Denis Donoghue teaches English, Irish and American literature at New York University. His recent books include Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (2000) and The American Classics (2005).
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Vol. 6 No. 17 · 20 September 1984
pages 14-15 | 4092 words
Denis Donoghue examines the new edition of ‘Ulysses’
Denis Donoghue
- Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition by James Joyce, edited by Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior
Garland, 1919 pp, $200.00, May 1984, ISBN 0 8240 4375 8
- James Joyce by Richard Ellmann
Oxford, 900 pp, £8.95, March 1984, ISBN 0 19 281465 6
Joyce’s Ulysses was published on his 40th birthday, 2 February 1922, in a limited edition of 1000 numbered copies. The text was full of misprints, as Joyce irritatedly knew. As late as November, he had been tinkering with the last chapters, getting further detail from Dublin – ‘Is it possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself down from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 of the ground and drop unhurt?’ he wrote to his Aunt Josephine – and the galleys were demanding attention he couldn’t give them. On 6 November he complained to Harriet Shaw Weaver that ‘working as I do amid piles of notes at a table in a hotel I cannot possibly do this mechanical part with my wretched eye and a half.’ He evidently decided that he couldn’t do much about the printer’s errors in time for the birthday, but he hoped they would be corrected ‘in future editions’.
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[*] A two-part essay by William Empson, advancing this interpretation, was published in this journal: Vol. 4, Nos 15 and 16.
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Letters
Vol. 6 No. 19 · 18 October 1984
From Craig Raine
SIR: In his review of Hans Walter Gabler’s new edition of Ulysses (LRB, Vol. 6, No 17), Denis Donoghue wonders whether I’d have quite such a cavalier attitude to misprints in my own work as, by his account, I have to those in Ulysses. As it happens, there are two footling misprints in my new book, Rich, and there is an equally unimportant misprint in the poem you printed in the same number of LRB. I don’t mind.
On the other hand, I do mind about misrepresentation. The burden of my review of the Garland Ulysses was that Hans Gabler, in his preface, exaggerates the state of textual corruption. Of the vaunted seven errors per page, the majority are manifestly trivial. A few are significant – as I said in my review. If Professor Donoghue thinks all misprints are important, why didn’t he pass on to your readers the misprint I found in the new text? After all, in discussing the lengthy restoration in the library episode, he seems content to follow my sceptical argument without adding anything new to it.
Craig Raine
Faber, London WC1
