Ulysses - Gabler Edition [342]
One further note about the continuous manuscript text: it was not constructed in order to fulfill what is known as ‘authorial intention.’ Gabler's phrase, ‘Ulysses as Joyce wrote it,’ refers to Joyce’s activity as he created Ulysses both in the extant documents and by inference from those documents to the lost ones. The editor studied what Joyce did, not what the editor thought Joyce meant or intended. This makes his edition one oriented towards the text (the author’s text in this case more than, say, the published text) but not towards intention. The framework of genetic editing supplies editors with a set of premises and methods in which an edited text is built from the ground up with each stage considered as a version, a distinguishable self-contained text that does not need to be justified in terms of the author and the author’s intentions. The variants between one version and the next are seen not as errors to be corrected but as revisions in a changing text. On the whole, the variants in a many-layered manuscript—such as the extreme example of the continuous manuscript of Ulysses—that will go together to form each identifiable version will be self-evident from the process of the writing’s development. But enough instances of alternatives usually remain where the editor must exercise critical judgment. The grounds for this judgment can be procedural ones, such as the priority given to Joyce’s own inscription or the rule of the invariant context that determined whether a reading was marked as valid or deleted in the continuous manuscript text, or they can be decisions that the editor had to make on the basis of his understanding of the kinds of revision Joyce was likely to make at the pertinent stage of his work on Ulysses.
Only after the continuous manuscript text was assembled did copytext editing come into play, as the continuous manuscript text was then emended, like any other copytext, as a result of the editor’s comparison of it to the other prepublication documents and to the few postpublication documents in which Joyce was involved (primarily errata lists that he helped to prepare and corrections for the 1937 reprint of the 1936 Bodley Head edition). Since most of the collation was done to construct the patterns of writing and revision in the continuous manuscript text in the first place, the copytext editing was largely confined to eliminating errors of transmission and to emending accidentals. Again, it was not done primarily to fulfill final authorial intentions.3 The copytext editing of the continuous manuscript text is indicated in the footnotes to the synoptic text—the presentation of the editor’s assembly of the continuous manuscript text—in Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition.
The critical edition of Ulysses set as its arbitrary goal the creation of a parallel text to the historical first edition, one that ideally represents the first edition without errors. (Of course, nothing is ideal, and the 1984 edition inadvertently introduced a few errors of its own.) Such a goal was a pragmatic, and not a logically necessary, one; the assembled continuous manuscript text could have stood as the edition’s text. As it is, Gabler