In a 1946 essay, Irene Hendry identified four distinct epiphany techniques in Joyce’s work, noting their use in Ulysses, from the simplest device, such as the revelation of Gerty Macdowell’s limp, to the more complex, such as the bowl symbolism in “Telemachus”. Cited as an example of Joyce’s major epiphany technique—quidditas produced directly—is the revelation of Molly Bloom as “female essence”.
In his first book on Joyce, the American scholar William York Tindall wrote, “Since the naturalists tried to establish reality, they were descriptive. Before perfecting his art, Joyce tried this method. The Dublin of Dubliners and its people are described. But almost abandoning description in Ulysses Joyce evoked place and people. He established his characters by what they say; and his places, named but not described, live in the minds of his characters.
Yet no place is more solid than Joyce’s Dublin and no characters are more substantial. During his walk along the beach, Stephen exercises his descriptive powers on what he sees and hears. Gerty MacDowell’s scene, which concerns the eye, is suitably pictorial. The catalogue of externals in Mr. Bloom’s parlor is not naturalistic but a parody of naturalism and its reduction to absurdity. … Joyce did not approach things directly like a naturalist but indirectly, through correspondence or analogy, as a symbolist.”
In his second book on Joyce, Tindall wrote, “It is certain that, careful of external details, Joyce observed his city as a naturalist would. … Yet, in Ulysses, as in the earlier works, he used these particulars to suggest inner or general things—in the manner of Baudelaire and Flaubert. Such usage is symbolist; for a symbol is a common thing, closely observed, suggesting other things.
An observer of things, Joyce saw something else within them and beyond, something they embodied and showed forth. That much is plain, let critics quarrel as they will.
And it is plain that, however reliant upon details of Dublin, Joyce called again upon parallel and motif to enlarge his particulars and hold them together. … The riddling motifs of Ulysses are complicated in turn by allusion, quotation, and single images or charged words—like those in A Portrait or, better, since Ulysses is a kind of poem, like those in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.”
In his book-length study of Ulysses (1961), the Australian scholar S. L. Goldberg argued that interior monologue in Ulysses was rooted in Joyce’s epiphany technique. For Goldberg, the epiphany is “the real artistic (and dramatic) unit of Joyce’s ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing. What he renders dramatically are minds engaged in the apprehension of epiphanies—the elements of meaning apprehended in life.”
In a 1965 interview, novelist Vladimir Nabokov called Ulysses “a divine work of art [that] will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths.” He named it the greatest masterpiece of 20th-century prose. In a 1966 interview, he said, “it towers above the rest of Joyce’s writing” with “noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style”.
Psychology professor Charles Fernyhough called Ulysses “the archetypal stream of consciousness novel”.
Joyce uses “metaphors, symbols, ambiguities, and overtones which gradually link themselves together so as to form a network of connections binding the whole” work.
This system of connections gives the novel a wide, more universal significance, as “Leopold Bloom becomes a modern Ulysses, an Everyman in a Dublin which becomes a microcosm of the world.”
In 1998–99, Ulysses was ranked Number 1 in Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century.
Publication history
The publication history of Ulysses is complex. There have been at least 18 editions, and variations among different impressions of each edition.
According to Joyce scholar Jack Dalton, the first edition of Ulysses contained over 2,000 errors. As subsequent editions attempted to correct these mistakes, they would often add more, due in part to the difficulty of separating non-authorial errors from Joyce’s deliberate “errors” devised to challenge the reader.
Notable editions include:
Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922: The private, first edition published in Paris on 2 February 1922 (Joyce’s 40th birthday) by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Beach commissioned Darantiere in Dijon to print 1,000 numbered copies consisting of 100 signed copies on Dutch handmade paper (350 francs), 150 numbered copies on vergé d’Arches paper (250 francs), and 750 copies on handmade paper (150 francs), plus an extra 20 unnumbered copies on mixed paper for libraries and press.
London: Egoist Press, 1922: The first English edition published by Harriet Shaw Weaver’s Egoist Press in October 1922. For legal reasons the book was printed on behalf of Egoist Press by John Rodker using the same printer, Darantiere, and plates as the first edition.
This edition consisted of 2,000 numbered copies on handmade paper for sale plus 100 unnumbered copies for press, publicity and legal deposit libraries. A seven-page errata list compiled by Joyce, Weaver and Rodker was loosely inserted and contained 201 corrections. The U.S. Post Office reportedly burned up to 500 copies, as noted in later Shakespeare and Company editions.
New York: Two Worlds Publishing Company, 1929: The first U.S. edition of the novel was pirated by Samuel Roth without Joyce’s authorisation, and first published serially in Roth’s Two Worlds Monthly, then later in a single volume in 1929. It was designed to closely mimic the 1927 Shakespeare and Company 9th printing but many errors and corruptions occurred during reproduction.
Reportedly 2,000–3,000 copies were printed but the majority were seized and destroyed by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice after a raid on Roth’s offices on 4 October 1929
Hamburg: Odyssey Press, 1932: In two volumes. The title page of this edition states “The present edition may be regarded as the definitive standard edition, as it has been specially revised, at the author’s request, by Stuart Gilbert.” This edition still contained errors but by its fourth revised printing (April 1939) it was considered the most accurate offering of the text and subsequently used as the basis for many later editions of the novel.
New York: Random House, 1934: The first authorised U.S. edition, published after the decision in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses finding that the book was not obscene. Random House’s founder Bennett Cerf chose to base this edition on a copy of the pirated Samuel Roth edition of 1929, which led it to reproduce many of that edition’s errors.
London: Bodley Head, 1936: The first edition printed and published in England. Set from the second impression of Odyssey Press’s edition and purportedly proofed by Joyce.
Bodley Head, 1960: Newly reset corrected edition based on the 1958 impression of the earlier Bodley Head edition. The source for many later editions by other publishers.
Random House, 1961: Reset from the 1960 Bodley Head edition.
Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Garland, 1984: Edited by Hans Walter Gabler.
Ulysses: A Reader’s Edition. Lilliput Press, 1997: Edited by Danis Rose.
“Joyce Wars”
Hans Walter Gabler’s 1984 edition was the most sustained attempt to produce a corrected text, but it has received much criticism, most notably from John Kidd. Kidd’s main theoretical criticism is of Gabler’s choice of a patchwork of manuscripts as his copy-text (the base edition with which the editor compares each variant), but this fault stems from an assumption of the Anglo-American tradition of scholarly editing rather than the blend of French and German editorial theories that actually lay behind Gabler’s reasoning. The choice of a composite copy-text is seen to be problematic in the eyes of some American editors, who generally favour the first edition of any particular work as copy-text.
Less subject to differing national editorial theories, however, is the claim that for hundreds of pages—about half the episodes of Ulysses—the extant manuscript is purported to be a “fair copy” that Joyce made for sale to a potential patron. (As it turned out, John Quinn, the Irish-American lawyer and collector, purchased the manuscript.) Diluting this charge somewhat is the fact that the theory of (now lost) final working drafts is Gabler’s own. For the suspect episodes, the existing typescript is the last witness.
Gabler attempted to reconstruct what he called “the continuous manuscript text”, which had never physically existed, by adding together all of Joyce’s accretions from the various sources. This allowed Gabler to produce a “synoptic text” indicating the stage at which each addition was inserted. Kidd and even some of Gabler’s own advisers believe this method meant losing Joyce’s final changes in about two thousand places.
Far from being “continuous”, the manuscripts seem to be opposite. Jerome McGann describes in detail the editorial principles of Gabler in his article for the journal Criticism, issue 27, 1985. In the wake of the controversy, still other commentators charged that Gabler’s changes were motivated by a desire to secure a fresh copyright and another seventy-five years of royalties beyond a looming expiration date.
In June 1988 John Kidd published “The Scandal of Ulysses” in The New York Review of Books, charging that not only did Gabler’s changes overturn Joyce’s last revisions, but in another four hundred places Gabler failed to follow any manuscript whatever, making nonsense of his own premises.
Kidd accused Gabler of unnecessarily changing Joyce’s spelling, punctuation, use of accents, and all the small details he claimed to have been restoring. Instead, Gabler was
