New James Joyce Texts: A Review Essay

New James Joyce Texts: A Review Essay Laurie Teal Bates College Lhibliners Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche, eds. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. 455 pp. $50.00 Dubliners Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche, eds. Afterword by John S. Kelly New York: Vintage, 1993. 285 pp. Paper $10.00 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche, eds. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. 359 pp. $50.00 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche, eds. Afterword by Richard Brown New York: Vintage, 1993. 277 pp. Paper $9.00 THERE CAN BE few readers of Joyce's texts unfamUiar with the perhaps too-weU-documented furor surrounding Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 Garland "critical and synoptic" edition of Ulysses (followed in 1986 by the Vintage paperback, dubbed "the corrected text" in subtitle). If we have learned to mistrust Gabler's version of Ulysses (even though many of us still teach with it and cite it in our work), should we likewise 187 ELT 38:2 1995 mistrust his recently published critical editions of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? If the answer to this question is yes (and Fm not convinced that it is), it wUl at least be for different reasons, since each of Joyce's texts has a complex and lengthy composition , revision and publication history, resulting in a unique set of editorial concerns for each work. Disagreements wül also be minimized by the absence this time around of hyperbolic claims for the text (as well as the label "corrected text"); Gabler himself admits that his new editions differ very little from Robert Scholes's 1967 edition of Dubltners and Chester Anderson's 1964 edition oÃ- A Portrait of the Artist.1 Gabler has again followed the rules of copy-text editing in preparing these two new critical editions. Copy-text editing caUs for the selection of a single base text—often the first printed edition—to which emendations for the newly edited text are made, a process designed to guarantee textual integrity and a verifiable genealogy for any given text. The textual emendations under consideration fall into two general categories : substantive emendations (changes in word-choice, addition or elimination of sentences and passages, etc.) and accidental emendations (such as punctuation, capitalization, and spelling). The goal in emending the copy-text is, as Gabler tells us, twofold: first, it "corrects* the copy-text's mistakes (such as unintentional copying or spelling errors) and purifies it of subsequent "transmissional corruption" (including typing and printing errors and house styling); and second, it updates the copy-text by grafting onto it later authorial revisions, usually made in galleys and page proofs. Editorial "differences of opinion" can thus arise not only over the choice of copy-text (Gabler has a clear preference for early manuscripts, which caused more grief in his editing of Ulysses than is likely to occur with these two texts), but over what Gabler calls the "subsidiary rules" governing emendations (both substantive and accidental) to the chosen text. Edited texts are always ideal texts, "eclectic" in composition (coming from many different sources). In some cases, the elaboration of what Gabler calls a "textual double standard" is necessary (e.g., siding with one document over another for substantives but not for accidentals); the goal is to develop a consistent set of subsidiary rules which eliminate what might be called random eclecticism (i.e., siding with one document over another in one instance, but not in the next similar instance). Although authorial intention remains a guiding principle in preparing a critical edition, Gabler complicates the notion of authorial intention 188 Teal : Joyce texts by suggesting that the textual documents present a "historical series of intentional moments"; it is the task of copy-text editing to reconcUe these moments. The general format of Gabler's two new critical editions is the same: an editor's introduction outlining both the history of the text and the editorial decisions made, the edited text with footnoted apparatus listing substantive emendations, and two appendices—one listing the emendation of accidentals, and the other offering a...