How Geen Is the Portrait?: Joyce, Passive Revision, and the History of Modernism

Abstract

Twenty-five-plus years on, the so-called scandal of Ulysses remains an extraordinary literary event, spectacular, in no small part, because it involved editing, a subject that remains below the radar of most literary scholars. Gabler’s edition, Kidd’s jeremiad, and the scores of Joyceans who took sides, took offense, and took the occasion to comment on Joyce, textuality, and editorial practice: All this came to the attention of a public beyond the university. Exhausting as the controversy was, it is no surprise that most Joyce scholars have tacitly settled on a moratorium with respect to the correct text of Ulysses. If anything, much of the excitement and energy in Joyce scholarship since then has moved away from the creation of critical editions and critically established reading texts altogether, as genetic scholarship has put Joyce’s avant-textes in the spotlight.1 Luca Crispi sums up the shift nicely, explaining that for ‘‘genetic readers, the published editions of Ulysses and of Finnegans Wake . . . are mere moments in a much richer and more complex reading experience that is founded on the texts’ extensive pre-history as is manifest in their manuscripts.’’2 While early generations of Joyce scholars pored over schema for Ulysses, trying to shrink the novel down to size, genetic critics have turned to the avant-textes in order to explode not merely reductive understandings of Joyce’s epic but the very concept of a unitary text itself. Genetic criticism has been salutary in many respects, but it has also pushed both Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man further from the center of Joyce Studies, even as it has pulled Finnegans Wake into it. Because of the relative paucity of manuscripts, drafts, and other documents connected to Joyce’s first two books, genetic critics have little to say about them.3 The neglect of Portrait has led much of the Joyce