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The Book Editions
Our final discussion must be brief of the stages of transmission of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the first printing in The Egoist to the 1924 Jonathan Cape edition. The publishing history has
With respect to accidentals, the situation created by the author's corrections prior to H and to B is somewhat more complex, and for an editor methodically quite intriguing. When faced with the close to 600 additional commas in the text of the Egoist serialisation, Joyce went about restoring the light punctuation of his manuscript with considerable determination. This process continued into Y. His paramount concern doubtless was for the rhythms of his text, the essential qualities of which—"to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm"—had been early adumbrated in the very first paragraph of the narrative essay "A Portrait of the Artist" of 1904. Yet for the flexible rhythms of his novel, its semicolons and its colons, placed and distinguished from each other with great subtlety in the manuscript, are as important as its commas. It is surely
However, Joyce's attention to the accidentals of the text as printed in fact took two directions. As has been noted above, his reduction of next to all capitalization and his preference in print for compounds written together as one word is tantamount to a restyling of the text with respect to these accidentals. In so far as it can be positively ascertained that they were made by the author, the changes are part of the total authoritative correction and revision of E and H. As such, they invalidate, in part, the pattern of the manuscript inscription which cannot be editorially restored whenever positive authorial direction is given to depart from it. Neither, however, should a critical editor (as opposed perhaps to a publisher's editor) for the sake of a new typographical consistency, and in an attempt to finish what the author began, go beyond his alterations. Quite a number of original capitalizations and word divisions in fact survived Joyce's restyling. These cannot but be left untouched in a critical text, which will thus, in the treatment of accidentals, appear thoroughly inconsistent.[64]
Inconsistency of the kind just advocated, however, is really an expression of editorial consistency based on a systematic enquiry into the extent of authority in each substantive textual witness. With regard to Joyce's Portrait, such consistency should be firmly extended to the last of the substantive texts, that of the Jonathan Cape edition of 1924 (J). Because its proofsheets have not been preserved, it presents greater textual problems than H and B. What attention James Joyce
James Joyce, then, obviously took full advantage of the one and only opportunity he was ever given to see A Portrait through the press. This does of course not mean that the edition into which his efforts went ten years after the completion of the manuscript presents a text to override all previous texts. The inevitable deterioration of the text in ten years of transmission has not been remedied in the edition of 1924. Nor has the text been extensively revised. Even a cursory perusal of J will satisfy an editor that the authorial proofreading was not by any means on the scale of Joyce's reading and revising in proof of the text of Ulysses. The comparison with the later work indeed emphasizes the remarkable reticence against change and revision which Joyce showed towards the text of A Portrait at every stage of correction. By analogy to the earlier rounds of authorial correction of the text, it should be expected that the proofreading of J which did take place affected both accidentals and substantives. That Joyce paid attention to the accidentals is proved, for example, when J, restoring the manuscript punctuation, reads: "What is this your name is?" (50.1) against the typescript error perpetuated through B: "What is this? Your name is?" But it is an exceptional case when it can be proved on internal evidence that the author was responsible for a variant in accidentals. Generally, the lack of documentation prevents editorial acceptance of such variation. The substantive variants in J, on the other hand, are susceptible to evaluation by which it should be possible satisfactorily to identify the authorial corrections and revisions. For example, the manuscript sentence: "The doomsday was at hand." (113.11) was transmitted invariant through H. B, by the authorial direction of Y, changed to 'Doomsday', yet J reverts to the manuscript wording 'The doomsday' in what must be considered as the author's final decision on this reading, overruling the revision of Y. Similarly, the typescript error 'fellows' at 43.19 was transmitted unnoticed through B. J restores the singular 'fellow' of the manuscript. Finally, a subtle revision at 77.35, 'moment' for 'movement', indicates the author's care in proofreading. With 'movement' the manuscript had picked up 'a movement of impatience' of 77.28, which itself is a recollection of 74.28 and is only incidentally woven into the description of the situation of tension in the conversation between Heron, Wallis and Stephen on p. 77. Only in the 1924 re-reading of the text did Joyce himself realise that the proper reference of line 77.35 should be to 'a shaft of momentary anger' of 77.12.
When all authoritative stages of the transmission of the novel have been analysed in detail, a comprehensive textual hypothesis to govern editorial decision in the preparation of a critical text may be formulated in a revised set of directions:
- 1. Base a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on the holograph manuscript (D) of 1913/14.
- 2. In accidentals, accept the manuscript system of punctuation. Follow authorial directions as contained in EC-A and Y to restyle the manuscript capitalizations and word divisions.
- 3. In substantives, accept all authorial correction and revision as documented in the fragments of T, in EC-A and Y, or as ascertained by inference from an evaluation of the total body of substantive variance between each of the authoritative editions. Except for the corrections of incomplete manuscript readings in E (in so far as they are not manifest miscorrections or stylesheet rectifications of grammar and syntax), reject all non-auhoritative variation in substantives.
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