Controversial Editions: Hans Walter Gabler's Ulysses

Author(s): Geert Lernout

Source: Text, Vol. 16 (2006), pp. 229-241
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 Controversial Editions:
Hans WalterGabler's Ulysses

GEERTLERNOUT

F EVER THERE WAS A CONTROVERSIAL

EDITION in the last thirty years,
it must have been Hans WalterGabler'sedition of James Joyce's
Ulysses. In a 1991 review of the third edition of L. D. Reynolds and
N. G. Wilson'sScribesand Scholars,MarkPossanzacalled it the "most
controversial"edition. This notorietywas not restrictedto scholarly
circles:as faras I know,no other editorialprojectmeritedan interview
in the Washington Post or a major article in the New YorkReview of
Books. Gabler's Ulysses had been a majorevent in the mid-eighties,
both in the world of textual studies and in that of the Joyce industry:I
rememberthe general feeling of excitementwhen the three fat books
were finallypresented at the JamesJoyce Symposiumin Frankfurtin
June 1984. In the formerworld Gabler'swork acquireda paradigmatic
position that is evident if we read, for example, the contributionsof
the so-called New New Bibliographersto Philip Cohen's collection
of essays, Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory.
Nearlyall of these editors and textual theorists refer to Gableras in
some way representing a way of editing that is decidedly different
from the Greg-Bowers-Tanselletraditionof copy-textediting that still
dominatedAnglo-Americanediting in the earlyeighties.
The three-volume Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition' was

I Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, prepared by Hans Walter Gabler with
Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York and London: Garland, 1984.

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2.30 - GEERTLERNOUT

indeed a quite novel form for an edition: not only had the text com-
pletely been preparedon computer,it came in two differentversions,
a "synoptic"text on the left-hand and a reading text on the right-
hand page. Although there seems to be nothing remarkableabout
the appearance of the reading text, the way it was established was
also new in Anglo-Americanediting. For an explanationwe need a
closer look at the left-handpage which containsthe synoptictext. This
is not a full genetic display,since Gablerdisregardsthose stages of
composition that precede the first complete fair copy, the so-called
Rosenbachmanuscript.It is not a complete record of the history of
the text: it contains only authorialvariants,i.e., those changes and
additions to the typescriptsand page proofs that are in Joyce's hand
or that can be shown to be authorial,and in a way the text on the
left-hand page is determined by the final version on the right-hand
page. Gabler'sperspectiveis teleological:he does not include variants
that for one reason or another never made it into the finalversion.
The initial reactions to the new Ulysses were extremely positive.
This is not surprising:most of the Joyceanswho knew anythingabout
textualmatterseither had been partof Gabler'sAdvisoryCommitteeor
were membersof his editorialteam.Althoughsince the fiftiesthe vast
majorityofJoyce'smanuscriptshadbeen availableto scholarsin public
libraries-in the case of Ulysses, mostly at the Universityof Buffalo
and at the Rosenbach foundation in Philadelphia-and although in
1975 the most importantdocument, the Rosenbachmanuscript,had
been published in facsimile by Clive Diver, and most of the other
materialstwo years later by MichaelGroden in Garland'svastJames
Joyce Archive, the number of Joyce scholarswho were interested in
textualmatterswas extremelysmall.A.WaltonLitzand DavidHayman
had pioneered the study of Joyce's manuscriptsin the late fifties and
earlysixties, but they had had veryfew followers.
At the time, the vast majorityof Joyce criticswere not interested in
textual matters. In the late seventies and early eighties, the Joyceans
had been discovering"theory,"and a younger generation of Joyceans
were reading the psychoanalysisand philosophy of Jacques Lacan,
Jacques Derridaand Julia Kristeva:the first had given a key-note ad-
dress at the 1975 ParisJoyce Symposium;the other two lectured at
the 1984 FrankfurtSymposium. It was therefore inevitable that the
most importantearly reviews of the new edition were written either
by textualcriticswho had not workedon Joyce or byJoyceanswithout
interest or training in editorial theory and practice.As a result most
of the early reviews in influentialjournalssuch as the TimesLiterary
Supplement, the London Review of Books and the New YorkReview of
Books were written by senior Joyceans with little or no experience in
textual matters: Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, and Richard Ellmann.

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 Controversial Editions - 131

From the camp of the new generation of textual scholars, who

were challenging the Greg-Bowers-Tanselleschool of editing, the
nineteenth-centuryspecialistJerome McGannreviewed Gabler'sedi-
tion in Criticism under the title, "Ulyssesas a PostmodernText:The
GablerEdition."As his title implies,McGanncelebratedGabler'sbreak
with the copy-text editorial practice then dominant in the United
States,and he saw the new Ulyssesin the firstplace as a seminal work
comparableto George Kaneand E.TalbotDonaldson'sedition ofPiers
Plowman and the revolutionin Shakespearestudies firstconsolidated
in Gary Taylor and Michael Warren's The Division of the Kingdoms:
Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear Understandably, McGann
was especially thrilled at what he saw as Gabler's departure from
the Greg-Bowers-Tanselleconcept of final authorialintentions. The
review came out in the same year as McGann'sopen challenge to
the old new bibliography, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. In
fact, in his reviewMcGannstressedpreciselythose featuresof Gabler's
work that go beyond or againstthe Greg-Bowers-Tanselletradition,
especiallythe genetic presentationwhich McGannclaimsturns Ulysses
into a postmodern text, the fact "completelyoverhauls the way we
might think about the text as a whole [McGann's own italics],"'z and
that it is "a text which Foucault would have admired, a text which
re-presentsa socio-historyof Joyce's Ulysses"(299).
McGann'senthusiastic support for Gabler's edition is surprising
and seems to have been motivatedmore by tacticalreasons than by
real sympathy,given that the basic thrust of Gabler'sapproach runs
counter to McGann's own position. In A Critique of Modern Textual
Criticism,McGannmakes it clearthat the publicationof a literarytext
is essentiallya collaborativeeffort,especiallyin the modern period. As
a result, a conscientious editor should not follow the Greg-Bowers-
Tanselledoctrine of working with the final manuscript,but typically
choose a work's first edition as copy-text-which is afterall the form
of the book that the author knew would be presented to the reading
public.
But this is exactlywhat Gablerdoes not do in his edition. In Ulysses:
TheCorrectedTextthere is not only no copy-text,the first edition is
explicitlyrejectedas a basisto work from,and latereditions are simply
not taken into considerationat all. The "basecopy,"or "basistext"as
Gablerhimself calls it, is built up from the existing textual evidence,
from the first more or less complete autographto the final proofs.
In the establishment of his genetic text, Gabler makes a theoretical
distinction between documents of transmission and documents of

2
Jerome McGann, "Ulysses as a Postmodern Text: The Gabler Edition," Criticism 27
(1985), 291.

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 -
232- GEERTLERNOUT

composition that explicitly excludes the possibility of all forms of

collaborationbetween the author and others. Greg's acceptance of
"accidentals"at least formed one element in the theory of copy-text
where "social"principles of a house style are considered to be more
importantthan the author's own. But in Gabler'sedition there is no
more overall authority,and only those variantsfor specific passages
are accepted that survive in an authorial hand. So-called "passive
authorization,"the author's silently accepting a variantreading that
is not in his or her hand, is ruled out in principle. That McGannis
aware of the difference between his and Gabler'spositions is clear
when he proposes to replaceGabler's"continuousmanuscripttext"by
a "continuousproduction text,"which would include transmissional
variants(292). The only conclusion seems to be that McGannwas so
keen on accepting an edition that went beyond the Greg-Bowers-
Tanselletraditionthat he was content to turn a blind eye to some of
its real features.
Other representativesof the New New Bibliography,the editors
who wanted to move awayfrom the restrictionsof the Greg-Bowers-
Tansellemode and who were generallymore sympatheticto develop-
ments in literarytheory,havewrittenwith sympathyof Gabler'swork.
In Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, the most
radicalrepresentativesof what could also be called "postmodernist"
textual criticismrefer to Gabler'sUlyssesas an example of what they
are trying to achieve. Peter Shillingsburgconsiders the synoptic text
of Ulysses with Michael Warren's King Lear and his own Thackeray,
as an attempt "to emphasize alternativetexts, or multiple texts, or
indeterminatetexts."'3In the same volume Paul Eggertsees Gabler's
edition as an important phase in "the poststructuralistchallenge to
Anglo-Americanediting procedures"(73), and DavidGreetham,who
has gone furthestin reconcilingtextualcriticismand post-structuralist
theory,contraststhe postmodern synoptic text on the left hand page
with the conservativeand restrictivereadingtext on the right. George
Bornstein, the editor of another recent book on editorial theory in
the humanities, even called the synoptic text of Ulysses "the current
edition most embodying"a palimpsesticview of a literarywork in
which the text "becomesless a bearerof a fixed final inscriptionthan
a site of the process of inscription, in which acts of composition
and transmission occur before our eyes."4 Initiallythe majorityof
Joyceans, blissfully unaware of textual issues, read the edition from

3 Peter Shillingsburg, "The Autonomous Author, the Sociology of Texts, and the
Polemics of Textual Criticism," in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary
Theory, ed. Philip Cohen (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1991), 41.
4 George Bornstein, "Introduction," Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities,
ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993), 4.

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 ControversialEditions -33

their own critical or theoretical perspectives, with theoreticians such

as Suzette Henke describing the 1984 Ulysses as a deconstructive
statement:

Wewill be forced to read Ulyssesas we now confrontDerrida'sGlas-as

a deconstructive,many-layeredtextualgame of dialecticalcomponents.
Ulyssesbecomes a lexical playfield with infinitepossibilitiesfor joyous
disseminationof the semes that compose its textualvariants.5

But at the moment when Henke's essay was published, the mood
among Joyceans had changed: her essay appeared as part of the pro-
ceedings of a conference in Monaco where Gabler himself had been
absent and where feelings were decidedly less positive than in the early
reviews. Quite a few of the senior Joyceans, one of them a member
of Gabler's advisory board, expressed their disagreement with some
of the concrete decisions and with the overall choices made by the
editor, a discontent that would lead to Ulysses: AReview of Three Texts,
a Gabler repair kit designed by two members of the advisory board,
Philip Gaskell and Clive Hart. But this new spirit of discontent was not
limited to senior Joyceans: there was a new kid on the block.
One textual critic did not agree with the unanimous admiration
for Gabler's achievement: John Kidd had already been opposed to
Gabler's methodology before the edition was published. He first at-
tacked Gabler's work in an interview in The Washington Post, and he
repeated the assault at the April 1985 conference of the Society for
Textual Scholarship where he concentrated on what he himself called
"factual errors and heavy-handed emendations." In June 1988, Kidd
published an article in The New York Review of Books in which he
repeated the charges he had made the year before. But it was only
in February 1989, in "AnInquiry into Ulysses: The Corrected Text," an
essay published in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America,
that Kidd was prepared to move beyond the discussion of individual
mistakes and "errors of execution."
Surprisingly, Kidd's major statement contained next to no disagree-
ment on theoretical principles. What it does do instead is dissect a
few phrases in the "Foreword" of the 1984 edition. Kidd needs almost
four pages of text to show that Gabler's claim that his is the first
critical edition of any of Joyce's texts is incorrect. The next section is
devoted to Gabler's notion of copy-text, because, according to Kidd,
Greg's essay on "The Rationale of Copy-Text"is "[t]he only work on
the theory of textual criticism or principles of scholarly editing cited in

5 Suzette Henke, "Reconstructing Ulysses in a Deconstructive Mode," in Assessing the

1984 Ulysses, ed. C. George Sandulescu and Clive Hart (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe,
1986), 88.

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2-34 - GEERT LERNOUT

Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition or in any of Gabler's writing

on Ulysses.",6Thisis a deliberatemisreading:Gablerdoes not, on page
1879, refer to Greg's essay but to "Greg'srationale"and thus to the
concept as Bowers and Tansellehad developed it.
Also, what Gablerhad suggested in his TheLibraryreview of the
publication of the facsimile of the Rosenbachmanuscriptand else-
where, did not constitute, as Kiddclaims, "anew view of the compo-
sition of Ulysses"(p. 420).7 In realityit is an attemptto draw editorial
conclusions from the view of the genesis of Ulysses that had been
developed by many scholars:A. WaltonLitzinitially,and then in the
mid-seventies,MichaelGroden and Philip Gaskell.8 Since we do not
have a finalmanuscriptof Ulysses,and sinceJoyce continued to revise
until the verylast page proofs,we do not seem to haveanyother choice
than to take as our basic text the final authorialmanuscriptversion of
each segment of the text. Gabler'ssynoptic text is the result of this
initial work, showing where every individualauthorialsegment was
first introduced, whereas in the reading text only the last authorial
variantof everyindividualsegment is retained.It is clearthat Gabler's
use of the term "copy-text"does differradicallyfrom that advancedby
Greg,but it should also be clearthat Gabler'ssolution of the particular
difficultiesinvolvedin editing a text like Ulyssesat least deserves to be
taken seriously.
Contempt is also evident in a discussion of Gabler'sessay in Stud-
ies in Bibliography. In uncharacteristically harsh diction G. Thomas
Tanselle describes Gabler's "Synchronyand Diachrony"in terms of
"pretentiouslanguage"and "thisverbiage."9In one of his regularre-
view articlesof the literatureon textualediting,this time concentrating
on the period of the late seventies and the first half of the eighties,

6 John Kidd, 'An Inquiry into Ulysses: The Corrected Text,"Papers of the Bibliograph-
ical Society ofAmerica 82 (1988), 417.
7 Gabler's most important statements preceding the edition itself are: Review of
Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, ed. by C. Driver, The Library, 5th Series, 32
(1977), 177-82; 'And Now: Ulysses as James Joyce Wrote It: Working on a Critical
Edition," German Research: Reports of the DFG (1979), 25-26; "Computer-Aided Crit-
ical Edition of Ulysses," ALLCBulletin 8 (1981), 232-48; "JamesJoyce as Author and
Scribe: A Problem in Editing 'Eumaeus,' "Nordic Rejoycings 1982: In Commemoration
of the Birth of JamesJoyce (James Joyce Society of Sweden and Finland), 98-105; "The
Synchrony and Diachrony of Texts: Practice and Theory of the Critical Edition of James
Joyce's Ulysses," TEXT1 (1981;, published in 1984), 305-26.
8 A. Walton Litz, The Art of JamesJoyce (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961); Michael Groden,
"Ulysses"in Progress (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977); chapter eleven of Philip Gaskell,
From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1978), 213-
44.
9 G. Thomas Tanselle, "Historicism and Critical Editing," Studies in Bibliography 39
(1986), 37 and 38.

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 Controversial Editions 2.35

TansellefiercelyattackedGabler'stheoreticalgroundingof his synop-

tic approach. AfterbrieflyreprimandingGablerfor his use of repro-
ductions,'0 Tansellerepeated his objections againstthe 1984 Ulysses
in a review article on editorial theory published in the second half
of the eighties. In a criticalreadingof both McGann'spostmodernist
defense of Gabler'swork and of an articleby Gabler,Tansellestressed
that McGannwas wrong in describingthe 1984 Ulysses as innovative
and that Gablerfailed to elucidatethe theoreticaltension between the
synopticand the readingtexts." Tanselleis quite unfairto Gablerwhen
he concentrates his fire on a few infelicitous expressions instead of
acknowledging that the peculiar problems in editing Ulysses can be
well served by a synoptic presentationof the evidence. The result of
the controversywas that RandomHouse, the Americanpublisher of
the edition, establishedan independentcommitteeof textualscholars
(among them Tanselle)to evaluatethe edition, but the committee was
dissolved a year later without a report (for reasons not connected to
the Ulysses editions) and the publisherdecided to bring out the old
1961 edition.
In the context of Anglo-Americaneditorialtheory, Gablerinitially
seems to have been hailed as a new prophet by the New New Bib-
liographers who were making their mark in the mid-eighties and
who thought, not alwayscorrectly,1. that the new Ulysses offered a
powerful challenge to the Greg-Bowers-Tanselleconsensus against
which they rebelled and 2. that it did so because it was in manyways
closer to Germanor Frencheditorialtheory and practice. Elsewhere
I have attempted to define Gabler's unique position in relation to
three differenteditorialtraditions;' here I wish to stress the fact that
Gabler'swork was also criticizedfrom within the Europeantradition.
Apartfrom Gabler and his collaborators,few Europeancritics be-
came involved in the debate afterthe Monacoconference, and there
was only one reaction from a representativeof the Italo-Frenchedito-
rial tradition. Paola Pugliattiof the Universityof Pisa has published a
review and two articleson the new Ulysses,and she took part in a de-
bate with Gablerat the 1988 VeniceJoyce Symposium.In an articlein
Dispositio Pugliattiwas able to elucidate the theoretical implications

io See also G. Thomas Tanselle, "Reproductions and Scholarship," Studies in Bibliog-

raphy 42 (1989), 32.
"1 G. Thomas Tanselle. "Historicism and Critical Editing," Studies in Bibliography 39

(1986): 1-46.
It "Lacritique textuelle anglo-americaine: une etude de cas." Genesis 9 (1996), 45-65.
"'Critique genetique' und Philologie." Rildiger Nutt-Kofoth, Botho Plachta, H.T.M.van
Vliet, and Hermann Zwerschina, eds. Text und Edition: Positionen und Perspektiven
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2000), 121-42. Translated as "Genetic Criticism and
Philology," TEXT14 (2002), 53-56.

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 -
2.36 GEERTLERNOUT

of the reservations she had expressed in her review, since regrettably,

she writes, most of the reviewers' attention had been focussed on
the critical discussion of single emendations, instead of looking at
the "global textual philosophy (and ideology)" of Gabler's work. The
Ulysses edition is based on an editorial attitude "which systemati-
cally shuns explanation, which hardly ever manifests uncertainty and
which often tends to solve crucial textual problems by the explicit,
capitalized, imperative STET";13all of these are the direct result of
the critics' inability to take into account novel ways of looking at a
text. "Text"is then, via an excursion into etymology, described as both
product and process. Pugliatti writes that the recent history of criticism
and theory reveals a dialectical vacillation between an aesthetics of
the work of art as process, beginning with Mallarm and Valery, and
the view of the text as the "final, inevitable product of a teleological
process" which Pugliatti attributes to theorists like Edgar Allan Poe and
Gottfried Benn. There is only one form of theory that takes both into
account: semio-philology or textual genetics. Historically, the study
of variants in Italian "philology" made it easier for structuralism to
make its mark on criticism and theory in Italy,because variants always
include both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. The same claim
can be made on a theoretical level: the variants of a text are to be taken
seriously as independent texts in their own right, and not as necessary
stages on the way to the texte clos:
In short [... ] it is precisely in the field of philological scholarship that
a double perspective (text as product vs text as process, dynamicsvs
systematics, aesthetics of the text vs aesthetics of the writing process) has
been theoretically asserted and critically practiced as not only a possible
perspective but also an extremely productive one. ([... ] 118)

The "comparatively green field" of textologie or textual genetics, on

the other hand, introduces a new textual theory by radically historiciz-
ing the text. The final text is no longer the definitive text in which all
of the earlier versions find their ultimate destination, but each stage,
each avant-texte, is a text in its own right:

In short, the various stages of elaborationmakingup the avant-texte

which constitute the privilegedobject of study of textual genetics do
not have the status of "preparation" vs "thefinal realization",although
the last stage is seen as "un moment d' quilibre" (Bellemin-Nol, Le texte
15), since they do not aim at a textual organization in which eventually
what is said is well said. (120)

13PaolaPugliatti,"TheNew Ulyssesbetween Philology,Semioticsand TextualGenet-

ics,"Dispositio 12 (1987), 114.

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 Controversial Editions - 1-37

Yet the study of the avant-texte does not entail the analysis of a
series of synchronic stages, it "outlinesa dynamiccourse which can
highlight-in a way that the final stage cannot do-the internal logic
of the writingprocess and the inner impulseswhich makeup a writer's
scripture"(120). In this way,genetics moves awayfroma poetics of the
text towards a poetics of scripture,an approachthat does not see the
movement from a first draftto the final text in teleological terms, but
in termsof difference;in this perspective,"thetext acquiresa new time
and space dimension: a different"chronotypicitd" (123). The result of
these considerationsis, still accordingto Pugliatti,that
it is not possibleto envisageandaccepta simplisticnotionof mistake
withoutfurthertheoreticaldefinition.Andit is equallyincorrectto
postulatethesheerexistence,inthecomplexity ofthetextualprocess,of
the Author'sLastIntentionsand assertthe possibilityof reconstructing
them.(126)

In the final analysis, there are no authorialmistakes. Editorialcor-

rections should be replaced by "an activityof reconstruction of the
inner relations holding togetherthe system(s) of variants" (126). The
practicalramificationsof this theoreticalstandfor an edition of Ulysses
must be clear.
In the following discussion of the circumstancesof the publica-
tion of Ulysses, based on her comments in the review of the edi-
tion, Pugliattistresses the difficultiesand the contingency of Joyce's
writing. As examples she mentions the change from "if you do not
write"to "if you do not wrote" by a type-setterwhich Joyce actively
validated by a later comment of Bloom's ("wonder did she wrote
it herself"); the rearrangementof parts of "Penelope"by MacAlmon
whilst typing the chapter (and Joyce's subsequent comment that he
had noticed the changes and had accepted them); and the famous
story of Samuel Beckett taking dictation and entering "Come in" in
the text of Finnegans Wakewhen somebody knocked at the door. The
conclusion, transformedinto a question, is: "Does not the author,by
his conscious or unconscious sanctioningimplicitlyvalidate a whole
system, the new system established by the departure?"(130). Since
in this "system"there cannot be a "mistake,"the editorial work can-
not use the demand for coherence to institute routine procedures of
emendation. Pugliatti'scritique of Gabler'swork is therefore funda-
mentally theoretical, as opposed to Kidd's,which was for the most
partdirected at what he called the edition's "errorsof execution".She
attacksGablerfor adheringto the Greg-Bowersschool:

Now,if we considerGabler'spretensionto offerin the synopsisa text "in

progress," his complete and exclusive trust in a remarkably traditional
philological school is, to say the least, surprising. The information, in

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238- GEERTLERNOUT

anycase, confirmsthe reader'ssuppositionthatthe most importantthe-

oreticalissues of recenttextualcriticismhavebeen completelyneglected
(becausethey are wholly ignored) by the editor of Ulysses.(134)

This is a serious accusation, though hard to understand in the light of

the attack on Gabler's "genetic principles" by Tanselle, the major rep-
resentative of the Greg-Bowers school, and the edition's very positive
reception among the New New Bibliographers. Like Tanselle, Pugliatti
focuses on the issue of "final intentions." Apart from the fact that
the gaps in the transmission history of Ulysses make it impossible to
reconstruct adequately a final stage of textualization,

what is hardlyconceivableis the possibility(and advisability)of envis-

aging an authorial teleological intentionalityother than the one im-
plicitlyexpressed by the author in his strenuous work of revision. We
cannot, that is, in any way overlook the fact that all the transmissional
stageswere accuratelyrevisedand-one should suppose-sequentially
approvedby Joyce himself, that these were by no means only transmis-
sional and revisional,since while revisingthe author was at the same
time composing, i.e., continuallyre-shapingcontexts and co-texts and
that consequently what he approved of in the various stages of the
transmissional-compositionalphase was a number of differenttextual
systems (135-36).

Pugliatti especially censures Gabler for providing a "textual image"

made up of sources on different levels of the text's development. While
the different versions all existed at some particular moment in time as
"variants,"the text of this edition never existed until 1984. The alterna-
tive would have been an edition with two apparatuses at the bottom of
the page: "asynchronic one in which the decisions which determined
the constitution of what the editor believes is the most authoritative
text are justified, and a diachronic one aiming at providing the story of
the text's formation giving evidence of its progressive development".
(138)
In an essay in the James Joyce Quarterly, Pugliatti re-emphasized
her theoretical objections, now with examples of the individual read-
ings she objected to, which were, with two exceptions, adequately
dismissed by Wolfgang Scheppe as due to a failure to interpret the di-
acritical system correctly (which, by implication but ironically, proves
Pugliatti's point that the diacritical system is far too complex to be re-
ally helpful). What is indeed interesting here is that Pugliatti's attitude
toward the theoretical implications of editing has been expanded by
a reference to one representative of the American editorial tradition,
Jerome McGann. In the second footnote, Pugliatti quotes from A Cri-
tique ofModern Textual Criticism in which, against Gabler's emphasis
on authorial authorization, McGann stresses "the social role to be

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 Controversial Editions 239

assigned to printing institutionsin the coming into public existence

of a modern literarywork,"but in the fourth footnote she refers to
McGann'sreview as "[o]ne of the most problematicand theoretically
interestingdiscussionsof Gabler'sedition to date"(53). The reasonfor
this stance is obvious: McGannhad hailed the left-handside version
as based on a post-modernview of the "instability" of texts.
Muchmore than that of Kidd,Pugliatti'scritiqueof Gabler'swork is
theoreticalin nature:in the three articlesdevoted to the 1984 Ulysses,
she makes it clear that the German editor has failed to take into
account the new developments in editing that firstappearedin Italian
philology and that were later developed in Frenchgenetic criticism.
Contraryto these developments in French-Italianeditorial theory,
and, more importantly,againstJoyce'spracticein writingand revising
Ulysses,Gablerinsists on final intentions and on the teleological view
of the work as the final goal of the developing text. Partof Pugliatti's
failure to appreciate Gabler'stheory and practiceis certainlydue to
the misunderstandingthat continues to bedevil criticswho look at a
differentcriticaland theoreticalparadigmthan their own, and in this
respect she seems to be fightingon two fronts at the same time. On
the one hand she wants to convince her Frenchreadersthat critique
genetique had a precursorin Italianphilology,and on the other she
intends to censure Anglo-Americaneditorialtheory for being out of
touch with what is happening in the field in France and Italy. But
accusations of parochialismcan always be reversed: she seems to
know verylittle about the complexityof discussionswithin the Anglo-
Americaneditorialtradition,and she appearsto be totallyunawareof
the equallyimportantdevelopmentsin Germaneditorialtheory,which
are surely more relevant to a proper evaluation of Gabler'sefforts.
Pugliattirightlychides Joyceansfor their incompetence in translating
Italian and Latinwords and phrases ("Tsorprendente la liberta che
alcuni critici joyciani si prendono con le traduzionida brani latini e
whereas one of the works cited is firstdescribed as a "tesi
italiani"'a4),
di B.A. presentata all' Universita di Princeton [... ] con la supervisione
di A. WaltonLitz"(213), but eight pages later it has become a "tesidi
dottorato."
Muchmore interestingis a look at Pugliatti'stheoreticalantecedents,
which are primarilyItalian, although she does acknowledge French
genetic criticism and the attackon Anglo-Americanbibliographyby
Jerome McGann.
The mainbackgroundof Pugliatti'scritiqueis the work of the Italian
editor and semioticianCesareSegre.Segreis one of those rareeditors

14 Paola Pugliatti, "II nuovo 'Ulysses' e la critica del testo," Strumenti critici, N.S., a.
1, No. 2 (1986), 221.

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2.40- GEERTLERNOUT

who is also active as a semiotician and theoreticianof literature;one

year after the publication of Pugliatti'sreview, Segre published the
monumental Avviamento all'analisi del testo letterario, which was
translatedinto English in 1988. With Umberto Eco, he is one of the
fathers of semiotics in Italy. It is due to his influence that, first in
the early sixties, a majorityof literarycritics moved from a Crocean
idealist aesthetics to a formalistsemiotics, and second, in the mid-
seventies, from this formalist semiotics to a new awareness of the
role of history and of philology. It is Segre's opinion (and Pugliatti
follows him), that Italiansemiotics, precisely because of its tradition
of criticism based on variants,was much more open to diachronic
approachesof the text than most Frenchstructuralists.In this respect,
Italiancriticismanticipatedthe Frenchgenetic critics'move towards a
diachronicinterest in the development of texts.
The most surprising absence in the controversyover the Gabler
Ulysses is that of the Frenchgenetic criticsthemselves. At the begin-
ning of the eighties, a new generation of FrenchJoyceans combined
elements of post-structuralismwith an awareness of the genesis of
the work of art into a researchproject that has occupied the French
academic critics up to the present moment. Although most of the
attention is directed at Finnegans Wake,a lot of these criticshave also
worked on the genesis of Ulysses,so it is surprisingthat there are no
Frenchcontributionsto the debate on the new Ulysses.
Whereas the immediate reaction to Gabler'sedition in the Joyce
industrywas overwhelminglypositive, the second wave was firstcriti-
cal and then openly hostile. Since only a tiny minorityof Joyce critics
is interested in textual or editorial issues, quite a lot of the criticism
has been theoretical or aesthetic. This is most evident in the 1990
issue of Studies in the Novel, ostensiblydevoted to a discussion of the
Gableredition but in realitya collection of essaysthatonly occasionally
touched on textual issues. Especiallythe theoreticalor poststructural-
ist criticsmanaged to obscure the issue by claimingthat either Gabler
or Kiddis deconstructivelymore kosher (I have seen very convincing
argumentsfor both positions).
Since 1990 things have become quieter, and, especially in recent
years, the philosophical-theoretical paradigm in Joyce studies has
been replaced by an interest in culturalstudies, which in its turn has
resulted in what has been called a "returnto the archive,"a renewed
interest in biographicalstudies of Joyce on the one hand, and a new
interest in attempts to situate Joyce more properly in the cultural and
ideological matrixof his time. At the same time, partlywhile Gabler
was still preparing his edition, the FrenchNational Science Council
installed a new "laboratoire" for the study of modern manuscripts
from the perspective of what its director Louis Hay called "critique
g6n6tique" and a small group of young Joyce scholars formed a group

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 Controversial Editions - 241

that has been studyingJoyce's notes and manuscriptsfor Ulysses and

Finnegans Wakefor twenty years now. In 1990, aftertwo decades of
pursuing other interests, DavidHaymanreturnedto the study of the
Finnegans Wakemanuscriptswith his book TheWakein Transit,and
the sameFinnegans Wakenotebooks thatwere the object of thatbook
attractedthe attentionof scholarsin the US,in Ireland,and in Belgium.
Since 1990 the internationalJoyce symposiahave alwaysfeaturedtex-
tual and genetic panels, and last year'sconference in Triestehad four
differentpanels on textual or genetic issues and a full day discussion
of electronic editing. The most exciting plenarypaper in Triestewas
givenby MichaelGroden,who reportedhis examinationof the troveof
new Ulyssesand Finnegans Wakemanuscriptsthat have recentlybeen
acquired (at considerablecost) by the NationalLibraryin Ireland.
In these new contexts Gabler's edition has become less contro-
versial and a Trieste panel on his edition even set out to become
a vindication of his work. The final irony is that discussions about
the Gableredition between scholars, be they editors or critics, have
had less impact on the study of Joyce than the hard realities of the
marketplace.Whathas happened to Ulyssesin the global marketsince
Gabler?RandomHouse went back to the 1961 edition, arguablythe
worst version of the text. In the window of opportunity between
the lapse of copyright in Joyce's works and its re-instatementby the
European Union, every British publishing company brought out its
own version of the text, the most interestinga photographicreprint
of the original1922 edition.John Kidd,who hadbeen preparinga new
edition for Norton, announcedthe new workseveraltimes but it never
materialized.On Bloomsday1997, DanisRose,one of Gabler'scollab-
orators,brought out a Reader'sEditionthat was generallyrejectedby
both textual editors andJoyceansand that alienatedthe Joyce Estate,
which fought the edition in the Londoncourts. Since then, editions of
Joyce's work with permissionfrom the Estatehave become extremely
unlikely

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