Ulysses - Gabler Edition [341]
In assembling the continuous manuscript the editor makes an important distinction between a ‘document’ and a ‘text’. If an author writes out a story and then returns to its pages twice to revise it, there is only one document but three distinguishable texts (the original story, the original with one set of revisions, the original with both sets). Most of the extant documents for Ulysses contain more than one text. Typical cases are manuscripts with Joyce’s handwritten text plus his subsequent revisions, typescripts with the typed version plus one or two rounds of correction and revision in Joyce’s hand, and proofs which contain the printed version plus Joyce’s corrections and revisions. When documents are missing—as is the final working draft where it served as copy for the typist; three chapters in typescript where the extant fair copy served as copy; and small sections of the proofs—the surviving documents can serve as evidence for the text contained on the missing ones that immediately preceded them. For example, the first set of proofs will show as printed text the material that Joyce presumably entered in his handwritten additions on a lost typescript page. Thus, an editor can reason that while the documents may not all survive, all the text is recoverable either through direct evidence or through recreation by extrapolation from the extant documents. The ‘continuous manuscript’ (the conflation of all Joyce’s handwriting on the manuscript and in the corrections and revisions on the typescripts and proofs) remains a virtual document, but the continuous manuscript text can thus be created as something now real. This is what Gabler has done. What he calls the ‘synoptic text’ presents, on the left-hand pages of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, the construction of the continuous manuscript text. The synopsis is accomplished through an elaborately coded system that indicates all Joyce’s revisions, additions, and deletions, including the stage at which each change occurred. Also, the editor’s decisions, including his transcriptions of the manuscript and his choices as to which of Joyce’ variant words (when there is more than one possibility at a particular place) are retained in the continuous manuscript text, are on display for all readers to observe and to assess.
It is accurate to say that the continuous manuscript text was assembled or created or recreated or constructed, but it was not created by copytext editing. Once it was assembled, the continuous manuscript text became the copytext for Gabler's edition, but until it came into existence there was no copytext at all. (Much of the discussion of the edition has been confused on this matter, assuming incorrectly that the Rosenbach Manuscript or the typescript is the copytext for the continuous manuscript text.) Gabler constructed the continuous manuscript text, in his words, ‘as Joyce wrote’ Ulysses. This means building the text up, stage by stage, from the working draft towards the goal of the first edition text as it would have appeared had no mistakes been made. The straightforward reconstruction becomes complicated when documents are missing or when something Joyce wrote on one document was not typed or printed and so not transmitted through the production process.
Like almost all editors, Gabler dismissed as a working principle the concept of ‘passive authorization,’ the idea that because Joyce left an error standing or did not restore a reading as he read proof he must have wanted the resulting reading in the book. But to accompany such a rejection an editor needs procedures to help determine when to accept a reading that the author did not restore and when not. Two procedures are especially important. First, any text handwritten by Joyce was presumed to be authoritative and hence admissible into the text unless it could be proved to be faulty. Conversely, any transmitted (typed or printed) text was considered to be potentially faulty unless it proved to possess authority. Second is Gabler