A Note on a Nearly Forgotten Edition of Dubliners

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• A Note on a Nearly Forgotten Edition of Dubliners
• Valérie Bénéjam (bio)

In remembering the sad occasion of the passing of John Wyse Jackson in February 2020, I would like to spend some time reflecting on the ground-breaking Illustrated Edition with Annotations of Dubliners he co-edited with Bernard McGinley in 1993.¹ This edition has several unusual features, which make it one of the most original versions of Dubliners one could own; but one of its most remarkable peculiarities may be the history of its reception. It was reviewed in several mainstream newspapers and magazines,² but I could only find one full review in a Joyce-studies journal—Michael Patrick Gillespie’s in the JJQ, and that does not even consider the book individually but groups it with “a lovely coffee table book,” drawing a not altogether favorable comparison with Jackson and McGinley’s endeavor.³ De facto, the book never made the list of standard Dubliners editions that Joyceans commonly employ when writing or teaching.⁴ Incidentally (and unfortunately), it is now out of print. In this note, I would like to consider why we collectively missed the major transformation of the text and the sea change this edition could have brought to our reading of Dubliners. My hypothesis is that the mistake happened because what this edition added to the text was perhaps more subtle than what it conspicuously purported to bring.

That it should have been considered, in Gillespie’s terms, “a fine (if somewhat expensive) introduction” for those “unfamiliar with Dubliners and not particularly interested in going beyond a rudimentary understanding” (143) was perhaps to be expected, especially in the early 1990s, when many Joyce scholars, schooled in a strict structuralist examination of the text,⁵ were still wary of “extra-textuality” (141). Indeed, in their aptly subtitled “Illustrated Edition,” Jackson and McGinley assembled an impressive collection of documents that seem to come out of a treasure trove of Dublin iconography: pictures of places (postcards of buildings and street life, maps, architectural details, and floor plans) and of people (politicians, cardinals, sovereigns, singers, and writers), but also caricatures, extracts from fashion pages, advertisements, reports (from festivals to funerals), concert programs and music scores, newspaper headings, book covers, religious images, tram tickets, coins, and many others. In fact, as someone who has spent years studying and teaching Dubliners—and who would gladly venture “beyond a rudimentary understanding,” I have found this possibility of visualizing the materiality of Joyce’s Dublin absolutely fascinating. Without conjuring up a general image of the short stories in one’s mind’s eye as a film adaptation would, it [End Page 598] gives us concrete material around which a scene can be imagined. The focus on the paraphernalia, on the props of Joyce’s dramatic narration, even though some of them may seem tangential, has something quite touching about it, as if the editors wanted us to recreate a lost world and allowed us into their own private museum.

The annotations are in the same vein, as they provide us with every identifiable real-life detail that has—or may have—inspired Joyce’s narratives. Indeed, sometimes the methodology seems a little wobbly, or at least the phrasing awkward, as the editors seem to assume that Joyce’s aim was entirely biographical and that annotations are meant to uncover the historical reality behind Joyce’s text—what they call the “originals of his characters” and “the origins of his episodes” (D viii). For instance, in the Afterword to “The Sisters,” we are told that the first three stories “give the illusion that it is Joyce speaking directly to the reader of his own experience” (D 11). The certainty of mimesis is such that often it seems the real identity of the fictional characters will be unveiled: the dramatically painful ending of “Counterparts,” for example, is glossed with the revelation that “[t]he son is Bertie Murray, whose haplessness was recorded in Stanislaus’s diary” (D 85, my italics). As interesting as the revelation of Joyce’s inspiration may be, identifying the source event or person only with the verb “to be,” as if there were...