Serial Encounters by Clare Hutton;

Author:Clare Hutton; [Hutton, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192582683
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2019-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

In the event, of course, Joyce never got to work on the Huebsch edition envisioned here. But from early June 1921 he did get to work extensively on the proofs of the Paris edition, marking as many as 5,000 pages of proof and working himself into a state of ‘proof fever’, a phrase he added to the proof of chapter 7 (‘Aeolus’), in a knowing act of ‘self reflexive materiality’, under the heading:

ORTHOGRAPHICAL

Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. (U1922, 117)22

A sense of that ‘fever’ is communicated vividly in a letter to Weaver of October 1921:

A few lines to let you know I am here again with MSS and pencils (red, green and blue) and cases of books and trunks and all the rest of my impedimenta nearly snowed up in proofs and nearly crazed with work. Ulysses will be finished in about three weeks, thank God, and (if the French printers don’t all leap into the Rhone in despair at the mosaics I send them back) ought to be published early in November.23

This suggests the intensity of the final stages of the compositional process, and points to the significance of the ‘small valise’ in which Joyce had stored notebooks and lightly revised typescripts in preparation for the moment of general revision in advance of publication in volume form. Working from that valise (or trunk or case) with coloured and lead pencils, dipping pen and ink, Joyce revised Ulysses significantly. Given the extent of some of the revisions—such as those for chapter 5 (‘Lotus-Eaters’)—it is surprising to find that Joyce did not, at this stage, generate either a new manuscript or a new typescript of the text he now intended for publication. That he did not do so suggests the economies of labour and the pressures of the moment in which he was working. Manuscripts take hours to copy, and Joyce’s eyesight was poor. New typescripts would have involved the trouble of finding and working with typists, and he had already had trouble enough with those who were working on chapter 15 (‘Circe’), as noted in Chapter 2.24 With Darantiere and Beach at hand and willing to help, he clearly felt that the chapter typescripts he had were serviceable enough, and used them as the initial means of textual transmission to Darantiere, and then revised, incrementally, on successive proofs.25 At the same time he continued to make use of notebooks and notesheets which recorded his thoughts, as well as notes from his reading, and acted as lexical and conceptual aide-memoires.26 These repositories and the authorial working practices which they communicate would be worth significant bibliographical and genetic scrutiny. The rewriting on proof—attending to the vexed question of whether Joyce planned his revisions or wrote them spontaneously—would also be a particularly rich seam to investigate. But that kind of detailed investigation is beyond the remit of what follows. What is offered here is an account of how the work of Ulysses changed for readers in its journey from New York to Paris.

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