Dubliners

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1995 by Mark Osteen

The editors also misrepresent their practices. In their introduction, they write: "Some alterations . . . have been made in this edition to accord with Joyce's expressed -- but ignored -- wishes" (xiv). They can only be referring to the fact that Joyce did not get a last look at proofs on the first edition, which resulted in the discrepancy between the first edition and late Maunsel proofs. But the example they draw from "Clay" (in the late Maunsel proofs Maria's coat is called a "raincloak"; in the first edition it is called a "waterproof") won't hold water: in choosing the first edition's word over the late Maunsel version, they're actually doing the opposite of what they claim to be doing. Admittedly, all textual editors must use critical acumen to adjudicate between variants, if all other things are equal. Even Scholes didn't follow his own policies in every case, either by inadvertence or design leaving out a couple of late Maunsel changes. But if one is going to proceed on the assumption that the late Maunsel proofs represent Joyce's final intentions, one cannot simply decide that, on the other hand, sometimes they don't.

The larger question is whether these editorial blunders are attributable to intention or to simple incompetence. Other editorial mistakes point to the latter conclusion. The most egregious instance of ineptness occurs in "The Dead." After the Morkans' party, Gabriel and Gretta are walking toward the cab, and Gabriel recalls an incident when they saw a man making bottles in a furnace. In all the extant manuscripts and proofs it is she who asks, "Is the fire hot, sir?" But the first edition mistakenly attributed the speech to Gabriel, and Richard Ellmann famously wove an interpretation of the story around Gabriel's alleged question.(8) Joyce attempted to correct this misprint, which is one of the 30 he sent to Richards. The editors' perpetration of this error (they compound the mistake by writing "previously `she'": 189) in a text not bound to the first edition is inexcusable.

McGinley and Jackson have made another controversial choice by electing to represent dialogue in a manner that follows neither the first edition nor any other recent Joyce text. Instead of using quotation marks or following Joyce's mature practice of marking direct dialogue with a single dash at the beginning, they have chosen to preserve a system that Joyce tried early in the collection's composition. In one MS of "Ivy Day," Joyce used dashes both at the beginning and at the end of every paragraph containing direct speech (not at the end of the speech, but at the end of the paragraph in which the speech occurs). McGinley and Jackson have adopted this allegedly "elegant and readable" (xiv) method instead of the now standard practice of using a single dash. I can't condemn their choice: at this stage in his career, Joyce was still experimenting with ways of obviating "perverted" commas (Letters 3:99), which he deemed "an eyesore" (Letters 1:75). In fact, in the last-cited letter he argues that the "page reads much better with the dialogue between dashes" (my emphasis). Although Joyce's words do not quite mandate McGinley and Jackson's choice (Joyce seems to mean that only the dialogue, not attributive phrases, should go between dashes), they do suggest that this edition offers a more accurate picture of Joyce's early punctuation habits than any other previous version. Individual readers will surely have their own preferences. Unfortunately, once again the editors' justification for their decision is confused. They claim to be using the method Joyce arrived at in the "second fair copy" of the story. I presume they mean the second extant fair copy. But if so, they're wrong: the manuscript in which Joyce employs this method, dated 29 August 1905, is actually the earliest extant fair copy of "Ivy Day," and precedes a slightly later MS of the story that Gabler uses as the copy-text for his edition. Again, the editors' unclear justification undermines the persuasiveness of their choice. It's a pity they didn't follow the salutary advice given by Scholes in his introductory note to the Modern Library edition: "in a text that is still a live book rather than a museum piece it is important to change nothing without a good reason" (xii-xiii).