The reasons for this are not hard to find. The late-corrected manuscript used by Darantière has survived, but not in full. Corrected typescripts of earlier chapters used by The Little Review and The Egoist had been lost, and although the published versions are of course available, some of these were probably edited or expurgated without Joyce’s sanction. The Rosenbach manuscript was undeniably passed by Joyce, but it was dashed off for immediate gain with scant regard for its future role in reconstituting a published text. In theory, Gabler affords an equal initial weighting to each version, pre- and post-publication, at least as far as it may contain clues in Joyce’s hand; and in practice he is sometimes forced to give equal weighting to published versions which were almost certainly not passed by Joyce. On each facing page of the synoptic, critical edition, Gabler included many crucial variants in the establishment of his final text.
Between 1984 and the projected publication of the one-volume student edition of 1986, Gabler’s work was warmly greeted by eminent Joyceans, but it also came under stringent critique. Its chief assailant was John Kidd. If Gabler had set himself the task of revealing the 1922 Ulysses as flawed beyond redemption, then Kidd intended no less an exposé of Gabler, arguing that his edition had even more errors. He showed in 1984 that Gabler’s team had made no rigorous analysis of variations between the 1932 and 1933 editions, and that vital correspondence between Joyce and his collaborators was unused.
Writing in the Fall 1985 issues of The Irish Literary Supplement on ‘Gaelic in the New Ulysses’, Kidd contended that its cavalier treatment of Irish-language words and phrases was symptomatic of a more pervasive sloppiness. The drinking-toast ‘sláinte!’ (health!) is reproduced by Gabler as the mistakenly unaccented ‘slainte!’ and without any accompanying archaeology on the facing-page, but both The Egoist and The Little Review had included the necessary accent. Kidd deduced that these magazine versions were used very selectively by Gabler, who never established a clear rationale for their use or neglect: ‘a comprehensive computer-file’ has given way to ‘a human wish-list’. In like manner, an earlier draft correctly includes the accent on ‘amháin’ in the Citizen’s cry ‘Sinn Féin amháin’, but Gabler, following Rosenbach rather than correct usage, does not. Gabler’s printing of ‘Sgeul im barr bata’ is wrong (failing to eclipse the b of barr with an attached m), largely because the editors failed to pay due heed to an early notesheet which almost got it right ‘Sgeul i m barr’. Kidd’s conclusion was emphatic: ‘by no means should the proposed text be favoured over editions already in print’. Some of Kidd’s other points had already been independently anticipated by the Irish scholar Vivian Mercier in a talk given in Dublin in 1985, but Mercier did not pursue the case once he was satisfied that Kidd had taken it up.
By the time Kidd’s article appeared, his critique had been reported in the London Times Literary Supplement, whose editor called upon the Joyce Estate and the Society of Authors to suspend the 1986 edition until Kidd’s findings were fully available and rigorously appraised. This did not happen. Gabler had already rejected Kidd’s findings as unfounded or misconceived; the 1986 version appeared; and Kidd intensified his analysis of the text. So did many others, in the belief that it demanded an extended debate before it could be ratified. At a conference in Monaco, Fritz Senn pointed out that there really was no ‘continuous manuscript text’ since the entire work simply did not exist in Joyce’s hand. C. H. Peake argued that in the first three episodes, the final wording at ten points in the 1922 text was closer to Joyce’s final revisions than was the Gabler edition. Giovanni Cianci found that the typography of Aeolus over which Joyce took such pains in the 1922 edition, was spoiled by Gabler’s reduction of the headlines (which, from the outset, Joyce wanted larger and darker, not smaller and fainter). In each of these cases, the 1922 version seemed preferable to the new one.
Most stunning of all the Monaco contributions was Richard Ellmann’s withdrawal of his earlier support for the most famous change in the 1984 version, the insertion of the words ‘Love, yes. Word known to all men’ before the further insertion of a jumbled Latin quotation. The Latin was soon revealed to be a conflation of two fragments by Thomas Aquinas in Summa Contra Gentiles, and this led Ellmann to infer that Joyce, recognizing the impenetrability of the quotations, wisely decided to remove them (despite having retained them in the Rosenbach manuscript). Ellmann, who had always argued that love was the central theme of Ulysses, nevertheless concluded that the word should be omitted here. Joyce’s artistic tact would scarcely have permitted Stephen to proclaim the word hundreds of pages before he agonizedly asks his dead mother to name it.
In the James Joyce Broadsheet of February 1988, Kidd asked if Gabler had respected the basic rules of conservative editing: the use of original manuscripts, collation of multiple copies, study of all lifetime editions, researches in publishers’ archives.
‘If the Rosenbach MS facsimiles are not checked against the original in Philadelphia, if Joyce’s letters to Pound altering the lost typescripts are unseen, and if corrections of Budgen’s dictation errors are not extracted from the Matisse-illustrated Ulysses, one is not editing in the great tradition.’
Four months later, in a highly publicized essay for The New York Review of Books, Kidd added many details to his critique. His case was clear. The 1984 Ulysses was filled with new blunders (such as the misnaming of Trinity College cyclist H. Thrift as H. Shrift, and of cricketer Captain Buller as Culler), but it was also, and more seriously, ‘a different version from what Joyce conceived, authorized and saw into print’. It was not a corrected text but a new one altogether.
Because he worked from facsimiles, Gabler was held to have been unable to make out distinctions (visible in the manuscripts to the naked eye) between Joyce’s writing and that of printers or proofreaders: thus the 1984 version records erasures that never happened and excludes others that were in fact made. Challenging Gabler’s declaration that his emendations were largely confined to the removal of unquestionable errors, Kidd computed that the new text overrode what Joyce actually wrote on two thousand occasions. He listed thirteen categories of such changes, including alterations to spelling, italics, punctuation, names, typographical features, numbers, capitalizations, literary allusions and foreign languages. These, and many other detailed criticisms, were made by Kidd in ‘An Inquiry into Ulysses: The Corrected Text’ published in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America at the end of 1988.
Kidd’s conclusion was that until Ulysses was meticulously edited afresh, with scholarly and financial help from a foundation, the Bodley Head/Random House edition, ‘the book roughly as Joyce last saw it, is the best we have’. Many other experts by then concurred, though doubts were again raised about the possibility of ever establishing a ‘definitive’ version. In 1989, Philip Gaskell and Clive Hart published Ulysses: A Review of Three Texts, which contained their systematic proposals for alterations to the texts of 1922, 1961 and 1984. These are currently under debate, in keeping with Joyce’s prophecy that his book would keep the professors contending for some time to come.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Bruce Arnold, The Scandal of Ulysses, Sinclair-Stevenson, London: 1991.
Philip Gaskell and Clive Hart, Ulysses: A Review of Three Texts, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe: 1989.
John Kidd, ‘Gaelic in the New Ulysses’, The Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1985, 41–2.
―’Proof Fever’, James Joyce Broadsheet, No. 25, February 1988, 1.
―’The Scandal of Ulysses’, The New York Review of Books, 30 June 1988, 1–8.
―‘An Inquiry into Ulysses: The Corrected Text’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 82, December 1988, 411–584.
Richard Madtes, The ‘Ithaca’ Chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, 1983.
C. George Sandulescu and Clive Hart eds., Assessing the 1984 ‘Ulysses’, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988.
ULYSSES
I
br /> STATELY, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:
—Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful Jesuit.
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.
Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.
—Back to barracks, he said sternly.
He added in a preacher’s tone:
—For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.
He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.
—Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?
He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.
—The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek.
He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in die bowl and lathered cheeks and neck.
Buck Mulligan’s gay voice went on.
—My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn’t it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?
He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:
—Will he come? The jejune Jesuit.
Ceasing, he began to shave with care.
—Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.
—Yes, my love?
—How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?
Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.
—God, isn’t he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you’re not a gentleman. God, these bloody English. Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can’t make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.
He shaved warily over his chin.
—He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase?
—A woful lunatic, Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?
—I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off.
Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.
—Scutter, he cried thickly.
He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen’s upper pocket, said:
—Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.
Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly. Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:
—The bard’s noserag. A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can’t you?
He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly.
—God, he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.
Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown.
—Our mighty mother. Buck Mulligan said.
He turned abruptly his great searching eyes from the sea to Stephen’s face.
—The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That’s why she won’t let me have anything to do with you.
—Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.
—You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I’m hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you …
He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips.
—But a lovely mummer, he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all.
He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.
Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.
Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.
—Ah, poor dogsbody, he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?
—They fit well enough, Stephen answered.
Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.
—The mockery of it, he said contentedly, secondleg they should be. God knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair stripe, grey. You’ll look spiffing in them. I’m not joking, Kinch. You look damn well when you’re dressed.
—Thanks, Stephen said. I can’t wear them if they are grey.
—He can’t wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers.
He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin.
Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile eyes.
—That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan, says you have g.p.i. He’s up in Dottyville with Conolly Norman. General paralysis of the insane.
He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk.
—Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard.
Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.
—I pin
ched it out of the skivvy’s room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plain-looking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.
Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen’s peering eyes.
—The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you.
Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:
—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.
Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.
—It’s not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly. God knows you have more spirit than any of them.
Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steelpen.
—Cracked lookingglass of a servant. Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He’s stinking with money and thinks you’re not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.
Cranly’s arm. His arm.
—And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I’m the only one that knows what you are. Why don’t you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I’ll bring down Seymour and we’ll give him a ragging worse than they gave dive Kempthorpe.