It is accurate to say that the continuous manuscript text was assembled or created or recreated or constructed, but it was not created by copytext editing. Once it was assembled, the continuous manuscript text became the copytext for Gabler’s edition, but until it came into existence there was no copytext at all. (Much of the discussion of the edition has been confused on this matter, assuming incorrectly that the Rosenbach Manuscript or the typescript is the copytext for the continuous manuscript text.) Gabler constructed the continuous manuscript text, in his words, Сas Joyce wroteТ Ulysses. This means building the text up, stage by stage, from the working draft towards the goal of the first edition text as it would have appeared had no mistakes been made. The straightforward reconstruction becomes complicated when documents are missing or when something Joyce wrote on one document was not typed or printed and so not transmitted through the production process.
Like almost all editors, Gabler dismissed as a working principle the concept of Сpassive authorization,Т the idea that because Joyce left an error standing or did not restore a reading as he read proof he must have wanted the resulting reading in the book. But to accompany such a rejection an editor needs procedures to help determine when to accept a reading that the author did not restore and when not. Two procedures are especially important. First, any text handwritten by Joyce was presumed to be authoritative and hence admissible into the text unless it could be proved to be faulty. Conversely, any transmitted (typed or printed) text was considered to be potentially faulty unless it proved to possess authority. Second is GablerТs Сrule of the invariant context,Т which means that a word or passage from an earlier document could be admitted into the text only if the context around it (words, sentence, paragraphЧthe scope of the context varies from example to example) underwent no change, thus remaining invariant. These procedures have led to an important, and controversial, aspect of the edition. Several words and passages appear in the Rosenbach Manuscript but presumably not in the final working draft that was used by the typist and is now lost; these words and passages thus were never typed or printed. When Gabler judged them to be JoyceТs revisions as he made his fair copy of the working draft and when their context remained invariant, he admitted them into the continuous manuscript text on the grounds that they represent the fullest development of the text. Some examples will be given later on.
One further note about the continuous manuscript text: it was not constructed in order to fulfill what is known as Сauthorial intention.Т Gabler’s phrase, СUlysses as Joyce wrote it,Т refers to JoyceТs activity as he created Ulysses both in the extant documents and by inference from those documents to the lost ones. The editor studied what Joyce did, not what the editor thought Joyce meant or intended. This makes his edition one oriented towards the text (the authorТs text in this case more than, say, the published text) but not towards intention. The framework of genetic editing supplies editors with a set of premises and methods in which an edited text is built from the ground up with each stage considered as a version, a distinguishable self-contained text that does not need to be justified in terms of the author and the authorТs intentions. The variants between one version and the next are seen not as errors to be corrected but as revisions in a changing text. On the whole, the variants in a many-layered manuscriptЧsuch as the extreme example of the continuous manuscript of UlyssesЧthat will go together to form each identifiable version will be self-evident from the process of the writingТs development. But enough instances of alternatives usually remain where the editor must exercise critical judgment. The grounds for this judgment can be procedural ones, such as the priority given to JoyceТs own inscription or the rule of the invariant context that determined whether a reading was marked as valid or deleted in the continuous manuscript text, or they can be decisions that the editor had to make on the basis of his understanding of the kinds of revision Joyce was likely to make at the pertinent stage of his work on Ulysses.
Only after the continuous manuscript text was assembled did copytext editing come into play, as the continuous manuscript text was then emended, like any other copytext, as a result of the editorТs comparison of it to the other prepublication documents and to the few postpublication documents in which Joyce was involved (primarily errata lists that he helped to prepare and corrections for the 1937 reprint of the 1936 Bodley Head edition). Since most of the collation was done to construct the patterns of writing and revision in the continuous manuscript text in the first place, the copytext editing was largely confined to eliminating errors of transmission and to emending accidentals. Again, it was not done primarily to fulfill final authorial intentions.[3 Gabler has gone on to produce JoyceТs Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in more traditional copytext editions, but even there, as he explains in the Introduction to Portrait, he has resisted emending the copytext solely to fulfil final authorial intention.] The copytext editing of the continuous manuscript text is indicated in the footnotes to the synoptic textЧthe presentation of the editorТs assembly of the continuous manuscript textЧin Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition.
The critical edition of Ulysses set as its arbitrary goal the creation of a parallel text to the historical first edition, one that ideally represents the first edition without errors. (Of course, nothing is ideal, and the 1984 edition inadvertently introduced a few errors of its own.) Such a goal was a pragmatic, and not a logically necessary, one; the assembled continuous manuscript text could have stood as the editionТs text. As it is, GablerТs edition offers as the parallel text to the first edition text the assembled and then copytext-edited continuous manuscript text, as displayed on the left-hand pages of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition with its system of diacritical codes showing the editorТs assembly, and footnotes revealing his emendation, of the continuous manuscript text. A further extrapolation (again the result of a pragmatic decision on the editorТs pan), offered on the right-hand pages and in this printing, is the editionТs reading text, which comprises the synoptic text without any of its words or punctuation in full or angle brackets (those deleted or changed by Joyce), its diacritical codes, or its footnotes. Episode and line numbers in this printing correspond to those on the right-hand pages of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition.
A passage from the СLestrygoniansТ 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).
(B)[Squatted] Perched(B) on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tableso calling for more breado no charge, swilling, wolfinggobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. 1A pallid 3suetfaced3 young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New set of microbes. A man with ano infantТs^ DsaucestainedD napkin tucked round him D[spooned] shovelledDgurgling soup down his gullet. D[1Spoonfed.]D A man spitting back on his plate: halfmasticated gristle:(C)gums:o(C) no teeth to 1[chew] chewchewchew1 it. Chump chop 1[he has.] from the grill.1 DBolting to get it over.D Sad booser’s eyes. DBitten off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw.D 1DonТt! O! ^A bone!^ That last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself at Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what heo was eating. ^Something galoptious.^ Saint Patrick convened him to Christianity. Couldn’t swallow it all however.1 —>
The final working draft for СLestrygoniansТ is lost, so the earliest extant document is the fair copy on the Rosenbach Manuscript. The original text of this passage reads there, СSquatted 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 booserТs eyes.Т Subsequent revisions and additions changed and augmented the text, with letters B, C, and D indicating, respectively, JoyceТs 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 JoyceТs deletions or changes, as in the revision of the manuscriptТs СspoonedТ to СshovelledТ in the second round of typescript revisions (l.15). Carets indicate additions within a single stage, such as JoyceТs addition of СinfantТsТ between СaТ and СnapkinТ on the manuscript (ll. 14-15) or of СSomething galoptious.Т 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
