When dealing with a scholarly edition, readers should know something about the theoretical assumptions behind it and about the procedures that were adopted to produce it. On the face of it, accomplishing the goal of offering a text of a work that is more accurate than any that have appeared before might seem fairly simple: find out what the author wanted, clear away the errors, and you have it. But authors are rarely so cooperatively tidy: they change their minds; they destroy or discard documents once they have moved beyond them; they make changes in person, by phone, or via e-mail. Then other people get involved: a typist types, or a printer sets, something different from what the author wrote; a publisherТs editor changes the text, with or without the authorТs consent or sometimes with the authorТs active encouragement. Moreover, determining the order and relative importance of the surviving documents can be complicated. Is one edition earlier or later than another? Was the author involved at all in a particular editionТs production? Because of gaps in the available evidence and of inconsistencies or other complications in the surviving evidence, an editor needs a theoretical approach to the task and a set of procedures that follow from the assumptions.
The critical and synoptic edition of Ulysses needs to be understood in terms of the assumptions and methods of most Anglo-American editing today, because it both follows them and departs from, even challenges, them in important ways. In the method that has come to dominate Anglo-American editing, an editor studies all the relevant surviving documents for the work in question and selects one version as the copytext. The documents include any notes, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs that are extant, plus printed versions in which the author was involved. The copytext, usually the first edition or, if available, the authorТs manuscript, is the basic text that the editor will follow for such matters as spelling, punctuation, etc., in places where the evidence is inconclusive, and for all the words except when differences between documents indicate authorТs revisions and so call for the editor to alter the copytextТs words on the basis of one of the other documents. In the terminology of editing and textual criticism, the words are called Сsubstantives,Т spelling and punctuation are matters of Сaccidentals,Т inconclusive readings are СindifferentТ ones, and the editorТs alterations of the copytext are called Сemendations.Т
The resulting text, eclectically blending authorial corrections and revisions with the system of accidentals from the copytext, was eventually epitomized as fulfilling the authorТs final intentions. This method of copytext editing producing an eclectic text offers the editor a way of dealing with gaps in the historical record and with seemingly equal choices among variant readings (when in doubt, follow the copytext). It strives as well to rescue the authorТs text from its ravagement through time at the hands of the scribes, typists, publisherТs editors, and printers who were allowed to alter, and presumably corrupt, it. But it also tends to suppress the historical determinants that originally affected the work and its production in the name of the authorТs final intentions because the eclectic edited text is an idealized construct that appears to transcend time by recreating the СpurityТ of the authorТs isolated conception. The editor is also able to disappear behind the author, since the edition will likely be presented as the authorТs (the editor fulfilled the authorТs intentions) rather than as the editorТs (the editor started with some basic premises and made many decisions and choices in order to produce the edited text).
It is easy to disappear behind the towering figure of James Joyce but difficult to adopt a more visible editorial stance that reveals the editor, as well as Joyce, at work. Yet for Hans Walter Gabler as an editor, JoyceТs methods of writing Ulysses and the surviving evidence regarding that work called for a visible stance. An astonishing array of materialsЧespecially prepublication documentsЧhas survived; they open up the whole process of JoyceТs composition of the work for the purposes of editing, but at the same time they leave tantalizing and important gaps. Joyce wrote Ulysses episode by episode, and the process is almost entirely one of growth and expansion. After compiling notes and rough drafts, Joyce brought each of the eighteen episodes to a temporary finish in a final working draft that he gave to a typist. For eight full episodes and part of a ninth, Joyce apparently made a fair copy of this draft, making some changes as he went along; for these pages the working draft has not survived. (The surviving manuscript, partly the final working draft and partly JoyceТs fair copy, is called the Rosenbach Manuscript after the museum that owns it.) Each episode was transcribed by a series of typists and printers, and some sections were set in proof as many as eight or nine times. Joyce often added to the text as he read and corrected the latest transcription, but as he corrected each transcription he seems not to have looked back to the original manuscript. In addition, as he revised and corrected the proofs in 1921 for the book publication, he was often working on two or three episodes at the same time, reading proofs for early episodes, for example, at the same time as he was drafting the later episodes of СIthacaТ and СPenelopeТ. The printers had to reset much type again and again because of the huge number of JoyceТs corrections, revisions, and additions, and they worked under very short deadlines as they approached the publication date that Joyce wantedЧFebruary 2, 1922, his fortieth birthday.
Gabler decided at the beginning of his work that traditional copytext methods would not work well for the textual situation that Ulysses presents. At least three factors led to this decision: the manuscript, which does provide a beginning-to-end version in JoyceТs hand, is too far removed from the extensively augmented text that Ulysses eventually became; the typescripts and proofs are steps along the way in the process of expansion; and the first edition is too filled with errors.[2 Some critics have argued that the first edition can and should serve as the basis for an orthodox copytext edition of Ulysses. The claim can be assessed only when an edition of this kind is actually produced.] Gabler looked to German genetic editing, which is oriented more towards authorial revision than towards transmissional corruption, and also to Fredson BowersТs work within the copytext-editing tradition on constructed, or what Gabler calls СvirtualТ, documents as copytext. Bowers demonstrated that a copytext can be a lost or virtual document when he edited Stephen CraneТs stories and Henry FieldingТs Tom Jones. In the case of Crane two surviving versions of a story that each descend directly from a lost original were used to recreate the lost original document, and the recreated document served as copytext. For Fielding the accidentals of one document (the first edition of Tom Jones) were merged with the substantives of another (the fourth edition), and this constructed hypothetical document became the copytext. In the implications of these examples Gabler saw a way of meeting the challenge of the complex textual situation presented by Ulysses. He reasoned that JoyceТs activity on the prepublication documents from the final working draft through to the final page proofsЧhis manuscript inscription plus all the additions to the typescript and proofsЧcan add up to a manuscript of the whole book, even though a virtual one. In one of the editionТs major innovations he reconstructs this virtual manuscript, calling it the Сcontinuous manuscriptТ of Ulysses, and uses it as the editionТs copytext.
In assembling the continuous manuscript the editor makes an important distinction between a СdocumentТ and a СtextТ. If an author writes out a story and then returns to its pages twice to revise it, there is only one document but three distinguishable texts (the original story, the original with one set of revisions, the original with both sets). Most of the extant documents for Ulysses contain more than one text. Typical cases are manuscripts with JoyceТs handwritten text plus his subsequent revisions, typescripts with the typed version plus one or two rounds of correction and revision in JoyceТs hand, and proofs which contain the printed version plus JoyceТs corrections and revisions. When documents are missingЧas is the final working draft where it served as copy for the typist; three chapters in typescript where the extant fair copy served as copy; and small sections of the proofsЧthe surviving documents can serve as evidence for the text contained on the missing ones that immediately preceded them. For example, the first set of proofs will show as printed text the material that Joyce presumably entered in his handwritten additions on a lost typescript page. Thus, an editor can reason that while the documents may not all survive, all the text is recoverable either through direct evidence or through recreation by extrapolation from the extant documents. The Сcontinuous manuscriptТ (the conflation of all JoyceТs handwriting on the manuscript and in the corrections and revisions on the typescripts and proofs) remains a virtual document, but the continuous manuscript text can thus be created as something now real. This is what Gabler has done. What he calls the Сsynoptic textТ presents, on the left-hand pages of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, the construction of the continuous manuscript text. The synopsis is accomplished through an elaborately coded system that indicates all JoyceТs revisions, additions, and deletions, including the stage at which each change occurred. Also, the editorТs decisions, including his transcriptions of the manuscript and his choices as to which
