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.
Vol. 6 No. 17 · 20 September 1984 » Denis Donoghue » Denis Donoghue examines the new edition of ‘Ulysses’ (print version)
pages 14-15 | 4092 words