Ulysses - Gabler Edition [340]
It is easy to disappear behind the towering figure of James Joyce but difficult to adopt a more visible editorial stance that reveals the editor, as well as Joyce, at work. Yet for Hans Walter Gabler as an editor, Joyce’s methods of writing Ulysses and the surviving evidence regarding that work called for a visible stance. An astonishing array of materials—especially prepublication documents—has survived; they open up the whole process of Joyce’s composition of the work for the purposes of editing, but at the same time they leave tantalizing and important gaps. Joyce wrote Ulysses episode by episode, and the process is almost entirely one of growth and expansion. After compiling notes and rough drafts, Joyce brought each of the eighteen episodes to a temporary finish in a final working draft that he gave to a typist. For eight full episodes and part of a ninth, Joyce apparently made a fair copy of this draft, making some changes as he went along; for these pages the working draft has not survived. (The surviving manuscript, partly the final working draft and partly Joyce’s fair copy, is called the Rosenbach Manuscript after the museum that owns it.) Each episode was transcribed by a series of typists and printers, and some sections were set in proof as many as eight or nine times. Joyce often added to the text as he read and corrected the latest transcription, but as he corrected each transcription he seems not to have looked back to the original manuscript. In addition, as he revised and corrected the proofs in 1921 for the book publication, he was often working on two or three episodes at the same time, reading proofs for early episodes, for example, at the same time as he was drafting the later episodes of ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’. The printers had to reset much type again and again because of the huge number of Joyce’s corrections, revisions, and additions, and they worked under very short deadlines as they approached the publication date that Joyce wanted—February 2, 1922, his fortieth birthday.
Gabler decided at the beginning of his work that traditional copytext methods would not work well for the textual situation that Ulysses presents. At least three factors led to this decision: the manuscript, which does provide a beginning-to-end version in Joyce’s hand, is too far removed from the extensively augmented text that Ulysses eventually became; the typescripts and proofs are steps along the way in the process of expansion; and the first edition is too filled with errors.2 Gabler looked to German genetic editing, which is oriented more towards authorial revision than towards transmissional corruption, and also to Fredson Bowers’s work within the copytext-editing tradition on constructed, or what Gabler calls ‘virtual’, documents as copytext. Bowers demonstrated that a copytext can be a lost or virtual document when he edited Stephen Crane’s stories and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. In the case of Crane two surviving versions of a story that each descend directly from a lost original were used to recreate the lost original document, and the recreated document served as copytext. For Fielding the accidentals of one document (the first edition of Tom Jones) were merged with the substantives of another (the fourth edition), and this constructed hypothetical document became the copytext. In the implications of these examples Gabler saw a way of meeting the challenge of the complex textual situation presented by Ulysses. He reasoned that Joyce