Text (Not Manuscript) Transcriptions: Stepping-Stones to The Dublin “Ulysses” Papers

Abstract

Text (Not Manuscript) Transcriptions:Stepping-Stones to The Dublin “Ulysses” Papers Hans Walter Gabler (bio) The Dublin “Ulysses” Papers, by James Joyce, edited and annotated by Danis Rose. Six Volumes. Revised Edition. East Lansing, Michigan: House of Breathings, 2012. 1268 pages. $1000.00. A week before Christmas 2012, there arrived on my desk six large-format, paper-bound volumes. They carry a rights notice that reads: “© Danis Rose, Revised Edition; November 2012.” The preceding (first) edition was announced in April 2012 and, at a subsequent unspecified date, saw distribution. Some orders had been met by the end of May/beginning of June, in time for the 2012 International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin. No precise account is given in the revised edition of just why, within a short interval, a revision was deemed necessary, let alone how extensive it was. The foreword addressing the revised edition (printed and paginated identically in all six volumes) voices generalities about it being “well-nigh impossible to get [transcriptions] letter-perfect” and devotes just one sentence to the additional labor invested: “Over the course of the last year the texts …, especially the draft versions of the episodes, have been subjected to a major overhaul, and the result is a much more exact version” (7). This, together with some further remarks in the foreword, reads like a veiled admission that, since the “overhaul” was undertaken over the course of a year and thus was apparently begun well back in 2011, the edition of April-May 2012 was likely less than well considered and should not have seen publication in the first place—but let that pass. I have known Danis Rose for some thirty-five years. When the editorial work for the critical and synoptic edition of Ulysses began, we worked closely together for a brief span, and our conceptions for formalizing in print the genetic dimension of Joyce’s texts—of Ulysses, in my case, of Finnegans Wake, in his—were so close that we traded solutions to mutual benefit. Of his generation, Rose is one of the few richly experienced readers and transcribers of James Joyce’s hand. John O’Hanlon is his life-long fraternal partner, and together they form a sharp-eyed team whose results I would go a long way in trusting. But trust is subjective and can in scholarly exchange never exist without the counter-balance of objective checks and controls. [End Page 655] The volumes state that they present the Dublin “Ulysses” Papers transcribed, edited, and annotated. But what do these three terms mean, and how are we to know that the volumes live up to the expectations they raise? Fundamentally, the relationship of the six volumes entitled the Dublin “Ulysses” Papers to Joyce’s manuscripts held in the National Library of Ireland (NLI) are (to put it mildly) tenuous. Their catalog signatures are given, but as subsidiary references only. The cataloguing system of the NLI Ulysses holdings are nowhere discussed, nor are their provenances or their material and genetic status individually illuminated. Most seriously, we cannot be sure that the original NLI manuscripts, or even just the NLI’s digital reproductions of them, were the immediate source for Rose’s transcriptions. No acknowledgement of, or confirmation from, the NLI as owner of the originals is given, nor is the correlation of the transcriptions, immediate or mediate, to the originals defined. Throughout the six volumes, moreover, not a single manuscript or notebook page or opening is reproduced by which one might gain an impression, let alone an understanding, of how the transcriptions were performed or by which one might assess how good the transcription result is, both textually (in transliteration) and analytically (in the deployment of the diacritics). Since the NLI’s Joyce holdings are freely accessible on the internet, it is true, we can correlate the digital images there given with the transcriptions in the Rose volumes. The Dublin “Ulysses” Papers, alas, do not inform us of the possibility, let alone specifically guide us to the sources which the NLI digitally lays open. Seeing how strictly the six volumes of The Dublin “Ulysses” Papers thus dissociate themselves from the originals they purport to offer in transcription (as...