Ulysses (novel)

Ulysses is a 1922 novel by James Joyce that takes its title from the Latin version of the Greek name 'Odysseus'. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on a list of the 100 best novels in English of the 20th century. The book has been the subject of much scrutiny, criticism and controversy.

The corrected text

According to Jack Dalton (p. 102, 113), the first edition of Ulysses contained over two thousand errors but was still the most accurate edition published. As each subsequent edition attempted to correct these mistakes, it incorporated more of its own. Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 edition was an attempt to produce a corrected text, but it has received much criticism, most notably from John Kidd. Kidd's main criticism is of Gabler's choice of the manuscript as his copy-text (the base edition with which the editor compares each variant). This choice is problematic, in that there is no manuscript as such: Joyce wrote approximately 30% of the final text as marginal notes on the galleys. Gabler had therefore to reconstruct a manuscript, which had never physically existed, by adding together all of Joyce's accretions from the various sources. Whether this is problematic depends on one's perspective: on the one hand, it allowed Gabler to produce a synoptic text, which indicated the stage at which each addition was inserted; on the other, more orthodox theorists (such as Kidd) maintain that the copy-text should be the earliest single existing document—the 1922 edition.

Related Topics:
1984 - Copy-text - Galleys

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Kidd also criticized a number of specific editorial decisions made by Gabler, but again these seem to be a matter of judgement rather than of right or wrong answers.

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At present, the debate about which text of Ulysses is, in fact, the 'correct' or 'proper' version remains vibrant. Many publications of Ulysses will list the previous versions as one of the opening pages.

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