The Little Review “Ulysses” by James Joyce, ed. by Mark Gaipa, Sean Latham, and Robert Scholes (review)

That much of Ulysses was first published in magazine format (in The Little Review, from March 1918 to December 1920) is one of the curiosities of its genesis. Before postal authorities prohibited its further publication, the book’s first thirteen episodes and a considerable part of the fourteenth were there for the public to read, to praise, or to denigrate. John Quinn, the New York lawyer who defended the book against charges that it had violated the “Hicklin rule” on obscenity (and who quickly lost in court), had not wanted serial publication, believing that what could be presented in a single volume would prove less outrageous to moral vigilantes than would monthly provocations. From a legal standpoint, he was probably right. But from the standpoint of those interested in how the book grew in Joyce’s mind during the last two and a half years of its development, its appearance in The Little Review is a gift.

The editors of this volume believe that Joyce did not always know, with precision, how the book would be built. Might it, as the author imagined, become the sixteenth story in Dubliners? Or would the scene now known as “Telemachus” in Ulysses become an extension of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Would Ulysses have seventeen or eighteen episodes? What synthesis of objective prose and internal meditation would become its narrative style? Gaipa, Latham, and Scholes assert that, while Joyce had the book’s title in his mind from 1906 onward, the earliest drafts were not written until 1917. That would give him only four or five years to compose the book before its appearance in Paris on February 2, 1922. While censorship made further serial publication impossible after the fourteenth episode, Joyce was set free to write longer episodes (notably, “Circe”) without testing the patience of The Little Review’s editors or the sensibilities of the vigilantes. It also allowed Joyce to use what The Little Review had published as a “draft” for the additions and emendations that would make Ulysses into a finished product.

Beyond providing an exacting look at the way that the book came into being, the editors situate us as we might have been in those years before 1922. Since 1986, Ulysses is as Hans Walter Gabler and his team of scholarly editors would have us read it; they have performed an invaluable service by producing a version whose stable authority is now accepted by most readers. But during those two and a half years, Ulysses possessed no such stability. For readers of The Little Review, the chapters as they appeared were irremediably bewildering (think of Virginia Woolf’s initial response of distaste). For both the novel’s author and those readers, it was a work whose progress, page by page and addition after addition, was open to speculation and revision. For such readers, unlike readers today, the book did not possess the ultimately reassuring closure of Molly’s “yes,” given to us eighty-four times. Ulysses in its Little Review incarnation was a living, slightly inchoate, and endangered thing. After 1922, it was iconic.