This year, 2024, marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Hans Walter Gabler's still controversial "Critical and Synoptic Edition" of James Joyce's Ulysses.
Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe & Claus Melchior. 3 vols. New York and London: Garland, 1984.In a previous post on this blog, I discussed one of the most notorious features of Gabler's edition, his alleged discovery of the answer to Stephen Dedalus's question to his mother's ghost in the crucial Nighttown chapter (XV: Circe) of Joyce's novel:
Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.In the original, 1922 text, the ghost instead urges Stephen to repent his sins:
Prayer is all powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual, and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen.which drives him off into further ravings: "The ghoul! Hyena!"
In Gabler's text, thanks to the fortuitous discovery of a ms. passage which may have escaped its own author's eye ("Mr. Gabler postulates the skip of an eye from one ellipsis to another, leading to the omission of several lines - the longest omission in the book," as Richard Ellmann helpfully explains in his preface to the 1986 paperback reprint), the word itself was at last revealed:
Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus ...Ellmann glosses the Latin as a conjunction of two phrases from Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles:
Aquinas is distinguishing between love, which, as he says in the first six words, "genuinely wishes another's good," and, in the next five, a selfish desire to secure our own pleasure "on account of which we desire these things," meaning lovelessly and for our own good, not another's.
A couple of years ago I was asked to contribute to a collection of "small love stories from 36 Aotearoa New Zealand writers set in or related to Venice and inspired by one of the world’s great (in size and impact) novels: James Joyce’s Ulysses."
Here are the rest of the instructions we were given:
Each story will be 421 words and begin with a phrase taken from the book (two from each chapter), used as the title. Beyond that, you can take your story in whatever creative direction you like (with the idea of ‘love story’ also interpreted by each individual writer).I do like working with the stimulation of a set of constraints - even ones as arbitrary as these - but the fact that I'd been assigned a phrase from chapter XV, the infamous brothel sequence from the novel, seemed more than a simple coincidence. Hans Walter Gabler, Stephen's mother, and the "word known to all men" duly took their places in the 421-word "love story" I eventually came up with.
Your title is:Skeleton tracks– which is from the fifteenth chapter of the novel (you can find the whole online at Project Gutenberg, here). You may use this in the story / prose poem, or just keep it as the title – that's up to you.
Why 421 words, and why the lines from the text? We are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses on 2 February 1922, the 1600th anniversary of the founding of Venice in 421. We like the creative clash between flash fiction, championing the micro-story, and Joyce’s sprawling modernist classic. As well, this is a nod to the relationship between New Zealand and Venice that began with Venetian Antonio Ponto’s arrival here aboard James Cook’s Endeavour. Ponto was Aotearoa’s first recorded Venetian visitor; his surname means ‘bridge’.
And, yes, I did call it "Skeleton Tracks," as the editors suggested. You can find it reprinted in my latest collection Haunts, published earlier this year by Lasavia Publishing.
When you start to pick at one detail in Joyce's masterpiece, though, it has a way of leading you on and on through the maze of his infinitely associative mind. "Skeleton Tracks" - I knew it reminded me of something. It turned out to be the "railway line" riddle in chapter VII: Aeolus (the god of wind):
Lenehan extended his hands in protest.While trying to locate this passage, I had the good luck to chance upon the brilliantly informative multi-authored website James Joyce Online Notes, which I can confidently recommend to any other novice adventurers setting out for Joyceland.
- But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railway line?
- Opera? Mr O'Madden Burke's sphinx face reriddled.
Lenehan announced gladly:
- The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!
The Allusions section of this very compendious site offers the following sources for Lenehan's dreadful pun:
In “Two Gallants” Lenehan is described as “a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and riddles”. The most conspicuous one is quoted above. But when Lenehan demands: "Silence for my brandnew riddle!" ... he is slightly overstating his case, for the first documented punning riddle about Balfe's successful opera turned up only six years after it was premiered in October 1857.Thanks Harald! Much appreciated. If you only knew how much time I've spent trying to track down such inconceivable minutiae through the pages of annotated copies of Ulysses, you'd understand how exciting it is to run across a (constantly expanding) website which answers so many of your nagging questions.Of what new opera do the present petticoats remind one?One year later the Birmingham Daily Post of Friday, 27 May informs its readers that The Rose of Castile (also Castille) is "popularly miscalled in allusion to its enduring pretensions to public favour, 'The Rose of Cast Steel'".
Rose of Castile (rows of cast steel)- The Boy's Handy Book ... (1863)
Punch followed in 1865:By the bye, if for burlesquing they want to find an opera in which they might most fitly introduce this magnet scene, they had better try their wits upon The Rose of Cast Steel.The closest forerunner of Lenehan's version was published in “Clippings from the weekly journals” in The Hull Packet and East Riding Times (Hull, England) on Friday, 28 May, 1880:"What favourite opera," enquires Bauldy, with a hiccup, "does the tramway lines remind one of?" and he replies with a hee-haw when eberybody gibs it up, "Why, the Rows of Cast Steel, to be sure!"
Mind you, that same "Rose of Castile / Rows of Cast Steel" pun was also used by Henry Morton Robinson in his 1950 bestseller The Cardinal (1950), but of course that was long after the long-banned Ulysses finally became available in a commercial edition in America in 1934.
Joseph Campbell, & Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. 1944. London: Faber, 1947.Henry Morton Robinson is perhaps better known as the co-author, with folklorist and philosopher Joseph Campbell, of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), the first substantive attempt to explore the intricacies of Joyce's last - and definitely least accessible - work.
Stuart Gilbert. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study. 1930. London: Faber, 1960.Campbell & Robinson's work was presumably meant to capitalise on the success of Stuart Gilbert's 1930 book about Joyce's Ulysses. But it wasn't so much Gilbert that punters assumed they were reading in that case - it was James Joyce himself. It was well known that Joyce had supplied Gilbert with much of the detail about the novel's structure and themes included in his text: so it had - and in some ways continues to have - a quasi-authorial status for fans.
Interestingly enough, as the online Literary Hub article "Ulysses: A History in Covers - The Many Lives of a High-Modern Classic" (2015) reveals:
While bookstores in America were still being persecuted for illegally selling the Shakespeare edition, Beach had the German Albatross Press take over the book’s European publishing; they established an imprint called the Odyssey Press for this purpose. To avoid legal problems, they inscribed this edition’s back page with a note reading, “Not to be introduced into the British Empire or the U.S.A.” This is considered to be the most accurate representation of Joyce’s authorial intent and contains corrections by Stuart Gilbert, who had claimed the title of “the official Joycean.”
You see what I mean? To a certain sort of mind, following such skeins of association and allusion is almost irresistible. It's not for nothing that Joyce himself said:
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.
Take, for example, the riddling postcard in chapter VIII: Lestrygonians (a tribe of man-eating giants, encountered by Odysseus on his voyage home to Ithaka):
She took a folded postcard from her handbag."U. p: up." What on earth does that mean? I tried in vain to solve it myself. "You pee," perhaps - some kind of gibe about urination. But why "up"? Was I reading too much into it? In any case, why was this card thought to be important enough to be shown around to friends and acquaintances?
— Read that, she said. He got it this morning.
— What is it? Mr Bloom asked, taking the card. U. P.?
— U. p: up, she said. Someone taking a rise out of him. It’s a great shame for them whoever he is.
Stuart Gilbert clearly considered it beneath his notice; but neither could I get much satisfaction from Don Gifford & Robert J. Seidman's annotated version of the novel.
So I asked a distinguished Joycean of my acquaintance to unravel it for me. To no avail. It did inspire a poem, though:
U.p.: UpLater I added it to the novella "Coursebook found in a Warzone," included in my 2010 collection Kingdom of Alt:
I thought of a story about an Academic
one who hadn’t noticed he was dead
because they never opened up
the windows in his room
He sat there at his desk
book-ended by his filing cabinets
fading patterns on the wall
where his photographs had been
From time to time he’d look up from the pages
of last century’s quarterlies
see that day had shifted into dusk
& the streetlights had come on
The air was stale in there
he didn’t care
no need to tweak & update
the same old lectures now
•
“U.P.: Up” – Ulysses
I asked you to define it for me once
you couldn’t
not to my satisfaction anyway
I wonder if you’ll find it easier
alone there in the dark
pebbles in your pockets
chattering
to anyone who’ll listen?
Ave atque Vale then
to your Van Dyke beard
defiant little puku
amused bravado
whatever you deserved it wasn’t this
embarrassed silence these
absurd periphrases this
hermetically-sealed chamber
whose contents must
at the stroke of dawn
turn into dust
[2/7-21/10/08]
So what does designated hitter John Simpson have to say about it on the James Joyce Online Notes site?
Well, for a start, he takes the matter quite seriously, and admits its complexity:
Sometimes there are too many options available to allow us to be confident about the meaning (or a set of meanings) that should be ascribed to a term. Joyce’s use of “U. p: up” with reference to the slightly crack-brained Denis Breen is regarded as just such a problem, and it is one that has puzzled Joyce scholars for decades.Wisely, he begins with a summary of the context of the pun, or gag, or insult, or whatever it is:
Denis Breen receives a postcard. The message on the postcard seems to be U.P. Breen himself is infuriated, and wants to sue the sender for the astronomical sum of £10,000. Mrs Breen folds the postcard up and puts it in her bag, but still shows it to Bloom, who needs an explanation for the abbreviation. When others hear of the message they laugh. Why is the message so potent? Why does Joyce repeat the expression fourteen times in the pages of Ulysses?Why, indeed?
Robert Martin Adams carefully reviews five principal options (Surface and Symbol, pp. 192-3). Don Gifford follows other commentators by throwing in one or two more possibilities. Vladimir Nabokov preferred to associate the expression with “U.P. spells goslings”, apparently a schoolboy insult recorded principally in the English midlands. Richard Ellmann is attracted to the schoolboy humour of “you pee up”, apparently the source of various potential urinatory or sexual innuendoes. Leah Harper Bowron carries the speculation game to the extreme, with a specific medical diagnosis:I should add to the note above the explanation that "fou tu" translates literally as "mad you" but also resembles a ruder word, "foutu", which translates (again literally) as "fucked."Denis Breen 'pees up' or sprays his urine upward when urinating from a standing position because he has hypospadias and his urethral opening is within or behind his testes.To avoid the pitfalls of retrofitting the sense of the message it seems safer, from a linguistic point of view, to look at what the expression “U. P.” might mean. Sam Slote sensibly offers a conservative view:U. P.: up - 'U.P., the spelling pronunciation of UP adverb, = over, finished, beyond remedy' (OED, s.vv., U; u.p.). The expression 'U.P.: up' dates at least as far back as Dickens (as quoted in OED).We know that the French translation of Ulysses (at least approved in general if not at every turn by Joyce) takes a similar line:In the French edition of Ulysses the postcard is translated fou tu, "you're nuts, you've been screwed, you're all washed up". (Gifford: p. 163)
The notes on the Joyce website continue as follows:
We might look at how Joyce himself employs the term in a letter to Valery Larbaud of 17 October, 1928:And so on and so forth. A section quoting innumerable earlier uses of the expression follows, which I won't trouble you by sampling from in detail. However, it's worth mentioning the conclusion:Apparently I have completely overworked myself and if I don't get back sight to read it is all U-P up.Joyce includes a reference to the expression in a Cyclops notebook (dated to June – September 1919 in Zurich). As he had finished Lestrygonians in the autumn of 1918 this was probably just a reminder, but the entry seems to make it clear that “U. P.” is regarded by Joyce as being equivalent to “up” ...
We should remember, too, that just before Mrs Breen takes the folded postcard from her handbag to show it to Bloom, she says that her husband has been frightened by a nightmare in which he saw “the ace of spades” climbing “up” the stairs. The “ace of spades” is “a widow, esp. one wearing mourning weeds”, according to the OED. The expression is listed in Heinrich Baumann’s Londinismen, a catalogue of London cant and slang which Joyce knew and cites elsewhere. Perhaps that helps to explain Mr Breen’s eccentric reaction.
The general opinion within Joyce’s texts is that the unusual expression “U. p.: up” means more or less what the Oxford English Dictionary says: “over, finished, beyond remedy”.
At present the balance of evidence between the numerous potential meanings is more or less equal, with only one or two elements of support for each. But a review of contemporaneous attestations makes us realise that the traditional, conservative meaning (“all up”, finished, over) was much better known in Joyce’s day and for over half a century before than is remembered today. This does not rule out other interpretations, but it does tend to isolate the dominant sense.In overall summary, then:
Joyce uses variations of the expression “U P: up” fourteen times in Ulysses. The colon seems to indicate that the two sections of the expression have equivalent status and are not part of a longer abbreviation. The evidence is overwhelming that the ordinary person in the late nineteenth century would have known “U.P.” or “U.P. up” as a slang expression meaning “all up”, “over, finished, without remedy”, even “not likely to survive”. We know from a letter in 1928 that Joyce knew this explanation, and we assume that this is the meaning of the term he wrote down on one of his notesheets. In some circles, “U.P.” was also a well established abbreviation for “United Presbyterian”, but it is questionable how relevant this is to Denis Breen.
From the internal dynamics of Ulysses and from the social etiquette of the day (would Mrs Breen show Molly's husband a postcard with a virtually unspeakable obscenity?) we might regard the “You pee up” interpretation, which has sometimes found favour, to be laboured. The final occurrence of the abbreviation in the novel is found in Molly’s monologue ...:Now hes going about in his slippers to look for £10000 for a postcard U p up O sweetheart May wouldn’t a thing like that simply bore you stiff to extinction actually too stupid even to take his boots offAfter the I-narrator of “Cyclops” Molly has perhaps the most slanderous tongue in Ulysses. And yet she passes up the opportunity to make a malicious comment on the supposedly obscene allusion behind the wording of Breen’s postcard. She simply regards him as a forlorn-looking spectacle of a husband who is mad enough on occasions to go to bed with his boots on. This is in keeping with the way in which Breen is regarded generally in the novel – the cronies in Cyclops collapse with laughter at his lunatic behaviour, not because of some urinary or sexual irregularity.
There have been many other interpretations of the expression, normally made without appreciating the strength of the traditional meaning. One or other of these alternative readings may of course still be valid in a context of multiple interpretation, but without additional understanding of why Denis Breen runs to lawyers when he sees the postcard it is probably safest to stick to the conservative reading and to regard the others as only distant possibilities.
Mind you, I'm not entirely convinced. I do still feel there's some urinary (or sexual) gibe underlying the sinister postcard - I can't see why Dennis Breen, eccentric though he undoubtedly is, would have reacted to it so strongly otherwise. And the "slanderous" Molly Bloom's use of the expression "bore you stiff to extinction" sounds a little pointed to me, in context.
I suppose, though, that the whole ridiculous farrago goes to illustrate a celebrated dictum from Vladimir Nabokov which I used to quote when introducing James Joyce's story "Clay" to my first-year Creative Writing students:
In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong with the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have all been lovingly collected. If one begins with a ready-made generalization, one begins at the wrong end …It may well seem a waste of time to worry about the implications of the term “U. p.: up” instead of pondering the larger influence of Ulysses on twentieth-century European literature, but trying to do that would be (according to Nabokov) to start at the wrong end.
His remarks continue as follows:
Let me submit the following practical suggestion. Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain ... Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed - then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavour will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.Hopefully that's something we can all assent to.- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (1981)
Books I own are marked in bold:
-
Fiction:
- Dubliners (1914)
- The Sisters
- An Encounter
- Araby
- Eveline
- After the Race
- Two Gallants
- The Boarding House
- A Little Cloud
- Counterparts
- Clay
- A Painful Case
- Ivy Day in the Committee Room
- A Mother
- Grace
- The Dead
- Dubliners. 1914. London: Jonathan Cape, 1944.
- Dubliners: The Corrected Text. 1914. Explanatory Note by Robert Scholes. 1967. Jonathan Cape Paperback JCP 58. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.
- Dubliners. 1914. Ed. Terence Brown. 1992. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.
- Included in: The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. 1948. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The Definitive Text, Corrected from the Dublin Holograph by Chester G. Anderson. 1916. Ed. Richard Ellmann. 1964. Jonathan Cape Paperback JCP 59. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Ed. Seamus Deane. 1992. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- Included in: The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. 1948. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
- Ulysses (1922)
- Ulysses, with ‘Ulysses: A Short History’, by Richard Ellmann. 1922. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
- Ulysses. 1922. Illustrated by Kenneth Francis Dewey. Franklin Centre, Pennsylvania: The Franklin Library, 1979.
- Ulysses: The Corrected Text. 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe & Claus Melchior. 1984. Preface by Richard Ellmann. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
- Ulysses: The 1922 Text. Ed. Jeri Johnson. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
- Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study. 1930. London: Faber, 1960.
- Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. Notes For Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974.
- Delaney, Frank. James Joyce’s Odyssey: A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses. Photographed by Jorge Lewinski. 1981. A Paladin Book. London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1983.
- Finnegans Wake (1939)
- Finnegans Wake. 1939. London: Faber, 1949.
- Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.
- A Shorter Finnegans Wake. Ed. Anthony Burgess. 1966. London: Faber, 1968.
- Beckett, Samuel, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage, & William Carlos Williams. Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress. With Letters of Protest by G. V. L. Slingsby & Vladmir Dixon. 1929. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1972.
- Campbell, Joseph, & Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. 1944. London: Faber, 1947.
- McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
- Stephen Hero. 1904–06 (1944)
- Stephen Hero: Part of the First Draft of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. 1904-6. Ed. Theodore Spencer. 1944. Revised Edition with Additional Material. Ed. John J. Slocum & Herbert Cahoon. 1956. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969.
- Chamber Music (1907)
- Included in: The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. 1948. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
- Pomes Penyeach (1927)
- Pomes Penyeach and Other Verses. 1927. London: Faber, 1968.
- Collected Poems (1936)
- Giacomo Joyce. 1907 (1968)
- Giacomo Joyce. 1907. Ed. Richard Ellmann. 1968. Faber Paperbacks. London: Faber, 1983.
- Exiles (1918)
- Exiles: A Play in Three Acts. 1918. Introduction by Padraic Colum. N.E.L. Signet Modern Classics. 1962. London: the New English Library Limited, 1968.
- Included in: The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. 1948. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
- The Cat and the Devil (1965)
- The Cats of Copenhagen (2012)
- The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin (1948)
- Levin, Harry, ed. The Essential James Joyce. ['Dubliners', 1914; 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', 1916; 'Exiles', 1918; 'Chamber Music', 1907]. 1948. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
- The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann (1959)
- Ellmann, Richard, & Ellsworth Mason, ed. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. London: Faber, 1959.
- Poems and Shorter Writings (1991)
- Poems and Shorter Writings: Including Epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce and ‘A Portrait of the Artist.’ Ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz & John Whittier-Ferguson. London: Faber, 1991.
- Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Stuart Gilbert (1957)
- Gilbert, Stuart, ed. Letters of James Joyce. Chronology by Richard Ellmann. London: Faber, 1957.
- Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 2. Ed. Richard Ellmann (1966)
- Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 3. Ed. Richard Ellmann (1966)
- Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann (1975)
- Ellmann, Richard, ed. Selected Letters of James Joyce. 1957 & 1966. London: Faber, 1975.
- Eliot, T. S., ed. Introducing James Joyce: A Selection of Joyce’s Prose. 1942. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1964.
- Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce: New and Revised Edition. 1959 & 1982. Oxford University Press Paperback. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
- Ellmann, Richard. Ulysses on the Liffey. 1972. London: Faber, 1974.
- Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother’s Keeper. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Preface by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1958.
- Levin, Harry. James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. 1944. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1960.
- Power, Arthur. Conversations with James Joyce. Ed. Clive Hart. 1974. London: Millington Books Ltd., 1978.
- Walsh, Keri, ed. The Letters of Sylvia Beach. Preface by Noel Riley Fitch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Poetry:
Plays:
For Children:
Miscellaneous:
Letters:
Secondary:
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