The Cambridge Centenary "Ulysses": Struggling Towards Contemporaneity

Abstract

J Joyce’s Ulysses is a twentieth-century modernist novel published as a material text in a book on 2 February 1922. Produced from the printing-house of Maurice Darantiere in Dijon, France, the book is the product of high professional skill and workshop procedure. The house of Darantiere specialized in deluxe editions and, remarkably so in the early-twentieth century, still practiced typesetting by hand. The multiply successive proofs per gathering, virtually all preserved, identify no less than twenty-six typesetters at work. Over some nine months (mid-summer 1921 to 1 February 1922), the author, typists, printing-house workmen, and, again, author repeatedly interacted in shaping Joyce’s written composition into the firstedition book. Joyce engaged in the process with great intensity. He augmented the text as first submitted by about one-third. On the final proofs, the last contributions of the printing-house copy-editors are in evidence with their final touches to text and typography. The end result is the transposition of the Ulysses text composition, revision, and augmentation into the 732-page artifact of the 1922 first-editionUlysses. The page total is calculated by the book’s own evidence. By tradition, numbers not only have a denotative, definitional quality. They express proportion and even used to signify meaning. In book-making history, the transmedializing of text into book has been accompanied by strong traditions of aesthetic signification established through numbers and proportion. A highly favored tradition survives in the proportioning of book size and type-page dimensions to the ratio of the golden mean. The stretch of pages in the first-edition Ulysses fulfills that ratio. The material text content of the 1922 edition is laid out as a book proportionately between extremes. The first edition of Ulysses as printing-house artifact was hence shaped into an iconic REVIEW ESSAY