“footnotes nonpareil”: Ulysses, Authority, Error, and Annotation

Look out for an edition de luxe of all my [work] instantly. … S. D.

James Joyce, July 1904, LettersI 55

A quick glance at Amazon United Kingdom shows more than thirty “editions” of Ulysses currently available for purchase: Hans Walter Gabler’s is among them (though not the most easily procured in the U.K.), but so too are the 1922 text (annotated or not), numerous reprints of virtually every printing between the first and Gabler’s (most failing to specify which version is being offered, some “annotated,” many not), an Easy “Ulysses” (“the ruthless editing of a 900-page [sic] book down to the length of an average novel”), a “Ulysses”: Novel, 1922 “Rearrange[d] & Annotated,” and a Ulysses “Remastered by Robert Gogan.” Also on offer are two printings of the edition famously “specially revised at the author’s request by Stuart Gilbert,” first issued in 1932 by the Odyssey Press, an ad hoc imprint of the Albatross Press formed specifically to publish Ulysses.²

One of these, published by Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2010, states its imprimatur: “by kind permission of Stephen Joyce and the estate of James Joyce.” That, with the expiration of copyright, such permission is no longer required, of course, accounts for this last year’s proliferation. The second Odyssey Press offering comes from Sam Slote; his Alma Classics publication presents a modified reprint of the 1939 (fourth) printing of the Odyssey Press edition, densely annotated.³

Neither the Wordsworth edition, nor the text under review, reprints in its copyright page the full notice, cited for years as justification for the claim that the 1932 text was “the most accurate text of Ulysses” (JJI 665): “The present edition may be regarded as the definitive standard edition, as it has been specially revised, at the author’s request, by Stuart Gilbert.”⁴ The statement was present in both the one- and two-volume first printings (1932 and 1933), and thereafter dropped. Slote, a textual critic himself, knows better than to endorse the claim, quoting it in his introduction only to admit that it “is not entirely accurate.”⁵ He limits himself, instead, to the careful statement: “[the] 1939 printing of the Odyssey Press Ulysses stands as the most accurate instantiation [not of Joyce’s text itself, but] of the Odyssey Press’s various printings, although it is not without error, and so … is in its own way imperfect” (S xii). Such scholarly honesty and modesty come as a welcome reprieve from the vanity of the “rearranged,” “remastered,” and even “specially revised” versions. Slote has resisted the temptation to “correct” the 1939 impression’s obvious errors, though he (usually) mentions them in the annotations when the text being glossed is faulty. So he offers no full collation of the 1939 text’s variation from either the 1922 or any other edition, nor does he provide, as he states, a full list of “‘errors’ in the present edition (whether introduced in the Odyssey Press edition or inherited from an earlier edition)” (S 555, my italics).⁶ His is a pragmatic response to the perpetual problem of “error.”

The question of how “correct” or “accurate” the 1932-1939 texts are still lingers, not wholly clarified, although elucidating it is understandably not part of Slote’s project here. The extent of Gilbert’s actual involvement in this edition, including the first 1932 printing itself with its clear claim of “authority,” has been repeatedly tested, re-tested, and refuted (or at least called seriously into question).⁷ James F. Spoerri made it clear in 1956 that the fourth printing corrected many of the “errors” in the 1932 text (197), but he also claimed that Gilbert admitted “[he] was unaware there were several successive printings.”⁸ Clearly, whatever “corrections” were entered over the course of the print run were not done by Gilbert. But how many and what changes were made in the 1932 and 1939 texts that distinguished them from the 1922...