Ulysses - Gabler Edition [343]
A passage from the ‘Lestrygonians’ episode (8:654-67; pp. 138-39 in this printing) provides a good, and much-discussed, example of how the continuous manuscript text was assembled (the synoptic text is in volume 1, p. 356, ll. 10-24 of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition).
The final working draft for ‘Lestrygonians’ is lost, so the earliest extant document is the fair copy on the Rosenbach Manuscript. The original text of this passage reads there, ‘Squatted on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more bread no charge, swilling, chewing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A man with a napkin tucked round him spooned gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: gristle: no teeth to chew it. Chump chop he has. Sad booser’s eyes.’ Subsequent revisions and additions changed and augmented the text, with letters B, C, and D indicating, respectively, Joyce’s revisions to the lost final working draft as indicated by the typed text on the extant typescript, the first round of revisions to the typescript, and the second round of typescript revisions. (Letters in parentheses indicate reconstructed text on documents that have not survived.) The numbers indicate the revisions on each subsequent setting in proof. Full brackets show Joyce’s deletions or changes, as in the revision of the manuscript’s ‘spooned’ to ‘shovelled’ in the second round of typescript revisions (l.15). Carets indicate additions within a single stage, such as Joyce’s addition of ‘infant’s’ between ‘a’ and ‘napkin’ on the manuscript (ll. 14-15) or of ‘Something galoptious.’ as an addition-to-an-addition on the first set of proofs (l.23). When combined with angle brackets, carets show a revision, as when Joyce revised ‘chewing’ to ‘wolfing’ on the manuscript itself (ll. 11-12). The synoptic presentation of the continuous manuscript text is thus an assemblage of inclusion: Joyce’s deleted and superseded readings, as well as those that remain in Ulysses, are all part of it.
The superscript circles in the synopsis point to the footnotes (not reproduced here), where the editor has recorded his editorial emendations to the continuous manuscript text. For example, at l. 14, he emended the manuscript’s ‘a’ to ‘an’ preceding ‘infant’s napkin’ on the basis of his conjecture of Joyce’s activity on the lost final working draft, the text on the surviving typescript providing the evidence. The edited text differs from all earlier editions of Ulysses in one place: the word ‘gums,’ with the subsequent colon (l. 17 of the synopsis and l. 660 of the reading text), is restored to the text for the first time here.
The presence or absence of ‘gums’ might seem like a minor matter, but it is indicative of all the decisions involved in editing Ulysses. The editor admitted the word into the continuous manuscript text, and it became part of the edited text, on the basis of its appearance in the serialized version of ‘Lestrygonians’ in the Little Review; he argues that its appearance there is evidence that Joyce added the word onto a lost typescript page. The word’s appearance here is consistent with Gabler’s procedures. In a review of the edition, Jerome J. McGann made the important observation that