Wherefore re-Joyce?

Bruce Arnold

On the cover of the new Penguin printing of James Joyce's Ulysses it is claimed that the book is being published `to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Joyce's death'. The publishers are a year late. Joyce died in the early hours of 13 January, 1941.

Joyce's works went out of copyright on I January 1992. It may have been this which prompted Penguin to produce a post- copyright edition of Ulysses, paying no royalties to the James Joyce Estate, but it was not to celebrate Joyce. Though they promise 'new editions' of the writer's works, for Ulysses they have gone back to the 1960 version of the hook, which they reprint without the textual annotations which the general editor of the Penguin Joyce, Seamus Deane, originally said would be part of the updating process.

Of the many things which are wrong with these first four volumes in the projected seven in the series, this treatment of Ulysses is the least forgivable. Penguin have been aware since 1986, when they published Hans Walter Gabler's single-volume Ulysses, of the criticisms mounted against it. Gabler's work, which became public when the three-volume Ulysses appeared in 1984, became increasingly discredited among Joyce experts, as the different levels of error in his editing and critical judgment were laid hare, chiefly by the American Joyce scholar, John Kidd. The onus was on the principal paperback publisher to pro- vide an alternative version. Moreover, since long before 1984, the 1992 ending of copy- right provided the focus for what has now been so badly done. No editorial provision was made for this situation; instead, the reader is summarily dumped back 30 years, with a reprint of the Bodley Head hard- back edition, offset photographically, and with no notes or annotations whatever. There is no clear explanation of why this has been done. Kidd's view, that the Bod- ley Head version (which became the 1961 Random House edition in the United States) is 'the book roughly as Joyce last saw it', and therefore 'is the best we have', is quoted by the man who introduces Ulysses, Declan Kiberd, as justification for using it. But Kidd is producing, worldwide, a re-edited Ulysses of his own on Blooms- day, 16 June, 1992, and it would seem that any publisher with his wits about him could have matched this effort by employing a new editor. Penguin could even have nego- tiated John Kidd's version. It would have been infinitely better than the present retrograde step.

A quite different approach is adopted with Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Where Kiberd, for Ulysses, contributes no more than an introduction and a short history of the text, both Ter- ence Browne and Seamus Deane, who deal with these two volumes, annotate them profusely. In 'Two Gallants', one of the stories in Dubliners, Lenehan and Corley are described walking near Trinity College: They walked along Nassau Street 27 and then turned into Kildare Street 28 . Not far from the porch of the club29 a harpist stood in the

roadway.

Three notes, in two sentences, give, in no less than 20 lines, the geography and history of the two streets and of the Kildare Street Club, and they are but a modest share of the 690 footnotes which totally and needlessly desecrate the text of these wonderful stories. But Browne does not edit the hook. Penguin and the editor-in- chief, Seamus Deane, instead of offering a post-copyright re-edited version of Dubliners, republish the questionable and flawed Robert Scholes edition, which renewed copyright for 50 years from 1967, when it first appeared. Moreover, though Browne gives, in a brief note, a few details about the text, he leaves out the crucial `Note on the Text' by Scholes, which lists the changes first published in that year, and which has appeared in earlier editions as an appendix.

Worse is to follow in Deane's own chosen volume, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If Scholes's Dubliners is flawed, it is at least usable. The same

cannot be said about Chester Anderson's

version of A Portrait, which had him and Richard Ellmann muddling their way

through that twilight teritory of what Joyce might have written and published if he had not written and published the version we had for half a century.

Notwithstanding this use of the 1964 Anderson edition, Deane claims himself to have 'edited' the book, as well as to be responsible for the introduction and notes, which number a modest 273. The editing is a worry. All we are told is that 'Some obvi- ous errors have been silently corrected.'

So much for the editing of three of the four volumes (the fourth, by comparison, is seriously edited, adding considerably to our knowledge and understanding of Joyce).

In announcing these editions, Seamus Deane told us that they would 'mark a stage in the reappropriation of Joyce by Irish scholars', and they would recognise `more widely and more urgently the libera- tionist and decolonising aspects' of Joyce. If this means doctrinaire and turgid disser- tations on how Joyce was committed to social reform in Ireland, and how he laid the blame for social ills at the door of the cruel and oppressive British administration, then that has been achieved at some length. Take Declan Kiberd on 'Ulysses and Irish writing': In espousing the ideal of androgyny, just one year after the declaration of the Irish Free State, Ulysses proclaimed itself a central text of national liberation. Against the either/or antitheses of British imperial psychology, it demonstrated the superior validity of a both/and philosophy.

Phew!

Terence Browne brings to his introduct- ion to Dubliners a curious medley of linguistic styles and voices. He talks of the Joyce parents' marriage being 'blessed' with ten children, of Joyce senior having `hailed' from Cork, of the family being 'removed' to Bray, 'a pleasant seaside resort' with 'salubrious environs' for a `sojourn' there, of the 'paternal inability' to

pay the Clongowes fees, of people doing things 'at the behest of other people' and of 'houses of ill-repute'. Browne is ill at ease with the concept of Joyce as social commentator on Ireland's oppression by the British, and though he pays it lip- service, since this is the main objective of all the 'Irish' scholars responsible for the volumes, he is in fact shrewd and intelli- gent enough to recognise that Joyce was an Ibsenite, seeing most social disorders as deriving from more complex causes, among them the derelictions through drink of so many of Joyce's fiction models.

At that level Joyce is wonderful to read, from the boozy behaviour of Lenehan, who first impinges on our imaginations in

Dubliners, to the appalling chauvinism of `the Citizen' in Ulysses, just one of Joyce's

great pub-characters, drawn from the end- less supply of them forced into the bars of Dublin by British imperialist oppression.

But I would advise readers to find second- hand versions of Joyce's works, free of turgid comment, unnecessary footnoting and a complete lack of editorial coherence or conformity.

Bruce Arnold, literary editor of the Irish Independent, is the author of The Scandal of Ulysses.