Dubliners

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Mark Osteen

A Painful Case

On first looking into the Illustrated Edition of Dubliners published by St. Martin's Press, one is enthralled by its detailed notes and numerous illustrations and visual aids. The book is indeed a feast for the eyes, providing, among many other treats, several maps of Dublin (the lack of which is a deficiency in all the other editions), one even listing the businesses operating during Joyce's era; contemporary advertisements (my favorite is the ad for an Irish-made "porous rainproof" coat, perhaps designed to allow umbrella makers to stay in business); notices for the Irish concert in which James A. Joyce sang "The Croppy Boy" (no doubt a trenchant rendition); photos of Dublin landmarks, Italian popes, English knights. Edited by Bernard McGinley and John Wyse Jackson, the edition provides a readable text on the recto of each page, with notes and photos on the verso and in the right-hand margin of the recto. But a closer study of this edition exposes it as a major disappointment. One problem is that the editors don't seem clear on their own aims. For example, they find it necessary to jab at the "academic James Joyce industry" (xiv) for making all of his works as obscure as the Wake. And yet their entire project bespeaks a scholar's interests and aims: "an increased knowledge of some of these details can only increase the reader's appreciation of the causes and effects of the collection" (xv: I'm not sure what the "causes" of a book would be, but never mind). This confusion about their editorial function is manifest everywhere in the edition.

Perhaps the most flagrant examples occur in the textual editing: the editors fall victim to what Laurie Teal calls "random eclecticism" (188), alternating between following the first edition and the late Maunsel proofs, sometimes within a single story. What is worse, they are either confused or disingenuous about the textual history. For example, one of the late-stage Maunsel changes (reinstated by Scholes) to "Counterparts" turned "funds were getting low" into "running low." McGinley and Jackson (properly) accept the late Maunsel reading, noting that the line was "originally `getting low'" (83). Since the first edition's version derives from an earlier stage of the Maunsel printing, it is indeed previous (if not exactly "original"). But on the next page they retain the first edition's "stupid familiarity" over the late Maunsel reading "loutish familiarity," commenting that "previously Joyce had `loutish familiarity.'" Now they pretend that the late Maunsel version precedes that of the first edition, apparently adjusting the chronology as it suits their editorial preferences. This simply won't do. The same misrepresentation or confusion occurs in "The Dead," when they choose the late Maunsel proofs' "words" (for Gabriel's altercation with Molly Ivors) over the first edition's "row" (171), but a few pages later select the first edition's "fooling at the piano" over the Maunsel's "strumming" (184). In the first case, they claim "row" to be "previous," but in the latter case they call "strumming" "original." McGinley and Jackson have founded a whole new method of textual editing -- let's call it the Humpty-Dumpty school -- in which a word (such as "originally" or "previous") means "precisely what [they] choose it to mean -- neither more nor less" (Carroll 269). But unlike Mr. Dumpty, they don't even pay the word for its extra work.