To the Editors:
In The New York Review of Books dated June 30, 1988, though available on London book-stalls around June 10th and distributed free of charge in the cloisters of san Giorgio during the week of the 11th International James Joyce symposium from 12 to 18 June in Venice, you publish an essay entitled “The scandal of Ulysses” by Dr. John Kidd. The article is couched in the allegation, continuously reemphasized, that the editors did not compare all their work against the original documents. This is not true. They did. Dr. Kidd knows and has known this since the early 1980s when we first met. For him to assert otherwise scandalously rebounds upon himself.
The condemnation of the critical and synoptic edition of Ulysses (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1984), as well as of the current trade editions in England and the Us (Bodley Head and Penguin in England, Random House in the Us; all 1986) which print the reading text from the critical edition, spreads over some 18 columns of newsprint. Yet it rests on a mere 15 examples of readings cited in evidence. Neither individually nor together do they attain the degree of significance capable of sustaining a critique, let alone of carrying the weight of Dr. Kidd’s wholesale indictment of the method, scholarship and theory of the editions.
Three of the readings cited are name forms. One of them catches the edition misreading the hand of Frank Budgen, the friend to whom Joyce dictated part of the novel’s 10th episode. The second, if Dr. Kidd is right, may be an editorial failure to pick up a peculiarity in the original proofsheet. The third is a form that happens to differ from that of the name of the director of the Richmond District Lunatic Asylum in Thom’s Directory of Dublin. Yet it is the form Joyce unambiguously wrote in the fair copy from which the first chapter directly descends. By a representational standard which Dr. Kidd otherwise fervently endorses whenever he believes that the edition does not meet it, it should therefore have found his praise.
This leaves us with twelve examples. For ten of these, the complaint goes against two commas, two colons, one capital letter, one case of the author’s underlining in one manuscript against his not underlining (for italics) in another, one instance of a row of dots for an ellipsis, and three recording problems that affect not the text, but the apparatus in the critical and synoptic edition only.
We are then left with two examples: a spelling (“tway” as against “twey”) and a complex substantive reading—the only example, except for two of the name forms, to touch at all upon the words of Ulysses. First, the spelling variant: “tway,” whether we like it or not, is a spelling introduced in the first English trade edition of 1937, the only edition in Joyce’s lifetime which, as bibliographic scrutiny has ascertained (though Dr. Kidd would insinuate that such work to support the editing was not undertaken) incorporates authorial corrections. Clamouring for bibliographic analysis, Dr. Kidd yet wilfully closes his eyes to the editorial consequences of its results. What hypothetical “someone attempting to correct the text” in London in 1936/37 should have had a reason sufficiently to doubt the quaint archaism of “Watchers they there walk” (the reading of 1936) so as to locate the authentic replacement for “they” as “tway/twey” in a dictionary? No, the “tway” correction, together with other significant changes, helps to substantiate the interpretation of the bibliographic evidence. Joyce himself corrected the text. since he did so, the edited text incorporates the forms he employed in 1937 as his latest choices—even though for the first and only time he spelled “tway,” not “twey.”
The only example touching the word forms among the 15 given by Dr. Kidd receives an extra illustration in the article. This is a complex case that requires extended arguing according to the several options that the editorial hypothesis (i.e., the outline of the document relationships and of the edition’s principles and rules of procedure) holds in store. Tractable as it may be according to more than one of these options, it is a particularly bad example on which to indict the edition’s theoretical foundations. On the contrary, a perceptive discussion of the editorial potential inherent in variously handling it would help to set into proper relief the edition’s system of principles. How casuistically Dr. Kidd dismisses or accepts what little he allows himself to understand of them is neatly proven when, within a few paragraphs, he turns round implicitly to advocate constituting the text according to the very editorial rules he rejected for his one substantive example, or for printing the name of Johannes Jeep in roman. I would love to emend the title of Jeep’s song to “Youth here has an end” on the strength of a fragmentary draft manuscript—and I thank Dr. Kidd for pointing out the missed opportunity.
The scanty array of examples provides not even the flimsiest of foundations for a critique, let alone a condemnation, of the critical and synoptic edition, or, particularly, the current trade editions—not to speak of the slurs on the competence and scholarly integrity of the editor and editorial team—such as they are flourished in Dr. Kidd’s rhetoric of allegations, insinuations and sweepingly generalising assertions. Within the evidence adduced, close observance of details may optimize the edition in five or six cases. Three of these concern the apparatus (and thus the critical edition) only. For the reading text (and thus the trade editions), the article may have helped to change for the better one or two name forms, and one comma (with “Youth here has an end” thrown in as an extra).
Two basic misconceptions in Dr. Kidd’s assumptions about the editions of Ulysses, finally, need to be pointed out First, “The Corrected Text” is not the editors’ name for the edition. It is a phrase coined for the trade publication of the critical edition’s reading text by agreement between the James Joyce Estate and the publishers. second, the critical edition is a text edition, not a manuscript edition. It nowhere seeks or claims the diplomatic or topographic fidelity of a manuscript edition: i.e., it does not presume to render Ulysses “as Joyce wrote it” in the sense of recreating the writing and layout of manuscripts. As a text edition, rather, it telescopes textual developments into a synopsis, using diacritics and symbols to refer its textual and editorial results to the manuscripts and other documents where the writing acts implicitly or explicitly took place. The majority of textual documents for Ulysses are fortunately extant, though some are inevitably lost, as would be the case in any conceivable textual situation. It is a state of affairs that skilled editorial professionalism is specifically designed to meet. On top of its analytical display of textual developments which the edition most owes to common principles and practice according to a German school of editing, it follows received Anglo-American traditions of critically eclectic editing in establishing a reading text as an ideal text, i.e., as the sum of the acts of writing that shaped Ulysses. This reading text is the editorial suggestion—as any and every edited text is an editorial suggestion—of a valid text for Ulysses.
Dr. Kidd’s argument against the edition of Ulysses, then, is seriously flawed by an elementary failure to distinguish its critically editorial functions before a background of documentary referentiality which he tends to mistake for its representational aim. Of course he is right in implying that other editions of Ulysses than that of 1984/86 are conceivable. If one considers the example of shakespeare’s plays, there is no telling how many scholarly editions of Ulysses the future will see. But that precisely is the way: to realise, one day, an edition that can hold its own beside the first. To profess, in the end, to be unable to deal with the critical scholarship internationally invested in the editing of James Joyce’s novel of the century in any other way than by scrapping its evidence and returning to the highly inauthentic printing of 1961 is to admit utter helplessness before the challenge of Ulysses.
Hans Walter gabler
University of Munich
Munich, West Germany
To the Editors:
John Kidd’s “The scandal of ‘Ulysses’ ” does not mention the most scandalous “improvement” in the revised text of 1986: the setting of all dialogue, prefaced with a dash in the French manner, flush left. This typographical eccentricity is so unusual as to be disfiguring, and it does not appear in the text of which Joyce repeatedly read proofs, which is conventionally indented. His manuscripts do show the dash without indentation, but what we have here, as in the almost unreadable Thomas H. Johnson transcriptions of Emily Dickinson’s manuscript poems, is a mistaken scholarly fidelity to holograph mannerisms that were never meant by the author to be translated into type.
John Updike
Beverly Farms, Massachusetts
To the Editors:
Though it’s some years since I worked closely with the text of Ulysses, and only one major interpretive issue is involved (the “word known to all men,” which seems relatively easy to resolve), I am persuaded by Mr. John Kidd’s evidence that the Gabler edition is fatally flawed. It’s bad enough to find changes inflicted on the names of real people—like H. Thrift, Captain Buller, and Conolly Norman—all correctly spelled in previous editions. It’s worse to be unable to find, in the thicket of variants recorded by Gabler’s expensive Garland edition, authority for only one of these changes, and that based on a misreading of a facsimile. If this sort of error lies on the surface, what will be the total count when the edition is thoroughly worked over?
So it seems to be back to square one. The job of a proper—so called “definitive”—edition will be enormous. In many instances the better reading of the text will almost certainly be a judgment call, involving neither right nor wrong, but an estimate of balanced probabilities. That cannot be properly represented by accumulating variants at the foot of the page under peremptory sigla. A proper edition of the book will be cumbersome, pedantic, and encyclopedic—beyond the powers of any but a team of trained and disciplined researchers. It will take a long time, and by itself it may not be worth the effort; but it will provide an indispensable basis for a reading edition of the book in which the common reader can feel at least minimal confidence.
Robert M. Adams
Santa Fe, New Mexico
To the Editors:
May I add a note to John Kidd’s “The scandal of Ulysses” on the related ruckus over textual corruptions in the Gilbert and Ellmann edition of Joyce’s letters, though of course the publishing histories are not parallel and the corruptions not similar in kind—in the novel the disappearance of an aposiopesis and a dieresis, dittography replacing what had been mistaken as haplography, etc., in the letters misreadings of words, but sufficiently numerous and bizarre to mandate rescension of the entire Joyce correspondence.
