A RESPONSE TO: JOHN KIDD, "ERRORS OF EXECUTION IN THE 1984 ULYSSES"

Author(s): HANS WALTER GABLER

Source: Studies in the Novel, Vol. 22, No. 2, A SPECIAL ISSUE ON EDITING ULYSSES (summer
1990), pp. 250-256
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29532721
Accessed: 02-03-2016 15:17 UTC

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A RESPONSE TO: JOHN KIDD, "ERRORS OF
EXECUTION IN THE 1984 ULYSSES"

HANS WALTER GABLER

A defense of the critical edition of James Joyce's Ulysses against the

allegations in Dr. Kidd's paper is not required. These allegations are all
unfounded or misconceived. I need therefore not speak up at all, were it not that
I wish to reassure you (as you will hardly expect me to do otherwise) that Ulysses
has not been executed, or even erroneously executed?that is: decapitated,
hanged, or quartered by mistake?in 1984.
Mistakes, oversights, errors of application or even of judgment: no editorial
undertaking can hope to be entirely free of them. I was pleased that their margin
might be reduced by at least one item in future editions of the critical text of
Ulysses by incorporating an instruction for change from an unpublished postcard
preserved in Buffalo. However, the Poetry Collection at Buffalo have by most
recent communication affirmed my own record of the case: they assert that they
have no such unpublished postcard, under such or other date, as cited?but, you
will note, not quoted?by Dr. Kidd. Does the postcard exist at all? If so, where?
And what are its instructions? Until Dr. Kidd gets his facts straight, we cannot
deal with consequent facts potentially relevant to the edition. If and when we can
do so, we shall be happy to amend an oversight in the comprehensive and
judicious use we have made of unpublished as of published, and of specifically
Joycean as of Joyce-related materials. The imputation of a general policy of non
attention to unpublished materials is ludicrous.
No reckless wholesale restriction of categories of material, then. Nor
culpable misreadings of Joyce's hand: at least one of the examples given may
serve to demonstrate admirably what it takes, at times, to read an author's hand.
"Call", at the beginning of "Circe," has a squiggle. Is it, or is it not, an "s"? By
graphic comparison with its immediate surroundings, we have been plausibly
told, the squiggle qualifies as an "s". Years of constant scrutiny of Joyce's hand
throughout the Ulysses documents leave the matter still open. There are simply
too many squiggles of the pen in final positions that can never qualify as "s"es
to make this one as sure an "s" as the word's first letter is a "C". So, as Dr. Kidd

250

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 ULYSSES / 251

exercised it before us, whether designedly or not, we argue the case by

circumstantial reasoning (or, we read into the text what we assume must be
there). Dr. Kidd invokes Homer's "Aiaia"?the cries, or wails?to conceive of
a squiggle as an "s". My frame of reference was more closely contextual. The
phrase "call and answer" that concludes the preceding narrative direction I took
to prefigure the two speech prefixes following, of which "The answer" without
any doubt is the manuscript reading for the second one. Without apparent
warrant, the typist changed it to "The Answers". Why? Maybe because he (or
she) had no doubt about "The Calls" (plural) and realized a parallel. I assumed
a second typing error in consequence of the first and restored what I?therefore;
and through critical judgment?read in the manuscript. The preceding context
suggests a parallel, the typist saw a parallel, the editor assumed a parallel (albeit
the other way round), and it is only the consideration of the Homeric context
(giving a possible warrant for "Calls", though of course none for "Answers")
which suggests that a parallel may not at all be in question. This, therefore, is a
suggestive piece of criticism and not a nailing down of an "error of execution."
Two important principles are adumbrated: one a general and pervasive one that
governs all editing, and another a specific principle all-important for the critical
edition of Ulysses. The pervasive principle is that editorial judgment?editorial
critical judgment?is integral to any edition. By it, the editor is inextricably
bound into an edition. Or, in more operative terms: the editorial function is a
structural dimension of a critical edition. It governs choice and treatment of
copytext, recension, and emendation; and it both governs and necessitates the
critical apparatus in all its forms, including, in the case of the critical Ulysses, the
synoptic presentation. (It also, in my opinion, severely qualifies the notion of a
critical edition as the fulfillment of authorial intention; this was the subject of my
paper this morning.) The specific principle for the 1984 edition of Ulysses is that,
fundamentally, it establishes the text of the work that Joyce (successively) wrote,
and not the text manifesting itself through the deviational forces of pre?
publication transmission at the one particular moment in historical time marked
by the work's first publication in book form. Perhaps it is a pity that neither prin?
ciple was even remotely fathomed in its implications by what Dr. Kidd felt urged
to put polemically before you. We might have had a fruitfully constructive debate
on the wider issues of our common interests and activities. Instead, we have a
shambles of undigested editorial lore in an argument that, for lack of stringency
and incisiveness, collapses into triviality.
Thus, as I have said, I wish to reassure you: if you have been mystified by
what you have heard, the false definitions, misapplications of concepts and
terminology, and the overall incomprehension are not yours.
Specifically, you are right in holding on to your customary understanding
that a copytext is never found inside, but always outside an edition. A copytext
is defined before editing begins, and editing it makes an edition an edition. There
has been, then, no revolutionary redefinition of the term copytext?only an ex

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252 / GABLER

tension of the notion of what can be used as copytext. Pivotal to this extension
is the logical distinction and, as it were, separation of document and text?a
distinction prefigured, for example, in Fredson Bower's treatment of text and
documents in Fielding's Tom Jones. This distinction is made perfectly clear in
the editorial "Afterword" to the critical Ulysses, and it makes little sense to hold
against the edition that it does not do what it expressly sets out to avoid, namely
the immediate identification of levels of textual evolution on the one hand, and
text carriers, or documents on the other hand. Mediately, of course, the tracing
back of text to documents is always possible ?if the edition's system of notation
and the inter-relationship of its apparatus sections is rightly understood, one
cannot be at a loss as to where, in the sequence of documents, a specific textual
fact is documented. And, as for Dr. Kidd's troubles with the shifting definitions
of the code symbols: just remember that the edition consists of eighteen sectional
editions, and his worries won't be yours. On the contrary, you will see the real
advantage of a margin of flexibility in the definition of each code symbol.
Again you will be right in not allowing the distinction between copytext and
edition text to collapse?or be collapsed before your eyes. What is used as
copytext is a genetic assembly of the text of Ulysses. This is critically edited?
so that, once more, it makes no sense to complain that one doesn 't get a "straight"
genetic presentation. Of course one doesn't?or one wouldn't need a copytext.
Recognizing the impossibility to edit without an editor?that is without building
the editorial function into the edition?the edition provides an edited text
genetically displayed, or analyzed (and analyzable).
Since the edition text is edited, it incorporates emendations. Emendation is
an important function among the many editorial functions. According to the
received understanding of the term, "emendation" does not imply assertion of
textual authority. Strictly, only authorial revisions (as changes) have authority.
In standard copytext editing procedures, it is true, such revisions enter the edited
text from a source different from the copytext by way of an operation that is
formally also called "emendation." In the critical edition of Ulysses, by contrast,
authorial revisions command their place in the synoptic notation of the textual
genesis?i.e., they go to form a new section-type of the overall system of the
critical apparatus. Emendations proper, however?and only these remain under
discussion here?are required precisely where textual authority is considered to
have broken down. Yet where and when emendation is performed, authority is
never claimed for it, or its source. Ultimately the editor takes emendation always
upon himself. To hold this against him is tantamount to blaming him for doing
his job. Emending can never qualify as an "error of execution" in a critical
edition?at the most, the felicity or wisdom of individual emendations may be
debated. As a basis for such debate, the editor himself will first make a reasoned
choice of the sources from which, beside his own critical faculties, he draws the
emendations he deems necessary. But these sources, to repeat, are not distin?
guished by the authority of their texts, but at the most by their authorization as

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 ULYSSES / 253

documents (which, for the present, may broadly be taken to mean their relative
author vicinity).
The logical separation of text and document, the distinction between textual
authority and document authorization, and the restrictive definition of the notion
and term "emendation" together, it should be noticed, bring about a marked shift
in attitude towards the transmissional documents in their transmissional quality,
and particularly towards the first and subsequent editions of Ulysses and their
impressions. In relation to the edition's central task, the establishment of the
critical text according to Joyce's autograph inscription and revision, they simply
do not command the attention that the book manifestations of texts do?and
rightly do?if you take the middle-of-the-road "bibliographical way" of editing
evolved from the paradigm of Shakespearean editing. We scrutinized the post
1922 textual history of Ulysses very carefully. Where this revealed an authorial
revision, which was the case in only one or two instances, all told, it was incor?
porated in the synoptic display of the textual genesis?of course. Yet, though he
may have corrected, Joyce virtually simply did not revise Ulysses after 1922. As
for his corrections, it defies the powers of critical distinction?here as much as
anywhere else?to identify and separate authorial corrections from non-author?
ial ones in every individual instance of correction in the post-1922 editions and
issues. But this is no cause for worry, and it makes textually no difference?for
the majority by far of corrections to be registered after 1922 and in Joyce's
lifetime restore to the printed texts readings that the text as established from
Joyce's autograph carries anyhow. And as for the rest: the general assumption
of authorization of the printed editions fully collated is sufficient to ensure that
the Joycean corrections they more or less plausibly incorporate become eligible
as emendations. Since, thereupon, these editions have been carefully and
systematically used as sources for editorial emendation, I trust that the truly
eligible have also been elected (and the properly ineligible such as the obvious
sophistications of the 1932 edition and its subsequent issues, judiciously ex?
cluded). Dr. Kidd's somewhat grandiloquent speculations of the potential influx
of new authority with every new impression by themselves take us nowhere?
and not by a long way as far as the edition itself actually went in securing emen
dational readings from those later textual witnesses?if it cannot be demon?
strated that authorial correction, let alone revision, actually took, place.
Errors of execution?the very title of Dr. Kidd's paper, as well as the run
of his argument, reveals unfortunately how, desperate to get a perspective on the
edition before him, he ran off to the textbooks yet did not realize that they were
talking of editions and editorial work significantly different from the critical and
synoptic edition of Ulysses. He might have made further headway, of course, had
he more patiently read the "Afterword" to the edition and measured it against
those textbooks in the way that it in itself is very carefully weighed against them.
His carelessness of reading is revealed in details I would forebear to mention had
they not drawn polemical fire. Thus, the alleged hundreds of unrecorded variants

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254 / GABLER

are a chimera in terms of the very carefully set out rules of variant exclusion and
inclusion. Something that went wrong in the proofs but was correctively set right
before the first edition has not been recorded?isn't that fair enough? And
doesn't it save us from what in German are called Variantenfriedh?fe?cemetar
ies for variants? And as for our "silent disagreement" with the reading of Joyce's
manuscript by the staff of the Rosenbach Museum?anyone who wishes, even
Dr. Kidd himself, can sit down with the third volume of the Rosenbach Facsimile
and see written out there what they thought they saw in their manuscript. All we
are talking about is that there is no apparatus in the critical edition listing when
the Rosenbach staff have deciphered the manuscript differently from us. The
main reason for this procedure was that, owing to the manner in which they went
about their task some ten years ago, they so often missed details of the manuscript
that it would have been both tedious and uncharitable to erect a monument of sic s
to their noble effort in the critical edition.
What it all comes down to, then, is that, in Dr. Kidd's estimate, the critical
and synoptic edition of Ulysses does not follow the bibliographical way. Well,
it doesn't?and yet it does. Surely, when the whole debate has shrunk to this
point, it is acutely troublesome to discover that Dr. Kidd doesn't even appreciate
truly bibliographical reasoning when he encounters it and actually badly bungles
the issues when he claims himself to be setting out to argue bibliographically. He
fails to recognize that the grounds for incorporating that much-publicized phrase
defining "love" as the word known to all men are not at all critical, but biblio?
graphical entirely, as?most recently?you may look up in the latest issue of the
James Joyce Quarterly. As for the other example cited, it is true that the 1937
London edition was printed from reduced plates of the 1936 setting. There were
around 170 changes. One of them Dr. Kidd accepts as Joyce's own?but that,
surely, makes them all Joyce's, unless he can muster stringent evidence to
categorize and distinguish authorial and non-authorial corrections. The alleged
mixed source will not serve in the way he invokes it as evidence?though if the
argument were used differently, one could build a proper bibliographical
analysis upon it that might advance over the careful analysis by Walter Hettche
and Claus Melchior (in an independently published article in the James Joyce
Quarterly). But, of course, all facts must be accounted for, and these include the
odd circumstance that plates should have been corrected at all, that the correc?
tions are unevenly distributed and clustered in the obscurer regions of the text
(such as the "Oxen of the Sun" episode), and that Joyce told a journalist that he
was about to correct Ulysses?which is more than we know about his authorial
involvement with any other edition after 1922.
Enough?or more than enough?is said. I wish I had had the privilege of
answering a worthier challenge. Beyond having taken the opportunity of airing
some perhaps not altogether unimportant points of editorial rationale, let me
stress in closing that nothing has emerged from Dr. Kidd's paper to change the
critical text of Ulysses.

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 ULYSSES / 255

Thus, allow me to end in slight adaptation of John Dryden's peroration to

his essay on "Heroick Playes" prefixed to The Conquest of Granada:

I have been too tedious in this

reassurance; but to make some satisfaction,
I will leave the rest of my edition
exposed to the critics, without defense.
The concernment of it is wholly past
from me, and ought to be in them, who
have been favorable to it, and are
somewhat obliged to defend their own
opinions. That there are errors in it, I
deny not:
Ast opere in tanto fas est ohrepere Somnum.
But I have already swept the stakes; and
with the common good fortune of prosperous
gamesters, can be content to sit quietly;
to hear my fortune curst by some, and
my faults arraigned by others, and to
suffer both without reply.

POSTSCRIPT?January 1990

John Kidd had precirculated his paper for the STS conference of April 1985
so widely that more than one copy (earmarked "confidential") reached me in
advance. This enabled me to prepare a response. The paper published is the
version circulated, not the version read, which omitted one or two aspects and
was toned down in some points. The published response is consequently also my
full text, and not the one spoken as adapted to Kidd's delivery.
Five years in retrospect, the response still rings with a strong note of
irritation. The tone made listeners unhappy at the time. A present reader will
perhaps more easily recognize that the irritation was caused in no small measure
by the amateur critique presented to a professional conference of textual
scholars. It is still true today that Dr. Kidd prides himself on his refusal to
construct his critique systematically from the levels of text-critical principle and
editorial rationale. This, combined with a difference in experience of practical
editing, leaves precious little ground for a meaningful exchange. The pertinent
facts in the matter of the Buffalo postcard are that the document was unearthed
in May 1985, weeks after the STS conference. Dr. Kidd had picked up a hint
about its existence from index cards of the late Jack Dalton in my custody in
Munich, where he spent a few hours on his own thumbing through them. The
postcard's instruction agrees with our establishment of the text. There is, it is
true, a variant in the context to the instruction. Dalton had satisfied himself?and
we would agree?that this did not imply a request for a change. Unfamiliar with
Dalton's private system of notation, and without search or inspection of the
original postcard, Kidd trailed a red herring.

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256 / GABLER

My phrase in conclusion that "nothing has emerged from Dr. Kidd's paper
to change the critical text of Ulysses" was, in respect of individual readings, an
overstatement in the heat of the moment. In the revised second edition (1986) of
the critical and synoptic edition, we made a few changes, and some of those have
slightly modified the reading text. Dr. Kidd was one of several contributors who
encouraged us to strengthen the insistence on Joyce's inscription in a few points
of detail. To him and to others we are grateful for their share in what, since the
publication of the edition, must?as always in the case of critical editions?be
a common concern of its readers and users for the text.

UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH

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