American edition. “It was one of the more notable scandalsnsince Gutenberg started it all,” in the words of text critic JacknDalton. It included such famous misprints as the onendescribing Buck Mulligan on page 2: “He pointed his fingernin friendly jest and went over the parapet, laughing tonhimself.” In 1961, after a generation of mockery. RandomnHouse published a new edition, which it advertised asn”scrupulously corrected.” That edition was a reprint of then1936 Bodley Head edition, called “final and definitive”nbecause literary critic Stuart Gilbert had read over the proofsnand written Joyce about a few difficult points he’d noticed.nJack Dalton estimated that the 1936 edition containednnearly 4,000 misprints, and the 1961 edition added a few ofnits own. “It was the kind of book you could use only a fewnminutes in a chemistry lab before blowing the place up.”nThis is the text Americans have been reading and writingnabout for the past generation.nMany will agree that America had by now done enoughnin its courageous battle to give Joyce’s Ulysses to the world.nNow it was Germany’s turn. A Munich professor namednHans Walter Gabler decided it was time to show upnAmerican and British incompetence. He put all the evidencenfor Ulysses, handwritten copy, typescript, prepublicationnserializations, proofs, first edition, whatever, onto ancomputer. The computer could print all the variants innwords, spellings, and punctuation; it could also print outnJoyce’s true text, by leaving out bypassed or mistakennvariants. In 1984 Garland Publishing put out this doublenedition, and in 1986 Random House in America andnBodley Head in England published the second part as “ThenCorrected Text.” The dream of the 20th century was finallynachieved. The omniscient computer had finally replacednfallible man.nFans of Stanley Kubrick’s 200 J may see this coming. Letnme briefly run down the two main problems with thencorrected edition. First: garbage in, garbage out. Thencollection of variants had been made by human beings fromnphotographic copies. The French typesetters and even straynpencil markings had the same status as corrections made bynJames Joyce. These slips were not only collected as variants,nbut printed as the corrected text. John Kidd has collected anfew in The New York Review of Books (June 30, 1988).nSecond: how does a computer distinguish between variantsnthat are mere slips, those that are Joyce’s first idea before henchanged his mind, and those that he wanted to appear innUlysses? Answer: it can’t. That requires human intervention,nbased on logic and a feeling for style. Hans WalternGabler no doubt ranks above a provincial French typesetternin his knowledge of idiomatic English, but he ranks belownmany American, British, and Irish readers and critics.nThe good news is that anyone with access to a majornresearch library knows a great deal more about Ulysses thannwas known to previous generations. The bad news is thatnevery edition of the novel substantially misrepresents thenwork. Every work os exegesis and much literary criticismnwritten about Joyce has been and continues to be based onnseriously defective texts. Critics may prate all they wishnabout a “close, careful reading of the text,” but no valid textnexists. It must be reconstructed by every reader. Naturally,nthis will not affect Joyce’s university-level teachers andncritics, as one letter writer to The New York Times franklynadmitted. They use Joyce’s text to preach their views onnhuman freedom and love, and the actual words he wrote arennot allowed to aff^ect the use they make of his book. Then”theorists” who run our English departments and thenPMLA wouldn’t care if Molly ended her famous monologuenwith “No I said No I won’t No!” They would stillnhave their will of her and of Joyce’s novel.nNor do the publishers care. The various Random Houseneditions, until they switched over to the Gabler text, allnbegan with the pontifications of lawyer Morris L. Ernst andnJudge John M. Woolsey on Random House’s heroic role innfreeing the world from censorship. (From censorship, that is,nbased on legislative enactment, on due process and the willnof the people, however imperfectly represented. RandomnHouse had no problem with censoring poems of RobinsonnJeffers in the 40’s, because they seemed to criticize thenforeign policy of the New Deal.) In fact, Bennett Cerf andnthe boys at Random House cared not a whit for the text ofnUlysses. Although they could have used a corrected versionnof the first edition, which only suffered from 2,000 misprintsnor so, they wantonly used an irresponsible, pirated editionnwith thousands more errors. This choice seems especiallyncomical if you read the letter from Joyce that follows thenjudicial decision in the various American editions printednbefore 1986. In it Joyce specifically protests against piratedneditions.nMaxwell Perkins at Scribner’sndid not just rewrite and butchernScott Fitzgerald and ThomasnWolfe. He was proud of hisnwork — although he never wrotena line on his own that attractednthe attention of either critics ornthe general public.nRandom House is part of a long and glorious tradition.nConsider the first printed edition of the Greek NewnTestament, edited by Erasmus. Erasmus and his Baselnpublisher, Froben, knew that a group of scholars in Alcala,nSpain were involved in a careful and expensive edition.nThey decided to beat them to the punch. Unfortunately,nBasel did not possess many manuscripts of the NewnTestament. Erasmus ignored the one good one, because itndisagreed with the more numerous bad ones. When none ofnthe Basel manuscripts contained the end of Revelation, henre-translated his own Latin transmission, done over a periodnof years from various manuscripts, into Greek. Nor was thisnthe only Erasmian Greek inserted into the text. After thenwork was published, Erasmus went about boasting of hisndevotion to God’s Word. He and Bennett Cerf would havenhad a good night out together.nThe stories of what publishers have done to authorsnwould fill many pages. When Thomas Hardy’s Return ofnnnJANUARY 1989/17n