
The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar - elemeno
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-missing-joyce-scholar.html
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gwern
Sounds like a good cautionary example for 'real artists ship'. If he had just
declared his Joyce edition complete at some point, even if he felt it was
radically incomplete, it would have likely superseded Gabler and the major
errors which he hated so much, and he could've improved subsequent editions or
others could've taken it on after he disappeared. But the perfect was the
enemy of better, Gabler won by default, and now he's spent decades on
something else entirely. Odds aren't good he'll finish _that_ either.

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oska
I enjoyed this casual detail in the article:

> she and a colleague were dedicating a book to him, a 31,802-page tome called
> “The Manual for the Advanced Study of James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’”

Academic studies of the Wake leaves Ulysses scholarship for dead :)

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PhasmaFelis
I was skeptical, but apparently this is real, although calling it a "book"
seems like a stretch, as it comes in 122 volumes. (Volume 1, "The Romanian
Lexicon of Finnegans Wake", 455 pages.)

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Amezarak
I have never read ulysses, and didn't realize this was an issue. So what is
actually recommended for the non-academic reader now?

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wk_end
It honestly doesn't really matter - the differences between different editions
are subtle and of interest mostly to scholars. If you can find an edition with
good annotations go with that one; otherwise just pick up the one with your
favourite cover - I've always been partial to the Penguin one myself.

~~~
JadeNB
> It honestly doesn't really matter - the differences between different
> editions are subtle and of interest mostly to scholars. If you can find an
> edition with good annotations go with that one; otherwise just pick up the
> one with your favourite cover - I've always been partial to the Penguin one
> myself.

Without disputing what you say, I am curious: do you speak as a scholar who
knows this to be true, or a casual reader who assumes it to be true, or from
some other basis?

~~~
wk_end
Fair enough - can I say somewhere between the two? I don't feel comfortable
calling myself a true "Joyce scholar", but I did my undergraduate degree in
literature where one of my classes was a full semester seminar on Ulysses; its
publication history - and the various editors who've had a crack at the text -
were discussed.

That aside, I'm an avid casual Joyce fan - I've read the book several times
outside of that class, both before and after.

Those qualifications aren't exactly impressive, but I think they're enough for
me to entreat the prospective Ulysses reader - tolle lege! Pick it up and
read!

~~~
JadeNB
> Fair enough - can I say somewhere between the two?

Yes, absolutely. I didn't mean it as a challenge, just (as another eternally
on the verge of reading Ulysses) was curious how definitively I could take
your recommendation.

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DrJohnKidd
I have never claimed that I was on a quest to perfect Ulysses, or to edit a
"definitive Ulysses," or to concoct any "perfect edition".

New York Times Magazine author Jack Hitt simply made that up, as he seems to
have done with several other things attributed to me by him. Or maybe he has
an uncredited source that inspired him to romanticize my mundane drudgery as a
tropical textologist and translator.

The term I prefer is "authoritative," which is not a claim of "error-free
input," something Hans Walter Gabler wrote that had attained in his 1984
"Ulysses : A Critical and Synoptic Edition."

In 1986 the claim of non-erroneousness was repeated twice in a gushing review
of Gabler written by Geert Lernout in the _Revue Belge de Philologie_, which
ends with these words : << It seems that Joyce finally got the error-free text
he waited for in vain during his life-time. >>

One nice symmetry of Then and Now is that Lernout became the first academic in
Europe to assail me as having weird ideas about Joyce. Gabler's work is, we
are told twice, "error-free," and Kidd, we are assured, is an eccentric crank
who "has a whole series of pet theories . . ."

1986, 2018, Nothing new under the sun, Gabler-Kidd-wise and Kidd-Gabler-wise.
Lernout literally declares, "Kidd is the kind of person who . . ." It does not
get more ad hominem than that.

I would be interested to learn if anyone can find online any pre-2018 claim
that I sought to produce the impossible "perfect edition" of any book. That
false claim seems to have appeared first on the web on June 12, 2018. The
online version of Jack Hitt's New York Times Magazine profile of me is called
"The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar," but the paper publication
with a cover date of June 17 is titled “In Search of the Perfect Ulysses.”

What is stranger or more eccentric than I myself supposedly am, is a
journalist of such high intelligence as Jack Hitt attributing to me beliefs
that he does not sustain by a single quotation from my published work, whether
it be Joycean or Jungian, or a even poem out of my youth.

Come to think of it, Jack Hitt's beautifully written essay fails to give the
title of any of my works. Those curious about what Hitt skimmed over without
dipping his beak into the salt green sea, may consult an old CV of mine by
Googling this phrase, enclosing it within quotation marks : "Curriculum Vitae
of John Kidd"

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cornholio
Sounds like he tried to build an academic career on pathological grammar
Nazism. The size of a dot? Come on, that's at most a minor typographical
error.

A text the size of "Ulysses" cannot, by definition, ever be "perfect". There
will always be an opportunity for a vacuous hack to assemble a "catastrophic"
collection of minor mistakes that allegedly compromise the edition. This is
usually much easier than actually producing a new edition, by orders of
magnitude so, and this is why we hate grammar Nazis: they derail the
conversation and in the end contribute nothing of substance.

I know it's probably harsh, but every field has these guys, they should not be
celebrated but marginalized. I find his ouster from academia not surprising.
Kidd is obviously very competent but he chose to invest his vast knowledge and
intellect into an ego match instead of contributing and expanding his field.

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bshepard
There seems to be an important difference between everyday "Grammar nazism"
and an effort to generate an accurate proof copy of a -- maybe THE - defining
English language modernist novel.....Textual criticism, in general, is very
important for the transmission of culture, and a different kind of thing than
people who go around feeling superior because they still use "whom" in the
"right" place.

~~~
cornholio
Of course, it was a metaphor that fit nicely. That is to say, academia has
vacuous researchers that are to science what grammarians are to casual online
discussions.

