Walter Gabler, supported by an international team of collaborators and advisors, arrived at its text and of how this edition resembles and also differs from others that might be produced. This is crucial now that the copyright protection for the first-edition text of Ulysses has expired in most of the world and will end soon in the United States, with the result that many editions are becoming available.
When dealing with a scholarly edition, readers should know something about the theoretical assumptions behind it and about the procedures that were adopted to produce it. On the face of it, accomplishing the goal of offering a text of a work that is more accurate than any that have appeared before might seem fairly simple: find out what the author wanted, clear away the errors, and you have it. But authors are rarely so cooperatively tidy: they change their minds; they destroy or discard documents once they have moved beyond them; they make changes in person, by phone, or via e-mail. Then other people get involved: a typist types, or a printer sets, something different from what the author wrote; a publisher’s editor changes the text, with or without the author’s consent or sometimes with the author’s active encouragement. Moreover, determining the order and relative importance of the surviving documents can be complicated. Is one edition earlier or later than another? Was the author involved at all in a particular edition’s production? Because of gaps in the available evidence and of inconsistencies or other complications in the surviving evidence, an editor needs a theoretical approach to the task and a set of procedures that follow from the assumptions.
The critical and synoptic edition of Ulysses needs to be understood in terms of the assumptions and methods of most Anglo-American editing today, because it both follows them and departs from, even challenges, them in important ways. In the method that has come to dominate Anglo-American editing, an editor studies all the relevant surviving documents for the work in question and selects one version as the copytext. The documents include any notes, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs that are extant, plus printed versions in which the author was involved. The copytext, usually the first edition or, if available, the author’s manuscript, is the basic text that the editor will follow for such matters as spelling, punctuation, etc., in places where the evidence is inconclusive, and for all the words except when differences between documents indicate author’s revisions and so call for the editor to alter the copytext’s words on the basis of one of the other documents. In the terminology of editing and textual criticism, the words are called ‘substantives,’ spelling and punctuation are matters of ‘accidentals,’ inconclusive readings are ‘indifferent’ ones, and the editor’s alterations of the copytext are called ‘emendations.’
The resulting text, eclectically blending authorial corrections and revisions with the system of accidentals from the copytext, was eventually epitomized as fulfilling the author’s final intentions. This method of copytext editing producing an eclectic text offers the editor a way of dealing with gaps in the historical record and with seemingly equal choices among variant readings (when in doubt, follow the copytext). It strives as well to rescue the author