Ulysses - Gabler Edition [345]
many of the most widely publicized attacks are based on premises about textual editing that the general reading public takes for granted, so that when a critic proves that Gabler has violated these guidelines, his editorial competence is implicitly or explicitly called into question. It takes a reasonably specialized reader to realize that the weakness of such arguments, which seem logically convincing on their own terms, is at the level of the premise, since Gabler does not share many of the premises on which the critique is based.
Gabler’s loudest and most persistent critic, John Kidd, has since 1988 steadily and relentlessly attacked the edition. With a great deal of rhetorical flurry and a few oft-repeated examples, Kidd captured a great deal of attention. But all his pages of supposed analysis, and the sixty pages of tables and charts of Gabler’s alleged errors and inconsistencies in his ‘Inquiry’ into the edition, managed finally to demonstrate only two errors—mistranscriptions of the names ‘Buller’ at 5.560 and ‘Thrift’ at 10.1259—and to point to one reading that resulted from the editor’s inconsistency in following his edition’s own stated rules of procedure. The passage in question—discussed in Gabler’s ‘Note on the Text’—is at 16.1804-5: ‘was not quite the same as the usual handsome blackguard type they unquestionably had an insatiable hankering after’ should be ‘was not quite the same as the usual blackguard type they unquestionably had an indubitable hankering after.’ In this instance, the editor’s diminished attention to the rule of the invariant context and his mistaking of an authorial revision based on a transmission error for a mere correction led him astray. The items on Kidd’s long lists can be checked individually and will possibly lead to exposure of other errors or debatable readings or decisions, but the tables are constructed so capriciously and idiosyncratically, with so little demonstrated understanding of Gabler’s theoretical assumptions and procedures, and with no coherent or consistent indication of Kidd’s own working assumptions that they can point to errors or misjudgments only by accident. Kidd’s campaign forced a great deal of negative attention on this edition but has ultimately revealed very little at all about it. It is to be hoped that the kind of inquiry that McGann and other critics have called for can now come to the forefront.4
Such an inquiry is possible because, like any responsible editor, Gabler discussed his editorial procedures and laid out his decisions fully in Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. He defines a ‘critical edition’ by ‘the complex interdependence of a text established from the ground up’ as opposed to marking up and correcting an existing text ‘and its interfacing apparatus.’ Many different kinds of critical editions are possible, including a copytext edition or a different kind of nontraditional edition, but for all of them the text itself constitutes only one part. Equally essential is the apparatus, which acknowledges the hand of the editor. Readers should be extremely suspicious of any edition that presents itself as a reading text without an apparatus spelling out all its editor’s assumptions and decisions.
Anyone wishing to follow the logic and procedures that produced the readings in this edition, in other words to listen to the editor speaking as editor, is strongly urged to use the line numbers here to find the corresponding passage in Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, with its synoptic text on the facing left-hand page. Likewise, more detailed explanations of Gabler