Odyssey of a Corrected Classic

By Paul Gray

ULYSSES: A CRITICAL AND SYNOPTIC EDITION Prepared by Hans Walter Gabler; Garland; 3 volumes; 1,919 pages; $200

For 62 years, scholars and zealous readers have heard confirmed rumors about the typographical mistakes in Ulysses. The first person to notice them was the author himself. Shortly before his epic novel appeared in February 1922, James Joyce wrote an editor: "I an extremely irritated by all those printer's errors." They were, in part, his own fault. An obsessive reviser, Joyce scrawled some 100,000 additional words in the margins of galleys as they were sent to him for proofreading. These changes had to be incorporated into what was al ready becoming a palimpsest of confusion: diverse typists' errant renderings of various stages of Joyce's manuscript, compounded by a team of French-speaking printers who were being hectored by the author to get the finished product into his hands on the occasion of his 40th birthday.

The deadline was met, although the book Joyce saw was not exactly the one he thought he had written. Instantly recognized as a classic, Ulysses went through subsequent editions that corrected some mistakes while adding others. A nagging question arose and persisted: How to distinguish the novel's intentional complexities from accidental garbles?

The whole world has not been waiting for an answer, to be sure, but here it is anyhow. Seven years in the making (the same length of time it took Joyce to write the book), this new edition of Ulysses has been painstakingly reconstructed, with the aid of a computer, from all of the surviving documents of composition. It rectifies some 5,000 gaffes in previous publications of the novel.

That number, in isolation, sounds horrendous; indeed, any botching of a written word in an acknowledged masterpiece is one too many. But Ulysses consists of well over 400,000 words; so the margin of error has hovered somewhere under 2%. Furthermore, the vast majority of corrections made by Professor Hans Walter Gabler of the University of Munich and his colleagues involve spelling and punctuation; word changes or additions amount to a fractional percentage of the text that transformed 20th century literature.

There may thus be less in this expansive and expensive production than meets the eye. But the result, even with a price tag of $200, is by no means negligible. For openers, at least one major puzzle posed by earlier editions of the novel has been solved. Stephen Dedalus, a brooding young poet who wanders through Dublin June 16, 1904, is haunted by the recent death of his mother. Late at night, drunk and hallucinating, Stephen sees her in a vision and pleads: "Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men." She does not do so. But the identity of that word is contained in a passage, earlier in the novel, that was omitted from the first and all following editions until this one (see box). The word is love.

This discovery underscores the connections between Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, the other hero of Ulysses. For it is Bloom who utters the word that Stephen wishes to hear: "Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred." The fact that he does so when Stephen is not present makes their later meeting and parting more poignant and ironic.

The additional or revised material also clarifies a number of Bloom's thoughts as his odyssey through Dublin progresses. In the morning, the nonpracticing Jew drops in on a Catholic Mass and, when leaving, makes an embarrassing discovery: "Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all the time. Women enjoy it. Annoyed if you don't." Why should women be annoyed if men do not enjoy being unbuttoned? The question disappears when this rumination is unscrambled and set the way Joyce intended: "Women enjoy it. Never tell you. But we. Excuse, miss, there's a (whh!) just a (whh!) fluff. Or their skirt behind, placket unhooked. Glimpses of the moon. Annoyed if you don't."

Bloom knows and tries to forget that his wife Molly has an assignation with her lover planned for 4 p.m. But random events keep jogging his memory: "Not yet. At four he. Ah1 said four." What Joyce wanted Bloom to think at this point turns out to be crisper and more to the point: "Not yet. At four she. Who said four?" Later, Bloom mulls over the difficulty of beginning chats with strange women: "Suppose I spoke to her. What about? Bad plan however if you don't know how to end the conversation. Ask them a question they ask you another. Good idea if you're in a cart." That last sentence makes no sense at all, nor was it ever intended to. Six words were dropped from Joyce's prose: "Good idea if you're stuck. Gain time. But then you're in a cart."

There are literally hundreds of such small improvements, none earthshaking individually but each adding the freshness and precision so typical of Joyce's prose. A character's cries are not "birdlike," a word perilously close to cliche, but "bird-sweet." As Bloom watches the end of a fireworks display, he sees not a "lost long candle" but a "last lonely candle." A cloud covering the sun does so not only "slowly" but also "wholly." The changes restore both clarity and melodious strains of the Joycean music as well.

This new Ulysses will give scholars plenty to talk and quarrel about for years to come. That is exactly how Joyce would have wanted it. Shortly before his novel was published, he wrote a friend, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality." Now, thanks to this herculean labor of scholarship, the disputes and the enjoyment will encounter not unintended riddles but the very words that Joyce chose for his posterity. --By Paul Gray