Hello. Let me introduce myself: my name is Judd, and I’ll be joining the group in some sort of “coordinator” capacity for the upcoming read of Ulysses. Daryl gave me a very nice introduction in his introductory post last week, but I feel I should make one thing very clear from the outset: I am not an expert. I am a student, and a lover of all things Joyce, but I don’t want to present myself as anything more. I’ve read Ulysses a few times, and the rest of Joyce’s work (although I resist using the past tense of the verb “read” in reference to the Wake; but I’ll save that discussion for the end of this whole project), and a fair amount of Joyce criticism (much of which I am certain to be ripping off throughout my discussion of this book, mostly unconsciously: I will do my best to acknowledge my sources when I can remember/find them, but as many great Joyceans have acknowledged, reading Joyce is a collaborative process)– but I’m sure there will be plenty of people here who know more than me, or catch me on mistakes, or just really disagree with me. And I welcome that– it’s what this is all about, right?

So anyway, this is my first post, and we’re a little over two weeks away from our start date, but I wanted to address one question that every new reader of Ulysses faces: what are all these different editions, and which one should I read?  A great overview of the different editions is available here (scroll down to “Which Edition?”): I’ll be basing my commentary largely on what they’ve already said, just throwing in my own two cents. Also, for anyone who is interested in the whole history of the text and its history of censorship, pirating, copyright disputes, and academic squabbles, the book to read is Bruce Arnold’s The Scandal of Ulysses: The Life and Afterlife of a Twentieth-Century Masterpiece, which will give you more information than you could possibly ask for, and is a hell of a read.

Essentially, there are three major versions of the Ulysses text, and then one very strange fourth version. First, there is the 1922 first edition text, which went out of copyright in the 1990s, spawning a host of “facsimile” editions. This version is rife with typos and printing errors: the first edition was rushed to the printers amidst all sorts of difficulties and, needless to say, with a complex book like Ulysses it’s pretty easy for mistakes to seep in. (Another book recommendation: there’s a great study by Tim Conley on the role of error in Joyce’s writing and in Joyce scholarship: Joyces Mistakes [title punctuation sic].) If you do a basic Amazon search for Ulysses, these facsimiles are the first things that pop up. I’d avoid them.

The next edition is the 1934 text, published after the ban on Ulysses in America was lifted, and reset in 1961. This was the standard edition for several decades, and any Joyce criticism written in the mid-century heyday of Joyce-studies will refer to it. There are two versions of this available: a Vintage paperback, and a Modern Library hardcover.  I have the Modern Library edition for a “reading” (as opposed to “studying”) copy, and that’s the version I’d recommend for someone reading the book for pleasure: it’s got a great binding, it’s easy to hold, it lies flat, it has nice quality paper. It’s just a nice book.

But then there’s the third version of the text: Hans Walter Gabler’s famous/infamous “Corrected” edition. Published in 1984, Gabler’s edition reflects over a decade of close, careful work with various manuscripts and notes from the Joyce archives, introducing thousands of changes, most small but some very significant. It was met with initial enthusiasm from Joyce scholars: here is a positive review (spoiler alert, though, insofar as any review of something like this is going to talk about stuff that happens late in the book) from no less a “name” than Richard Ellmann, author of the definitive Joyce biography.  However, several years later, once the Gabler edition had basically become the only one on the market, all hell broke loose. It all started with a lengthy essay by John Kidd exploring all of the problems with Gabler’s editorial process, and claiming that he introduced more errors into the text, rather than correcting it. However, rather than get into the details of the whole “scandal,” I’d just refer you to Bruce Arnold’s excellent book (cited above), which documents the whole affair. Suffice it to say that the Gabler edition remains the standard edition used by Joyce scholars and academics, so if you think you might want to publish an article in the James Joyce Quarterly some day, you should probably be working with this edition. But it is an unwieldy, ugly book, as an object, and the paperback version has a binding that comes apart. Just so you know.

And then there’s this crazy-ass “Reader’s Edition” edited by Danis Rose, which seeks to simplify the text and about which probably the less said the better. (I’ll simply refer you back the Modern Word, and let their comments on it stand here.)

One area in which I am woefully unable to comment is regarding the e-book versions available, so I’d like to invite anyone who has any experience in that area to chime in, in the comments section below. There are some reviews on Amazon here, and there are free versions on Project Gutenberg here, but that’s about as far as I’ve gotten. A friend asked me about an iPad version, and I was like: “Huh?” So, please, if you have any knowledge of this area, help me understand this technological stuff.

One problem we will probably face is keeping our page references together across editions. This is one of that handy things about the Gabler edition: he provides episode and line numbers on every page, which makes referring back to the text very easy. Don Gifford, in Ulysses Annotated (I’m going to post next week on secondary sources, but this is the one book that is basically indispensible, if you want to order ahead), refers to the Gabler edition, but provides page references to the 1961 edition in parentheses, so that’s how I usually track references from edition to edition. I’ll see if I can find anything more useful before my next post.

Which brings me to my conclusion: next week I’ll be writing about secondary sources, websites, and background reading, but in the meantime you might want to order your copy of the book itself. Bottom-line: do you want “Joyce” to tell you the answer to the question “What is the word known to all men?”? Get the Gabler edition. Want to figure it out on your own? Get the 1961 edition.  But either way, you’ll be getting a great book, so don’t let the (fairly minor) differences weigh too much on your mind.

Happy Bloomsday! For any who may have missed my prior brief announcement, the next book queued up for a group read here at Infinite Zombies is Ulysses. It’s a book I’ve started and stopped several times, and so from an Infinite Summer/Zombies standpoint, it represents the first book for me in the true spirit of the original program. It’s one I should have read but have never managed. It’s one I just can’t lug myself up the hill of. It’s one I’m still not sure I’ll be able to get through, even with the help of insightful commentary and cheerleading. With the exception of the (by comparison) light reading of Dracula, I had read and enjoyed all the other books we’ve covered to date. Two of them are among my very favorites. So, a year late, I’m finally taking on a book that represents a known and almost dreaded challenge rather than a reread of a loved thing.

Because I think I’m ill-suited to provide adequate context and background for the book, I’ve asked someone else to coordinate this read. I know Judd Staley because we share an interest in the work of David Foster Wallace. Judd comments with some frequency on the wallace-l discussion list, and he was one of the coordinators of this past November’s Footnotes conference devoted to Wallace’s work. When I measured the temperature of wallace-l a few months ago regarding the possibility of a Ulysses read, he enthusiastically expressed an interest, and when I put out a specific call for help more recently, he answered. A doctoral student working on 19th and 20th century fiction, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, affect, Joyce, and Wallace, Judd was a presenter at the 2009 North American James Joyce Conference, and he’s active in the James Joyce Society of New York. So we’re in good hands.

As we wrap up Moby-Dick, you’ll begin seeing overlapping posts from Judd preparing us for Ulysses. He’ll provide information about differences among the varying editions of Ulysses (if you’re in a rush to buy yours, read the bottom of this, but know that Judd will add some color soon), make suggestions regarding supplemental materials, and provide some literary background. Several of us who have blogged other books here at IZ will continue to write about our reading experience.

Just as we leaped straightway into Moby-Dick after finishing up 2666, we’re not taking much of a break before starting Ulysses. The date by which you’ll want to have finished the first chunk of reading is July 12, and this will be an eight-week read.  Ulysses has no clearly marked chapter breaks but is divided up informally into episodes (about which presumably more later). This will be something of a pain to track across multiple editions. The weekly assignments and approximate page counts will be as follows:

July 12: Episodes 1-3 (~40 pages)
July 19: Eps 4-6 (~50 pages)
July 26: Eps. 7-9 (~80 pages)
August 2: Eps. 10-12 (~ 100 pages)
August 9: Eps. 13 & 14 (~65 pages; ep. 14 is where a lot of people give up)
August 16: Ep. 15 (~150 pages, but it’s a play, so there’s not that many words per page)
August 23: Eps 16 & 17 (~100 pages)
August 30: Ep. 18 (~35 pages of unpunctuated monologue)

I do hope you’ll join in.