I remember reading about this dispute when I was young and it encouraged me to read and compare several extant editions of Ulysses. However, I too lost track of this debate and Mr. Kidd. Thank you for this excellent, fascinating article.
2
I took John Kidd's World Literature class at BU. He was eccentric, but I do not remember him being abusive. He picked students randomly and asked the meaning of words in the readings. If the student had not bothered to look it up, and had no answer, Professor Kidd would assign further reading. It taught me not to be a lazy reader. I very much enjoyed his class. During introductions, when he learned I was originally from Brazil, he asked me for a copy of Ulysses in Portuguese. How ironic!
9
Absolutely fascinating for reasons I can't even clearly articulate!
7
While Hitt smacks the ever curious Bloom with the epithet "schlub" how could this book have ever worked without him? Even its title? You see James Joyce was also a "schlub" and the convergence of the two, albeit upon differing levels, has made for unparalleled reading, if not a sheer lifetime's quest directing our imaginations toward a greater exploration, not unlike Joyce's, of what we often know and in the deepest way seek to ken as reality.
This could have been an interesting article at half the length. It's a shame that Hitt didn't point out that someone who read Ulysses as a teenager in three days and then spent his entire life obsessing about the minutiae of someone else's work was clearly already mentally disorganized and obsessive. The wonder is not that Kidd was badly treated by academia but that he got so far in the first place.
8
I'm delighted to see John Kidd is with us still. He bought out our Joyce section at the Columbia University area N.R.S. Bookshop (the store later became Last Word Books, of which I was one of the co-owners) where I was working just before the Gabler edition was due to be published. The buzz on Gabler was already causing quite a stir. Kidd burst in and began bouncing about the shop like a very erudite Mad Hatter, all the while discoursing volubly on why the Gabler edition is so dreadful. (Thanks to Kidd, I own a pre-ordered copy of the Gabler and still haven't read anything but the original Random House editions.) I, who'd done my thesis as a Barnard English major on "Ulysses," made an offhand reference to a passage I'd always thought alluded to the death of Laocoön in the Latin text of Virgil's "Aeneid." Kidd's eyes nearly jumped out of his head. "That's very important!" he shouted! "Nobody has pointed that out yet! Can you find it? Can you show it to me?" "I think so," I said, somewhat taken aback, and off we scurried to find a Loeb Classic edition of Virgil. When I found the passage and pointed out the similarities to the Joyce text, Kidd pronounced me correct. I do hope he gave credit for the discovery to the girl behind the Morningside Heights bookstore counter if he ever cited it! A delightful man, and one who sure knew his onions when it came to Joyceana.
15
This article brought back memories of when I read "Ulysses." I taught high school English for 19 years. My farewell to teaching was a wonderful summer at Cornell studying "Ulysses" under Professor Daniel Schwarz along with 14 other high school teachers on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. I could not have read the novel by myself. But with Professor Schwarz' kind rigor and the fellowship of 14 other teachers, it was the highlight of my life as a reader. I don't regret my pursuits since then, but will never forget that summer.
6
Until this afternoon, I cared more about a discarded pop-top tab than “Ulysses,” and I never would have been pasted to an article close to 6,000 words, never mind without yielding to distraction, hunger or an empty coffee cup. And until this afternoon, I didn’t know what I was missing, not having read Jack Hitt’s almost mesmerizing writing that made me read this article to the end without stopping. Wonderfully colorful profile of John Kidd with an equally colorful lesson about James Joyce and “Ulysses.”
Makes me want to invite Jack Hitt to lunch and never stop listening. Thank you!
3
Excellent and compelling article. Agree with Michael in Upstate, I was drawn into reading the article and then could not stop. Very good writing, as always, from the always great Jack Hitt.
3
Beautiful article. Thanks! Reminds me of that old grad school cliche. "Academic arguments between scholars are so vicious because so little is at stake."
7
The most fascinating article I've ever read about "Ulysses" -- couldn't stop reading. "Ulysses" gave me many thrilling moments for its poetic passages, but, beyond basic parallels to the "Odyssey," I can't say I ever understood it. And now, at last, I have a hint of why its complexities fascinate so many readers.
And what a joy the discoveries and the writing -- after years of mystery -- must have given Jack Hitt. Happiest congratulations to the writer, and to John Kidd for his staggering commitments.
6
This was a great read! The notion that an entire community of people can create long and profitable careers out of the study of one work of fiction...emphasis fiction!...never ceases to amaze me and my working class upbringing's sense of worth and productivity.
It was also a reminder that academia has the ability to propel works of mediocrity to the highest heights of literature. I'm not saying this is the case for Ulysses. After all, like many who have tried I have yet to be able to finish this incomprehensible masterwork. I guess it's just too good of a book for most of us.
2
Belatedly I’ve caught up with Jack Hitt’s fascinating article – particularly of interest to me as I interviewed Kidd for a feature in the Times Higher Education Supplement (London) back in February 1993. Looking it up, I see that I stated that a new Ulysses edited by Kidd would be published the following year, in 1994: I had that from Mary Cunnane of W.W. Norton, so it wasn’t just Kidd bluster that I relied on. I also had quotes from other Joyce scholars who apparently approved of what Kidd was doing. But I have to admit that maybe I took too much of Kidd on trust, as did other journalists of the time.
I just have one other question for Jack H, if he’s reading this: did you ever track down Keith Botsford? Is he still alive? An elusive character who was for a time my boss when I worked for Boston University, he was a friend of Saul Bellow’s and seems to feature in the background of various literary figures’ biographies.
3
I remember you fondly, John Davies. My dabbling in Ulysses never stopped. I had always with me a hundred thousand pages, a digital archive of my forty-plus years of wrestling with the angel.
The extension of copyrights worldwide in the 1990s threw many Modernist editions into disarray. Those twenty years have expired and I have not.
Contrary to Jack Hitt's reporting, as delightfully dramatic as it is, I _do_ have both paper and digital copies of all my work. The paper originals are in Massachusetts. Digital backups are on a pocket drive in my Rio apartment , as they were in Shanghai and too many other Chinese cities to name.
The ever-alert Mary Cunane, whom you mention, suggested many fine revisions, which were eagerly adopted by me. But after submitting my second draft, I was unable to get a written response from anyone at Norton.
One preview of what awaits you. In the 1930s Joyce was still fixing the names of historical figures that were mangled by his early printers or by himself even. A letter stating so is housed at Boston University. My essay lists all the name-cruxes I've found over the decades.
The 2018 Legend of Kidd's Lost Introduction is as fantasmal as its predecessor, Millenial Rumors that it never existed. As a writer yourself living in foggy Cardiff, I hope that you, like James Joyce, Trust Not Appearances.
14
"to our health's contempt" let us raise our glasses to all the gauchos.
and another to hopes for an eventual release of john kidd's hostage "ulysses."
Per last para and Arthur Miller, attention must be paid.
None of them is perfect.
Mr. Hitt: Bravo! I was reading your piece at a local restaurant in Northampton MA.— Now: Who will play John Kidd in a future film? Kidd is some character! What a life!
1
The Sutherlands. I'm just not sure if it should be Donald or Kiefer.
2
What's the algorithm to transform "John Kidd" into "Jack Hitt"?
Hmmm.....???
3
And Hitt seems to have an interest in digging up long lost geniuses who turned their back on everything. His wiki doesn't mention his parents.
Some time ago, i audited a course at SUNY New Paltz given by a friend of mine - Robert Waugh. I don't think the class ever had a discussion about the best version of Ulysses, but the explication and discussion led by Professor Waugh was excellent. The careful examination of the book was anything but sterile academia. A humanity and appreciation of the intricacy of the allusions, as well as understanding the narrative arc (Yes!) of the novel all emerged. I did try Finnegan's Wake, but gave up when I felt my brain would never enjoy that challenge. Very enjoyable article about one man's monomania.
1
What a wonderful article: clear, engaging and edifying. While I used to think of Joyce as OCD and astonishingly, encyclopedically brilliant -- I always hated the experience of reading the dreams that came from his pen. I simply didn't understand them, and now I know why: I read them at the wrong level, and I am in awe at the ability of people like Kidd to get them.
4
Having just finished "Ulysses," I found this article very interesting. It does not surprise me that someone would devote his entire life to the novel, and still come away surprised by what he has read. The best attitude to have, in my opinion, is to read the book without trying to understand what is going on. When I read "Jejune Jesuit" on page two, I was hooked.
I read this article with great interest since I was a graduate student colleague and friend of John Kidd's at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the late 1970s (I received my PhD there in 1980). I recall hanging out with him a lot and having many conversations about Joyce, and I followed his dramatic work on Joyce in the years that followed. I was struck by your remark that “as a young scholar, Kidd gained notice from Professors, won prizes and quickly ascended the graduate studies ladder.” I don't recall Kidd winning any prizes. What were they? And can you clarify what you mean by "quickly ascended the graduate studies ladder?" That would certainly include completing a doctoral dissertation, but I cannot find a record of a dissertation by a John Kidd in any of the standard bibliographies (including ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global). Did you verify that he did indeed receive his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and can you provide the reference for his doctoral dissertation? I can't find a CV for him online. I'm not questioning the importance of John's work or the excellence of your piece on him, but some of these claims seem at odds with what I recall or can verify. As you indicate, John was an eccentric student, and brilliant in his own way, but I recall him struggling in grad school for all that, and question that he wouldn't have studied Joyce, as I did, with the renowned Norman O. Brown. More evidence for these claims would be helpful.
13
I assume most Joyce scholars end up like this.
I am pretty sure that Finnegan's Wake is a long, exhaustive prank on literary scholars. It is a novel composed using 60 languages, and relies heavily upon combination words and implied meanings. An explanation for the basic, literal meaning of just a few sentences often looks longer than most low level college english papers. There is serious debate about whether or not the work has a plot.
There is a serious chance that he just wanted to mess with critics. No normal person would read Finnegan's Wake for entertainment- only people obsessed with dissection of the written word would bother.
4
My late wife Ruth Mortimer and I published John Kidd's detailed exposition of the enormous number of errors, large and small, in the Gabler edition, when we edited the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. It appeared, as it happened, in the last issue under our editorship (December 1988), and was an exhilarating way to end our tenure. Kidd's energy and enthusiasm permeated our interactions with him; we (like most others) lost touch with him not long thereafter. I'm delighted to learn that he's alive and well, and pursuing yet another infinitely complex textual production. If Jack Hitt reads this, and is in touch with John Kidd, please pass on my regards and best wishes.
6
My bet is even Joyce wouldn't be able to produce a perfect version if there were a time machine to bring him to the present.
Not being an academic, let alone any good in English Literature, this is still fascinating read.
Academia are an intensely political place occupied by gigantic egos. And more often than not, you don't win by merit. But who knows, losing out can be sobering. This is very well save the loser's life
1
Kidd and his fellow obsessives deserve our gratitude. We live in a world where a President uses a fifth grade vocabulary, and rewrites history daily in Tweets. So our caring about what great, meticulous thinkers intended, and wanting to preserve a precise record of their important books is crucial.
For me, the recent "Emily Dickinson's Poems As She Preserved Them" published by Harvard, edited by Cristanne Miller, is something to celebrate. Perhaps someday I'll be able to say the same about Mr. Kidd's “Ulysses".
7
Not a literary scholar but I'm Irish and lyrical! Read a chapter of "Ulysses", randomly picked, on 6/16 every year, (have read some chapters twice) and just loved this article. There is much to be said for scholarly madness. Maybe it is just about a single day in Dublin? What if Moby Dick is just a novel about a couple of guys who went fishing?
4
I wonder if he's read Infinite Jest...
3
Thank you. That was most interesting.
The acerbic quotes--like so many cherry bombs going off in the musty halls of academia. . ..
. . .remind one of Professor A. E. Housman. Professor of Latin at Cambridge University. Who (unlike most classical scholars who wrote in Latin) flung his many barbs about in English.
(In graduate school, many a long year ago, I would pull down Housman's edition of Lucan. NOT for the pleasure of reading a long poem about the Roman civil war. . .
.. but to experience the gladiatorial thrill of seeing Professor Housman skewer yet another luckless opponent. Macte! Habet! "Good! That'll SETTLE him!")
Mr. Kidd--"Is anyone awake at the wheel?"--is obviously of the same kidney. No futile palaver! Grip the lance. . . .
. .AND DRIVE IT HOME.
One last thought.
I have such mixed feelings about works like "Ulysses."
Thousands of words about. . . .about what?
About words. Conundrums and puzzles--recondite allusions--little mystifications worked in (it would seem) to keep scholars busy "for centuries to come." I know! I'm a Philistine. But still. It reminds me of. . . .
. persons who ransack the pages of Scripture for hidden meanings--cabalistic allusions--intricate clues connected with numbers--this that, this that. . . .
. .when the MEANING of the Bible--well, sorry! New York Times. . ..
. . .is perfectly clear.
But I daresay I'm prejudiced.
Thanks again. Fascinating!
5
Thank you, Susan Fitzwater, for intuiting my kinship with A. E. Housman, Poet and Professor both.
I happen to have online, but unmentioned by Jack Hitt, at my decade-old "Textology" site, one built here in Rio's Cinelândia, in the windowless and pigeon-free luggage depository cum computer center of the Hotel Itajubá, a paragraph from my 1988/1989 print & digital monograph (way back then? yes), "An Inquiry into Ulysses: The Corrected Text," some lively words of Housman you may appreciate, if you've survived my Joco-Eumaean syntax.
<<< Contrary to Gabler's paraphrase, [W.W.] Greg dismissed the idea of a single document of "highest overall authority." What of Gabler's adjoining statement that "editorial decisions gravitate towards the copytext, upholding its readings where possible"? In mentioning outmoded theories, Greg is also handily prescient in offering a response [in 1950] thirty years before the contortion of his thought saw print:
<<< Thus a school arose, mainly in Germany, that taught that if a manuscript could be shown to be generally more correct than any other and to have descended from the archetype independently of other lines of transmission, it was "scientific" to follow its readings whenever they were not manifestly impossible. It was this fallacy that Housman exposed with devastating sarcasm. He had only to point out that "Chance and the common course of nature will not bring it to pass that the readings of a MS are right wherever they are possible ..." >>>
1
So, in this now dystopian world of trumpiana, endless over-thinking and bible quoting in support of government edicts one must finally get down to brass tacks and ask....."who cares" or maybe even more to the point, "so what". I'm no genius but my first reading of "Ulysses" some 55 years ago revealed to me the "secret" of the book....to wit, it needs to be read aloud in 24 hours as mimicry of the narrator's thoughts (madness?). Anyway, I never bothered to do this and therefore didn't waste my time on the pursuit of mindless time wasting. Instead, I have concentrated on the greatest philosophical quote of all time - "Time flies like an arrow, Fruit Flies like a banana" as uttered by the greatest thinking mind/man of the 20th Century (even of any century) that of and him as......Julius Henry Marx of Brothers fame! This quote continues to this day to solve all philosophical questions and produce a grin at any time. Eternity relies on it as well.
8
So well written until the final paragraph. "None of them are absolutely perfect, but each of them, nevertheless, is 'Ulysses.' ” Tsk, tsk. "None" is the contraction for "no one." None of them IS absolutely perfect, ... duh.
1
To paraphrase Camus after struggling mightily to make sense of this wonderfully well researched but curiously obfuscating essay: even the emptiest existence will, however grudgingly, find room aplenty for a new obsession.
Not only did The Little Review editors champion the publication of the novel Ulysses, they published episodes in serial form in the US between 1918 and 1920.
Great article! The pronunciation given for "gauleiter" is mistaken. "ei" in German rhymes with the English pronoun "I" not "ie", which I take to rhyme with the vowel in the English pronoun "he". But then I don't know how this writer actually pronounces "ie"! (Someone else may have commented on this. There are so many comments, and I have read only a few.)
As Voltaire (sort of) said, "perfect is the enemy of good."
What a fabulous exposé! This was a joy to read. Thank you.
3
There's an easy way to solve the problem of the different versions of Ulysses: Print the Roth text; underneath line by line, print the random house text; underneath line by line, print the Gabler text; underneath line by line, print the Kidd text; underneath line by line, print the source texts; underneath line by line, print annotations to all texts! Then, the true text of Ulysses can begin to be constructed.
1
Great reading! So much so, in fact, that I wish it was a series. How did Kidd end up in, of all places, my hometown of Rio de Janeiro and is living so well? He has a job at the Letters Academy?! Also, his choice of "Escrava Isaura" as a project is fascinating, to say the least. As a side, the book was adapted as a "telenovela" created by Globo network in the late 70's, a humongous success that was later broadcast all over the world, becoming a blockbuster in, amongst many countries, Japan.
3
most obsessed over novel of all time? how about
most consistently overrated novel?
if you want to spend time with a seriously great novel, stick to "In Search of Lost Time"
by Marcel Proust.
5
I quite enjoyed this article and the quality of the writing was excellent. There is also an interesting comparison in that both Joyce and Kidd felt misunderstood by the intelligentsia of their times and chose to live in exile outside the English-speaking world. I hope that Kidd completes his latest project and that those disks on the corrected Ulysses are found!
4
Fascinating article. Does anyone know what the best modern edition would be, or is Gebler simply the default option?
7
This is the literary equivalent of "Searching for Sugar Man". Now, if someone could get Kidd and Rodriguez together for a song and reading duet performance....it would get higher ratings than Kim and Trump. Trust me.
6
Unsurprisingly, professors are not above ego, bias, pettiness, and vindictiveness. Shamefully, Kidd's corrections have been allowed to be lost/forgotten because of his personality. Maybe such scholarly lapses are inconsequential, but where will this careless presumptive attitude end? Will the next cancer cure be ignored because the scientist is too eccentric or too plain or too white or too brown or too poor or too attractive?
7
Well written. If they ever make a movie about Kidd, James Spader should play him. Makes me sorry he didn't publish.
4
Finnegan's Wake is music.
2
dissonant, irrelevant music.not worth the
effort it takes to puzzle through it's maze
of meaningless words.
2
How I wish as much attention had been given to the punctuation in the Second Amendment.
16
Ok....so what edition of the book should people read?
You're asking us to belive that "Jack Hitt" and "John Kidd" are two different people?
6
It certainly looks ( deliciously) suspicious .
1
While reading the piece before discovering that John Kidd was alive in Rio I thought of his disappearance thusly. 'Kidd. You not.'
I tried from age 17 to 25 on three occasions to read Ulysses and had to move on because it became intellectually torturous (with extremely meager relief from the occasional wordplay fun).
I think the article’s author was spot on when he ended it by quoting Joyce: “These are not misprints,” he said, “but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” Yes, Joyce the gigantic and unique sturgeon whose ovum creates ova that is fertilized repeatedly by every ‘revised’ edition that is printed and distributed and by each reader of the book whereby just reading it transubstantiates it into an ongoing re-birth, every birthing a *separate-but-equal Ulysses.
I hope the journalist produces more work like this in the future so I can write a rave reference like, “Another Hitt!”
* this process would include et al. Finnegan’s Wake.
2
Zugzwang in OH,
Faulkner overrated? One cannot begin to understand the American South and it's bitter contribution to the American ethos without Faulkner.
While I am not smitten with Hemingway, I do recognize that we're indebted to him for enriching the literary tool-box of style and technique. An indispensable step-stone on the pathway to modern literary stylistics, Hemingway is easy to take for granted today.
As for Joyce, a fantastic absurdity is still fantastic. Joyce's virtuosic whimsy is well worth celebrating, even if an acquired taste, as that Venn intersection of a new psychological view of self and mind coupled to a literary celebration of language and place, made extant and fully visceral through the "beauties of [his] my style hitherto undreampt of," Joyce's exploration and dissolution of previous boundaries in literary form.
My accommodation, when I consider great writers, is that they pursue diverse goals in their work so direct comparison is problematic. One can look at legacy and impact which requires scholarship, but competitive comparison is not useful to me. I find it interesting to see how a work fits within the trajectory of change and evolution in literature. Like Beethoven's music, some literature feels stunningly modern because it is the antecedent that birthed the contemporary familiar and exhibits the boldness and prescience that marks a masterwork deserving of admiration.
2
In the early 1980s John Kidd visited a bookstore in Santa Cruz, where I worked, on a semi-regular basis. We talked quite a bit during lulls in the store. Dressed approximating a dapper 1920s style, he spoke in a friendly high-spirited manner about literature in general but of course about Joyce in particular, and sometimes about Jung. I seem to remember at the time Mr. Kidd either possessed or hoped to possess a copy of Ulysses “as Joyce originally conceived it.” That is, the physical book itself was a to be cube-shaped. Then, due to Joyce’s interest in numerology, the first half of the book, which takes place during the day, was to end in the exact middle of the book, page 365 on the left. Page 366 begins the night portion of the story. There were many other exacting elements intended as well. If this is indeed true, and if I am remembering this correctly, I think this speaks to Joyce’s striving toward a work of rare diamond-like perfection on every level. Aware of, and belief in Joyce’s full artistic vision, why wouldn’t John Kidd want to do what he could to see such an edition finally come to fruition? I cannot say why it has not.
8
This is a wonderfully engaging piece! Thank you! In some way, doesn't it all have to do with "how we see things"? Philosophy 101 and what's real and what's not? I have finally read/listened to "Ulysses," decades after my Master's at the U. of Tulsa, where a JJCenter bristled with scholars and arguments about the novel. I failed to read the book then, though my best friend completed a thesis on it longer than the book itself, with Hugh Kenner encouraging publication. John also disappeared, with an older woman, into the mist.
A text is a text is a text -- nope. Not with Joyce. Or any writer? But the reader is not a reader is not a reader. That is, some scholarship may often strive for a precise objective entity, a butterfly finally pinned to the paper -- but something has been changed, transformed, rubbed away in the offing. Let's each read what we got, dot or dotless, knowing we're damned close to the 'truth' of that artist's moment, and what s/he has brought to life in us -- even rejoycing in the arguments that re/a/bound.
1
From 1988 to 1994 I spent quality time in the Boston University English department completing an English literature MA and PhD. Though I was too focused on 19th century American letters to pay much attention to Joyce, I do recall the special hyperlink aura surrounding Professor Kidd's Ulysses project. Thank you for filling in the blanks.
3
Superb piece of academic detective work! I was just in Dublin at UCD for a comparative conference on “partitions.” It is the decade of the centenary of the Irish partition. But the Joycean in me could not resist following in Stephen’s many footsteps. I also stayed at the Radisson near the JJ tower across from UCD. There were of course lots of rumours of Joyce scholarship: that there is a book in process by a Princeton scholar on Joyce as a nationalist that the Irish pooh-poohed, and of course now the much hailed James Joyce in Court. I remember Kidd well. I was married in Ireland to a Joyce scholar following a Joyce conference in Dublin 30 years ago! Kidd sat across from us for breakfast at the B&B. Shame on academic politics! But am glad Kidd survived.
4
As an undergrad at BU, I was a student of Kidd's. His class remains my most memorable and he was by far the best professor I had there. It is wonderful news to hear he is alive and working. Thank you for this article and for detailing the impact he had as a Ulysses scholar.
17
Bloomsday is June 16. My college tutorial was 1 book, Ulysses by James Joyce. It is an incredible book. A work of genius. I never totally finished it or understood it. But the professor was wonderful and he told us that it contained everything we needed to know about life. I have replaced my original copy and read some of it every June 16th.
9
Thank you. This was the most enjoyable thing I’ve read in years.
12
A delightful article; lots of laughs. Now I want to read Ulysses, but NOT the German version.
6
This is the most interesting article, of any kind, that I've read in years. Too much to capture here. All of what compelled me about Joyce when I was a young student came rushing back while reading this.
15
Despite all the nit picking going on in the story, keep in mind that Ulysses is a deeply funny read for the most part.
7
A wonderful adventure story and with a satisfying ending!
2
Close to sixty years ago I bought a paperback copy of Ulysses at the airport to start reading in flight. After half an hour I decided it wasn't worth reading, and a few weeks later gave it to a pretty blond girl who later claimed she'd read the whole thing and liked it a lot better than me.
7
Great story!
1
What fascinates me almost more than this great article is how much the author dispells the idea that humans tell stories accurately about others, about themselves and their experiences about others. I am continually dismayed how and what other's interpret of their connections to other, in a dilusions that suit their own versions of reality.
6
I was an acquisitions editor in the late 90s when academic publishers were in the early stages of producing digital books. I went up to Boston to meet Kidd with the hopes of acquiring his project. Despite the army of students working at multiple computers I could tell it wasn't going to happen. But he was certainly an arresting character and we stayed in touch for a while. One night he called me at home, waking me, to talk though I can't remember what about. Something came up that my husband knew more about so I handed the phone to him, and they proceeded to have a long conversation. Interesting to read about him after all these years.
16
I would subscribe just to read this author. The sea monkey story was wonderful and this one is just as good. Wonderful features as good as the best of New Yorker. Just wanted to say thank you for whetting my literary beak.
12
One of the best things I have ever read. Congratulations. I am deeply amazed by this article.
10
A wonderful article. And despite the topic of anything Joyce - extaraordinarily adroit and droll one at that.
I think I have skimmed this book of Joyce so had no idea about these academic fights.
Now, not to be flippant about Joyce - this article proves what they say about academic politics - it's most brutal and often deadly.
Why??
Because there is not much at stake.
Finally, as with that great train robber of England - there seems to be something about Brazil that attracts these types of vanishing folks.
4
Glenn Greenwald, too
A wonderful article, but one can come away with a misconception about scholarship after reading it. Scholarship is not primarily about minutiae. Rather, capable scholars ask important and difficult questions, even if exploring those questions often involve being concerned with minutiae. The academic world, like non-academic worlds, is not overwhelmingly populated with capable scholars. Rather, along with non-academic worlds, it is very much afflicted with what the literary and social critic Kenneth Burke called, almost a century ago, “the bureaucratization of the imagination.”
I can’t speak to the small part of the world called Joycean scholarship, nor where Mr. Kidd might fit in the distinction between “gaucho” and “gauleiter,” but that he recognizes the difference is a plus. It is a distinction, however, that has been known for a long time. Good, capable scholars have long recognized it.
7
The suggestion that Kidd was 'the greatest Joyce scholar alive' is wrong on at least two counts. But apparently he was nice to Jack Hitt and that entitles him to the misunderstood genius treatment. His track record at BU tells a very different story, and if the pigeons on Comm Ave. could talk even they would have told Hitt that Kidd was an unsavory creep who should be avoided.
5
Such a serious charge should be substantiated.
Otherwise it smacks of grudge and meanness.
5
With Joyce’s death, the possibility of revising various editions into the one true Ulysses ended. But one thing is true: the big black dot must remain. MNy thanks to the author of this article for making me want to read Ulysses again.
3
Brilliant article. You hung out with The Man. Thank you for great reporting.
12
"...a dozen slightly different versions of the novel “as James Joyce wrote it.” None of them are absolutely perfect, but each of them, nevertheless, is “Ulysses.”
Or none of them.
It's like morphemes and allomorphs--see MW "Collegiate"
Allomorph:
one of a set of forms that a morpheme may take in different contexts <the -s of cats, the -en of oxen, and the zero suffix of sheep are allomorphs of the English plural morpheme>
At best--each edition is a unique allo-Ulysses; none is the Ulysses-morpheme!
That's not unlike Homer's "Ulysses" and each translation.
But at worst--each "edition" is a fraud.
Kidd should get busy. Devils are in the details; but devils are gods too.
Of course many can't see the trees for the forest. But that's what academia is for--to see both. That's "discrimination" in the good sense--letting ONLY and ALL relevant factors count. The popular bad sense of "discrimination" is about missing some and/or counting irrelevant stuff.
1
Not being particularly obsessive about JJ and Ulysses, I'm not quite sure why I stuck with this so long, as I lay in bed this early a.m. here in SE Brazil. Could be I had made up my mind not to waste my time with the Snore in Singapore. And I had already read Jane Brody yet again on waistlines. And I had aced the mini. But then I came to Hitt's discovery of Kidd in Rio, just down the road from us, and I perked up. Kidd is now at work, in a cubicle at the Academia de Letras, on a translation of A Escrava Isaura? I would hate for Times readers to think that Kidd has happened on a work of such stellar intellect and brilliant wordplay as to justify, per Hitt, a translation into English “nearly twice as plump as Joyce’s ‘Ulysses.’” Isaura is also not, as seems to be implied, Brazilian culture’s “big book” – though puzzlingly, dismayingly unknown to anyone beyond our borders. Really, what is this bafflingly loony thing that Kidd is doing with, or to, poor Isaura? “The work,” says Hitt, “will be in two parts, and every word in Part 1 will have its lexicographic partner in Part 2.” Sorry, this is daft. If Kidd is functional enough not to be locked up for his own good, I’m for him. But I hate to think of Times readers downloading Isaura, in Portuguese, from the Internet, and expecting a Joycean experience, when Isaura is anything but. The photo at the top of the article is credited to one Lalo de Almeida, so I assume it was taken here in Brazil. The photo could not be more articulate.
13
As a result of this article, I have postponed my recent (previously unthinkable) decision to unsubscribe from this newspaper. Well done.
12
Thank You.
5
Minor point -- The pronunciation of "gauleiter" is "gow-lighter" not "gow-lieder."
2
I agree. I made a similar comment this morning not having yet read yours. Your phonetic illustration is better than what I offered.
Absolutely wonderful article, and just in time for Bloomsday 2018. Joyce will have the last laugh, as always, but I had more than a few while reading this very informative, well written, and entertaining piece.
7
My artist daughter reminded me that it's not how you draw (or write), it's how you see.
When a scholar spends this much time and energy on one work, the pursuit is, as Nietzsche might say, 'for everyone and for no one.' We're fascinated because his search for the perfect is the search we all eventually make. I'm sorry that Michael in Upstate didn't finish his PhD. But I think Jack Hitt sees the fractals.
10
Not sure why the author posits that the quest to make sense of it all is a compulsion of a sort and motivated by a fear of the void. Why not a desire driven by one’s achievement motivation to take on the biggest challenge possible? (The Big Book.) Why not a quest for purpose/meaning given by as large a framework as one can handle? Driven not by fear, but by the reward of knowing, by completion of ever more challenging goals, by the sense of meaning and self that evolves, and by connection to an artistic narrative or entity that has taken on a life of its own. (“These are not misprints,” he said, “but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”)
5
While at BU, Kidd dressed to resemble Joyce, with the same hat and eyeglasses. A photo of him from this period would have enhanced the article.
10
The pic of Kidd with the pigeons should satisfy your request--he does have the hat and eyeglasses there!
1
Jack Hitt's article was brilliantly researched and written. I think it's Pulitzer worthy. Thank you for this beautiful and entrenching story. WOW and then some.
23
In Flann O'Brien's book, The Dalkey Archives, the Dublin sage revealed that James Joyce was not dead as supposed, but was alive and tending bar outside Dublin. Though he admitted to writing Dubliners, Joyce confessed to O'Brien that the text of Ulysses was actually written by a committee of pornographers--to which he had given his signature in a weak moment; and (again, O'Brien solemnly reported) he had never heard of Finnegan's Wake.
BTW, Joyce did not starve in a garret, but worked teaching English to Italians in Trieste and, unlike Mr. Kidd, he was thought of very highly by his students.
7
John and I were high school sweethearts, for a year in England. He was one of the most fascinating and intellectual as well as kindest people I’ve known. When he proposed marriage the next year, I turned him down. Our common peripatetic origins in US Navy officer families ended up quite differently: I lead a quiet midwestern life of domesticity.
25
Thank you for sharing your personal story.
5
yeah!!
"copy that" boss . . .
so very joycean.
har!
I enjoyed reading this expose. Mr. Kidd certainly seems to be an ambiguous, eccentric academic, whose obsession with textual perfection impeded the publication of his edition and further teaching duties. Comments by NYT readers provide additional context. At least his talent is not lost and he’s continuing scholarsly pursuits in Brazil. It’s also fascinating to read about the modern scholarly debates surrounding Joyce’s Ulysses. My field of literature’s modernist stream of consciousness prose is limited to fin-de-siecle Austria with Schnitzler’s “Leutnant Gustl”, a short novella, and Robert Musil’s unfinished epic “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.” Vienna was also brimming with psychoanalytics around this time. If I had to choose, I’d go with Schnitzler for it’s concise style and wit.
4
I doubt that either Schnitzler or Musil can be classified as
"fin-de-siecle Austria" writers. Both wrote after the start of the 20th century.
('fin-de-siecle Austria', end of the 19th century)
The greatest novel of the 20th century is not by Joyce. It is One Hundred Years of Solitude.
8
or winnie th . ..
oops.
that's not 20th C enough.
sheesh
1
What a great way that was to spend the first half hour of my day! It reminds me of the old aphorism regarding knowing more and more about less and less until one knows everything about nothing and nothing about everything. Wonderful sleuthing.
28
What a delightful read!
14
We did not think of him as the greatest Joyce scholar alive.
In fact, he's at a Joyce conference right now in Belgium.
(How's that for Joycean?)
7
Why the hyperbole? He was never "celebrated as the greatest Joyce scholar alive." Find me 5 academics who would agree. A good Joyce scholar, a good critic, but, come on, its not the NBA....And, in the end, what did he publish? Let's recall that Borges never won a Nobel or even, if I recall correctly, the Cervantes prize. Its a fascinating article, I just object to the dumbing down of the Times to read like Rolling Stone....And, that photo of him feeding the pigeons? Gorgeous clothes, well shined shoes, what moron could of thought of that guy as homeless or mentally ill.
16
It's. Could've. Punctuation. Glass houses....
2
Thank you very much for this article. I lived in the same student housing unit with John Kidd as a student at UC San Diego in 1974, and visited him in Santa Cruz in 1976. Our paths then diverged. I have wondered what became of him and somehow missed the entire Joyce saga. It's great to learn that he retains the same passion, creative genius, and wonderful eccentricity that he had back then. Your piece brought back many good memories. Thank you.
15
Nerds. Nerds. Nerds. Nerds. Nerds.
If this guy quibbled over the arcana of star wars fiction, you'd dismiss it. But quibbling over periods in literary fiction, and everyone ooohs and ahhhs.
I hope my children never become this lost in strange fascinations.
5
It was impossible not to tap, tap and pat the iPad to finish this hemispheric , time-consuming, biographical piece about a strange estranged whistleblower by a synonym-named newspaperman.
4
Anyone who knows either of these guys should disconnect their email and mobile #, get into bed and pull the covers over their head.
And pray.
4
This article is a work of fiction. John Kidd was never considered the greatest Joyce scholar who ever lived. I once spent a couple of weeks working with the Ulysses ms. facsimiles & Kidd’s long article in STUDIES IN BIBLIOGRAPHY on Gabler’s edition. I found numerous examples of exaggerated claims & concluded that the article was puffed up. I also studied Gabler’s edition, which will always be controversial but not for the reasons cited by this ill-informed article. That edition was revolutionary in terms of what it implied & exposed about the nature of textual editions & textual authority, though Gabler said himself that it could never be considered definitive. I knew Kidd as a graduate student & found him to be something of a con artist. In the controversy, he moralized editorial work & falsely accused Gabler of dishonesty while exploiting the average reader’s and scholar’s ignorance of editorial procedures. I’m a Joyce scholar, he tried to get me to endorse his distorted views of Gabler & his edition. The author of this article has provided an incomplete & misleading history.
29
Fascinating. In the vein of spirited debate I strongly urge you, and the NYT, to provide you with an op-op ed response. Wouldn’t this be an extension of the noble academic battle? Bring it!!
23
Glad you entered some reasonable qualifications to Hitt's overstated piece and John Kidd's inflated claims. This deserves more space in the Times! From a Kafka scholar.
17
I hope you also write a letter to the editor.
4
It’s stuff like this, and the quickly depreciating Food section, that, in these days of the Grey Lady's full tilt TDS boogie, keep me hanging on. Do this sort of thing and all y’all are forgiven.
9
Okay.Kidd was/is a brilliant and obsessive critic. Various good points made against Gabler (easy to do). But with the full support of Boston University ( er, I was there), he couldn't ,by temperament, do the REALLY hard work of an edition. Gabler did. And it is a tremendous achievement, not a matter of particular critique. Gabler: sober, methodical, "Germanic". Kidd- as you see. Glad you're alive.
21
My interpretation why the photos of John Kidd (aside: are we certain it's not Jon Kidd?) sabotage the surprise of the article-- the NYTimes editors are referencing the Aeolus episode. Bravo editors! Your Joycean buffoonery is appreciated!
6
A good lesson that small minds can be small about small things from any sphere, from kids on the front lawn to underdone potatoes to misplaced periods, and can blow them up to seemingly immense proportions. A sad waste of lives and intellects.
2
Ah, yes, academe! I used to be a professor's wife and later an administrator in several universities. There is a simple explanation for the unique personalities of academics. They probably were never the most gregarious kids growing up, preferring the life of the mind rather than that of the football field. Then they became college students, rehashing literary criticism in so many, many essays while hopeful of being brilliant. This striving continues though graduate school and for the rest of their lives. Theirs is a solitary quest, researching, thinking, writing, and worrying if what they write will be recognized as opening new paths of thought for which they will be praised. Finally they get the courage to present their ideas to their small closed world and what happens? Their years-long effort is immediately lacerated by often-smug colleagues. No wonder they become bitter as the years go by. Mr. Kidd had the courage to just walk away, even though it is all still galling to him.
7
When I once told a bright acquaintance that a relative of mine was an Egyptologist, he paused, and with a wry smile replied 'I did not think they did this anymore'. He is short of a genius and his life travel is to make the perfect coffee machine.
For this appreciative reader of the Odyssey of John Kidd in search of Ulysses, kindly tell him that it is not all pigeon pie, but surrealism with magic that comes to mind.
I enjoyed our visit with him in Rio and will dedicate in my heart for him a small story by Galworthy; trite, sentimental and magnificent, entitled The Choice, and thanks to this link, I now have a better understanding of the meaning of 'Ultima Thule'.
I'm an English professor.
I'm not solitary. I don't care if I'm praised. Never been lacerated. Not bitter.
I do have a unique personality, though.
24
I’ve felt the pull between practicality and scholarly ambition. From the scholars, I have received the most intellectual/philosophical inspiration, at least in my own pursuit of a PhD after years of working as a high school language teacher. For that, I am most grateful.
1
Can't wait to read “The Slave Isaura”- seems intriguing for its use of hapax legomena.
4
Is this for real? Or is it an au courant update of joe Mitchell on joe Gould the seagull man? Many manic similarities, no?
4
I made the same comment.
1
Got a $350 000 advance from Norton and just walked away? Wow.
PS. Joyce never visited Lucie in the asylum. I don't think even once.
4
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Mark Twain
Love this story!
6
The notion that copyright can prevent a new edition at this date is legalistic hogwash. As long as Kidd sticks to the original text and makes changes derived from that he and any publisher is safe from suit. It is typical ip bullying.
1
You've never met Stephen
6
My favorite nugget is this one: "a compulsion to fill an existential emptiness. This anxiety has its own Latin name, horror vacui, fear of the void" It is my belief that modern people of high intelligence suffer from this fear. Compulsive behaviors stem from it. One of my brothers spent most of a recent stay at my apartment compulsively reading his subscription of the NY Times on an iPhone 5 screen, his face pressed to its tiny screen. When he wasn't doing that, he was reading one of five books he had brought with him. He was surprised when I nixed the notion that he extend his stay another three days.
6
I have never read Ulysses, and I don't intend to. But the mystery, the philosophy, the irony and the thoroughness of this article drew me in. I read and enjoyed every word. I think that 'fear of the void' drives many a scholar or writer mad. There is no void; they fear what does not exist and refuse to accept what does. They search and strive for enlightenment at noontide with their eyes closed. They cannot perceive what is before them.
5
I read'Dubliners'many years ago with great delight and was especially moved by John Huston's film version of 'The Dead' released way back in the early 80's starring Anthony Hopkins.
Since then, I have tried at least once or twice a decade to read 'Ulysses' from end to end and must report only was able to get to the savage restaurant scene near the middle of the novel.'Ulysses' is a tedious, difficult, exasperating, and the most playful book written by man or woman. Thanks for this brilliant and fun piece on the novel and the man Kidd, a real 'Kidder.'
9
You will look in vain for Anthony Hopkins in the film “The Dead”.
3
You are right Ronald Cohen. My error. There is no Anthony Hopkins in the Huston film the dead. It was an Irish actor Donal McCann who played Gabriel Conroy. Thank you Wikipedia.
I stand corrected. It was not Anthony Hopkins but Donal McCann
1
"Escrava Isaura" is not the greatest brazilian soap opera exports by the way.
The author quotes Joyce: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.”
Joyce said that in reference to Finnegan’s Wake, not Ulysses.
20
My very limited search found the quotation [" If I gave it all up immediately, I’d lose my immortality. I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insulting them.”]
It was used in Ellman's 1982 edition of "James Joyce," in reference, after all to Ulysses, and specifically to why Joyce didn't want to provide his translator with a schema of the entire book.
Any source for the other? ( not a scholar, just wondered if this was a mistake that called into question everything in the article).
2
So many great sentences/phrases! I choose as best: "making this nondot an error miscorrected so many times that it is now perfectly invisible."
8
"Joyce and Freud and Gertrude Stein...Who are they? What do they want?" The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh. Mr. Waugh also pointed out the fact that Mr. Joyce wrote gibberish. This article helps to reinforce this very intelligent observation. Novels should be written for people to understand. This is a crossword puzzle. Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are not literary works, they are gibberish, which Mr. Waugh always pronounced with a hard G.
4
Will citizens do for the so-called president what academia has done for Gabler...We'll see.
1
“These are not misprints,” he said, “but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”
Reminds me of when John Cage was asked at a performance what was the best seat in the house. "Everyone is in the best seat," he replied.
6
Thanks, Jack Hitt. Wonderful article.
4
thank you for this article. I knew nothing about this person and enjoyed the education
3
What a delightful article! As anyone familiar with Joyce criticism knows, if you're going to be a Joycean, you'd best be an obsessive on par with Talmudic scholars. Kidd comes off like an underdog hero here--the brilliant, scrappy crackpot vs the dry academic Ivory Tower establishment. Kudos to Gabler though for his "administrative efficiency" in actually completing his work and getting it published, thereby making it a target for Joyceans like Kidd!
For anyone interested in the fascinating history of how "Ulysses" was disseminated and published, I highly recommend "The Most Dangerous Book" by Kevin Birmingham--mentioned here in Hitt's article. It's thoroughly researched and very well written. From its inception "Ulysses" was heroically championed by scores of people who risked their reputation and livelihood to make this book available to the public.
Thanks for finding John Kidd! Glad to know he's alive and well--and still a "gaucho."
9
Delving into the impenetrable absurdity which is "Ulysses" is enough to drive anyone crazy. In my pantheon of overrated writers: Joyce, Faulkner, and Hemingway; obscure, muddy writers who can't hold a candle, for example, to the coruscating Alexander Pope or a Nabokov.
2
Faulkner overrated? You cannot begin to understand the American south and it's bitter contribution to the American ethos without Faulkner.
While I am not smitten with Hemingway, I do recognize that the expansion of the literary tool-box of style and technique owes Hemingway for hewing an indispensable step-stone on the pathway to modern literary stylistics. Easy to take for granted today.
As for Joyce, a fantastic farce (absurdity) is still fantastic. Joyce's virtuosic whimsy is well worth celebrating, even if an acquired taste, as that Venn intersection of a new psychological view of self and mind coupled to a literary celebration of language and place which we can only now take for granted because the work to illuminate it, fully extant and visceral in the "beauties of my [his] style hitherto undreampt of," has been done by Joyce in an exploration and dissolution of previous boundaries in literary form.
My accommodation, when I consider great writers, is that they pursue diverse goals with their work so direct comparison is problematic. One can look at legacy and impact which requires scholarship, but competitive comparison is not useful to me. I find it interesting to see how a work fits within the trajectory of change and evolution in literature. Like Beethoven's music, some literature feels stunningly modern because it is the antecedent that birthed the contemporary familiar and exhibits the boldness and prescience that marks a masterwork deserving of admiration.
2
oh James would be intrigued
3
More stories like this in the Times, please
25
Mr. Kidd is living the dream of pursuing his intellectual curiosity wherever it takes him. Yes, this a very detailed article, but some extremely salient points were overlooked. How does he finance this simple, eccentric, yet comfortable life of the mind in a foreign land? What arrangements does he have for healthcare? Many of us frustrated creatives bound by golden handcuffs to dreary office jobs would love to know...
6
Why do I find this idolization of Joyce and Ulysses' minutiae to be akin to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
7
Fascinating article.
I'm one of those lazy people who never even TRIED to read Joyce but was introduced to him and his works by my future husband when we were both in college. He became quite involved with the chaos of Joyce's writing.
Have to say after reading and very much enjoying your article that I'd bet money Dr. Kidd is an "aspie" or Asperger's syndrome person. (Aspergers and most now know was considered a different diagnosis than autism when first diagnosed by Dr Asperger in the 1940's, but is now considered to be at the "highly functioning" end of the Autism Spectrum.)
If interested in the kind or type of mind that characterizes Aspergers, see:
https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/
4
One of the most interesting stories I have read or, in fact, heard of. I'm not sure why but I don't think I will ever forget it.
7
Spectacular piece. I should have gone to bed long ago but couldn't stop reading...
Jung summed up their father-daughter relationship as “two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.”
Beautiful analogy by Jung. Worth reading the whole thing just to find that nugget.
8
Thank you for this fascinating and wonderful story.
1
It seemed at the time of the controversy over Gabler's edition, that Gabler wanted to place himself on a par with Joyce; his attitude was that, of course, his version was superior to any other and perhaps to any edition Joyce himself might have wanted to authorize. His arrogance was rank.
John Kidd, on the other hand, offered a reading that was full of respect for Joyce's originality, his textual adventuring, and his genius for creating a world of living characters out of words.
8
How very Joycean! James would have been thrilled for he was certainly as much a pedant as Kidd - with one important distinction. Joyce wrote Ulysses.
1
Maybe Joyce had the last laugh and never intended for there to be a perfect version, as if there is anything ever perfect. Maybe Joyce wanted to make people mad in their pursuit of the nonexistent state of perfection. How can thoughts and ideas expressed in the symbolism of words ever achieve some type of perfection. Perfection of WHAT. Perfection is a human invention and not found in nature. It's nice cocktail party conversation for the bourgeoise academics. I recall Bob Dylan telling someone who tried to interpret his musics inner meaning. He said "he had no inner meaning in his music and why were they wasting their time looking for it when it doesn't exist."
1
Lovely article about a fascinating and brilliant man, Professor Kidd. I’m so glad that the wild sheeps chase ended well—in the sense that Professor Kidd was found alive and of sound body and pursuing his interests in his usual eccentric style in a fascinating setting. Bravo, Professor Kidd. Everyone’s time is their own to spend whether they want to spend it speaking to birds in the shadow of a fountain, staring at the blue, New Mexican ski, or pursuing the esoteric and interesting. There is an old pub song which goes by various names and frequently ‘The Ballad of Jock Stewart’. One line: “I’m a man you don’t meet everyday”. Nor is Professor Kidd, of course, and the world is better for it.
4
Mr. Hitt does a fabulous job keeping us in the dark until the end about John Kidd and his work on others' making a mess of editing Joyce's "Ulysses" and his betrayal of the audience waiting to get the promised reliable 'corrected" "Ulysses." It's an epic tale of claim and failure. In the end, does it really matter so much that the novel is not in its 'perfectissimo" edition? Joyce is to blame for much of the mess, but most of it seems to be minor. But there will always be gauchos, freewheeling and reckless cowboys, and 'gauleiters' or authoritarian housekeepers who insist upon strict rules. Joyce himself liked to play/mess with the rules and also losing his eyesight caused him to bd not the most conscientious and effective proofreader. Like the supposed to be larger dot it is a thing in the eye of the reader wand whether to notice, if at all, the mistakes or what to make of much of the slippage.
3
Mr. Hitt, you know your craft! Inspiring. Thanks!
6
I was fortunate to glance at one of the original galleys of Ulysses that my old friend, the renowned physicists David Halliday (now deceased) had sequestered away in his safe. He had, I believe 5 galleys and he sold one at an auction to a gentleman from NJ back in ~1982. I have no idea what happened to the other galleys, I'm sure they are stored away in some secure humid controlled warehouse in someone’s private collection.
4
"Ulysses" is the greatest novel of the 20th century like Donald Trump is the greatest president of the 21st century. Both have devout followers, and both have hoodwinked millions.
5
Ed L.
Thanks for providing this reader with a merry laugh albeit nervously
3
The emperor has no clothes.
When asked what two books I could have with me on a deserted island, I always name Joyce's "Ulysses"first. The second tome would be "How to Build a Boat. "
"Ulysses" first, last and always.
6
A similar confusion happened to the original text of the New Testament, and the ingenious way it was solved could be done for Ulysses as well. The New Testament is written in Greek, and there are more than 5000 manuscripts and fragments, all done by hand. The earliest (and most reliable) were written when writing material was scarce and Christianity was an outlaw religion, so copying wasn't done openly.
The first printed editions were in the Renaissance, made from late, corrupt manuscripts. This became a common edition called the "textus receptus" (Received Text). Over many years, it got reprinted over and over because it was cheap, so that's what everyone had.
Then earlier manuscripts were discovered by various brilliant scholars, each of whom published a New Testament of his own, all differing from one another and each claiming to be the best. In other words, the text of the New Testament was even more of a mess than Ulysses.
Then in 1898, book publisher Eberhard Nestle solved the problem. He took the three top scholarly texts and printed a New Testament where, whenever two agreed, that went into the text and the third reading went in the margin. Scholars accepted this, since he was using a neutral method and everyone's reading was in there somewhere. It was widely popular (and is now in its 29th edition, BTW).
Couldn't something like this be done to Ulysses, with ALL the variants available in one volume? That would make it easier for readers and scholars both.
19
I just pulled out my copy of Ulysses circa late-1990s from a course at the University of Tulsa, publisher of the James Joyce Quarterly.
1986 Gabler Edition, dot entirely omitted.
What?!
In other texts mistakes of this sort might be forgivable, but Joyce scholars know otherwise. I anxiously await a new edition.
4
I did the same thing with the same edition and was shocked to find no dot, although Gabler evidently told Hitt that there was one there
Didn’t seem to bother you before, did it?
Fascinating article, a well written account of what can happen to a person with a photographic memory and perfectionist compulsions. Kidd, and perhaps Joyce, were immersed, trapped, and compelled to swim in a sea of words. Anyone who has been in the ocean in choppy weather, far from land with the boat seemingly receding, will understand.
12
I believe I once waited for this corrected edition of Ulysses to come out, based on reading something Hugh Kenner wrote announcing this project. Of course, memory can be faulty, but I do know that I read the novel in its glorious imperfect form when waiting proved futile. What an amazing story.
5
This article about James Joyce's "Ulysses" was excellent and I followed the life of Professor Kidd with great interest. At the mention of "The Dream of the Red Chamber," I was quite amazed as I am presently reading this book, Anchor Book edition, 1958. I am not a scholar but an artist and I had been wondering about an art teacher, Seong Moy, I had many years ago at the Print Club in Philadelphia and where his work could possibly be seen now. Amazon had this book with his cover illustration. Hopefully Professor Kidd may write about his studies with this book in the future as there are also many varying editions.
6
"the perfect edition remains always close at hand and just out of reach"
In other words, there can never be a complete edition for a text that was written so chaotically by Joyce.
Impossible. Mythical even.
The text is brilliant but it will always be amorphous.
4
This is fantastic read. Reminds me of what used to be found in 'Lingua Franca' all those years ago, in which Jack Hitt used to publish. Excellent reporting with an engaging narrative. Thank you!
14
Thanks for this great article. I read Ulysses twice in my life: once as a teen, and again in my late thirties. My first reading was attended by a compulsion to explore every reference, and, eventually I'd hoped, come to a deep understanding. I failed miserably.
By the time I picked it up again, twenty years later, I found its mysteries to be more beautiful if left unexplained. By that point I'd come to believe that the power of great art often resides in its ambiguity and unfathomability.
Great literature has an interesting arc within the academy: to a point, scholarship is enlightening. It enriches the reader's experiences with a book. But beyond that point, literary criticism is, in my opinion, a distraction, a counterproductive exercise that often degenerates into petty bickering on matters so minute and, often, entirely unprovable, that it becomes meaningless. It's not like there's a grand unified theory of Ulysses that's waiting to be discovered and put to some experimental test.
Still, it's job security, I guess.
20
The problem, hand-waved away here, is that Joyce made corrections to printed editions of Ulysses without having access to his own original (access we do have). So his corrections were not the restorations that corrections ordinarily are. They are, usually, more or less isomorphic to the originals but a different way of putting it, which makes it impossible to get one consistent edition. Gabler had to decide what to do when Joyce had two or more Joycean ways of saying something. You can disagree with his principles or theory of editing, but he has a reason for most of his editorial decisions, and those reasons tend to yield insight. Scholars like Gabler's edition because it enriches the text with a whole lot of things that Joyce DID write. To go back to your snarky and unfair comparison to Hamlet's speech, Gabler's edition is more like having the two versions of Shakespeare's King Lear. For me, they are both aspects of an ideal, Platonic King Lear that doesn't exist in our world, since Shakespeare seems to have wanted to add material and had to cut other material to find room for the additions. But the Platonic Lear, like the Platonic Ulysses, is enriched by knowing all the ways that Shakespeare wrote each scene and each speech. So if "love" is the word known to all men, it matters that Stephen thought so, and matters that Joyce may have wanted at one time to make it implicit -- to make it Stephen's anguished question - and another time explicit, in his beautiful answer.
15
Good points. And Kidd was never "celebrated as the greatest James Joyce scholar alive." Hugh Kenner, Ellman, Gifford have more right to that title. Neither was Kidd the most blazingly brilliant. John Bishop of UC Berkeley had a parlor trick where students would give him a two-word quote from Ulysses and he would give the line numbers and pages from both the Gabbler and original edition, and recite the lines that followed.
Joyce scholars that I knew thought Kidd went into the hypertext version of Ulysses because his arguments against Gabbler were not that important.
In some ways, you can imagine Joyce would be happy that, like Hamlet, there are different versions of Ulysses: "Ineluctable modality of the visible" after all.
9
Reminds me a lot of a Joseph Mitchell NYer article about a Joe Gould type subject. OCD and autism behaviors are not as fascinating as they were before we knew they were common, biologically based brain disorders. What’s actually more Interesting to me is how the “sane” world responds to these people and their unfinished, compulsive schemes.
6
I think you are too quick to diagnose. How much have you studied James Joyce?
2
Wonderful article! This is my first real introduction to the world of literature; I had no idea of all the intricacies and competition involved. My biggest takeaway is to now appreciate the small details in literature that I used to consider menial and those who obssesed over them as crazy. I truly have much to learn.
11
I worked on the Norton Ulysses project in a limited capacity during those days; I was the "philosophy, mythology, theosophy" guy on the project under several very talented scholars. We were not a big team... Two fellows did the main work: Mark Mamagonian and John Turner. John Kidd spent a lot of time picking up stray birds, as you've mentioned, and walking up and down Bay State Road in creamsicle suits.
He was more interested in 'being Joyce' than 'doing Joyce' in my opinion. Mamagonian and Turner were (and are) superlative scholars. Mamagonian's work now involves the Armenian Genocide.
Too segue... I really want to mention that Will Lautzenheiser--he of the limbless, now ambulant--was an integral part of this project. One of the sharpest fellows we ever knew.
It was an interesting project full of interesting folks.
42
It sounds like Joyce was a compulsive reviser who was perfectly happy to change a word here and a sentence there when he thought of a better way to say something. In that respect, there IS no Ulysses "as Joyce wrote it," since he rewrote it himself many times and in many ways. That may be the problem at the heart of Professor Kidd's procrastination.
I suppose English Lit will muddle along without him. I am curious about one thing: Does the current edition of the Gabler Ulysses include the correct name of the cyclist Harry Thrift? To Joyce, who was trying to produce an accurate portrait of Dublin, that would seem to be a detail worth fighting over.
8
Joycean in its own way, this article reminds me of my own "obsession" with Ulysses. As a freshman at Columbia in 1966, I had placed out of the standard English course requirements and was able to choose an advanced full-semester course devoted to a single novel--Ulysses. My Random House copy with all the pencilled marginalia remains with me to this day. More importantly, the experience of understanding the novel and its author was the most memorable part of a now oft-maligned "liberal arts" education.
23
Well, this brought back a lot of memories. I was working in the production department of the publisher who was bringing out the Hans Gabler edition. It was part of a much larger "archive" of photographic facsimiles of every scrap of paper that Joyce put his hand to: notebooks, galleys, proofs, postcards, letters, and so on. The new Ulysses was to be the fruit of this labor.
One day our production supervisor, who was in sole charge of the James Joyce Archive, walked out of her office to tell us that she had just had the strangest phone call. A man named Kidd had called and tried to convince her that Gabler's edition of Ulysses was all wrong and that we shouldn't publish it. According to her, he was rather excitable on the phone. After listening to him very patiently she explained that we in production had nothing at all to do with editorial decisions and that he should try to get in touch with Prof. Gabler or one of the other Joyce editors.
However, he persisted in calling over and over until he realized that he was hitting a stone wall. He was treated as something of a pet joke in the department--who were we to believe, Hans Walter Gabler or this nut on the phone?--until one day he wasn't a joke any longer. But by then he was Random House's problem and we just watched from the sidelines, until he was completely forgotten in the rush of other work on other books.
Nice to see that he is as interesting now as he was then.
47
Er, isn't a personality like Kidd's rather obsessed with minutiae, in an unhealthy sense? As in obsessive-compulsive disorder? He seems to have ignored other, also interesting and beautiful parts of life. Most of us here love reading and lifelong learning, but isn't there a rational line to be drawn somewhere? You can, I'm told, ride even a good horse to death. I guess I'm inveighing for Aristotelian moderation.
Not a psychotherapist, but I wouldn't want my kids to be so over-focused. Kidd reminds me of Paul Erdős, the subject in "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers."
To be rational is to do and be well.
7
That's a great comparison: Paul Erdős. As a math and physics student (I won't mention my Erdős number, except that I have one), I was fascinated by the guy. The one distinction I'd make between Kidd and Erdős is that the latter seemed to be a very happy man, void of grudges or academic grievances. The joy of solving problems was, for him, more than enough sustenance for a happy life.
3
Have to say after reading and very much enjoying your article that I'd bet money Dr. Kidd is an "aspie" or Asperger's syndrome person. (Aspergers and most now know was considered a different diagnosis than autism when first diagnosed by Dr Asperger in the 1940's, but is now considered to be at the "highly functioning" end of the Autism Spectrum.) If interested in the kind or type of mind that characterizes Aspergers, see: https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/
1
In college, I read about how autistic children can and will focus on one thing for hours and seem mesmerized by it, e.g., they could pick up and drop a pencil over and over.
Mildly retarded people are excellent workers in factories where the worker must do the same mundane task repetitively. A person with a normal IQ could not take the boredom.
This article reinforces the stereotype of "academics" as hopelessly eccentric. In fact Kidd provided a valuable service in pointing out the (now) obvious imperfection of the Gabler edition, and no doubt of any other possible edition of Ulysses. His eccentricity, if it existed, was in overly vilifying Gabler, and polemicizing his intervention, when he could have simply systematically pointed out the errors and misreadings. That certainly would have been enough, though it might not have gotten him as much attention. The eccentricity, really, was among the non-academics, who relished the seeming eccentricity of a fairly straightforward academic debate.
Also of interest here is the obvious fact that no "correct" edition of Ulysses is possible--but is this any different from any other text?
13
I want to thank Jack Hitt for this. I lived the Ulysses experience through my wife (1944-2018) starting when we were very young parents, studying literature and other things as undergraduates and later graduates and, like so many, working on what we wanted to be when we grew up -- which, unsurprisingly, we never quite got around to achieving. I learned English from Ulysses and her. She lived Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake and she learned Spanish from everything Carlos Fuentes ever wrote and, a little bit, from me. Humanity's literatures (both oral and written) teach us over and over what timelessness really is and that memory is as close to eternity as we can get.
63
Reading this headline, I thought, "Could this be about my crazy James Joyce professor at BU?" Bad flashbacks: I was an undergraduate English major in 1992 when Kidd agreed to supervise my senior honors thesis, something to do with feminist interpretation of Ulysses. The more I dove into the minutiae of not just the text itself but Kidd's obsession with every character in the text and every word of criticism about the text, I felt my sanity unraveling. Kidd had a shockingly uncanny memory, literally for page numbers and punctuation. But the more time I spent in his office, among his books and trying to follow his trains of thought, the more I felt the intense futility and meaninglessness of the endeavor. The whole thing felt like a Joycean recast of The Emperor's New Clothes. In 2018 terms, it was Joyce was trolling all of us from the grave, and John Kidd and his TA's were explicating the layers of nothingness. I came to dread going to Prof. Kidd's office, where I would get pulled into manic, cranky conversations about tiny esoteric details. It felt like madness. I descended into a deep depression that semester and grew to loathe anything Ulysses-related. I abandoned my thesis and barely squeaked by with partial credit when Prof. Kidd (with apparently uncharacteristic generosity) allowed me to restructure it into an annotated digital bibliography. Sad, and not surprising, that Kidd's mammoth edition never came to full fruition. Glad Kidd is alive. I wish him well.
154
Crazy people can make others crazy. I am so sorry you went through that.
3
My 1961 version w revisions includes a very large dot. I finally read Ulysses after visiting Ireland for the first time a few years ago with the help of my computer. I am sure I missed many allusions so would have enjoyed a hyperlinked scholarly version so I didn’t miss as much as I’m sure I did. Ulysses is an inventive and wonderful book but it does require some assistance to understand.
Bravo to the author for tracking down Kidd. I have now subscribed to his civil war podcast Uncivil and expect more amusement.
10
What an excellent story. I am all in favor of defending obsessives and "masters of minutiae" in scholarly pursuits, unless of course it happens to be an enterprise akin to Bouvard and Pecuchet's. STEM disciplines would idolize figures such as Kidd, and I want the humanities to do the same. There is so much streamlining and tepid regurgitation these days that it is no wonder that figures like Kidd that keep the original fire alive just find no room for their work. One should be allowed to miss the forest for the trees in cases such as these as it is the detail that raises the reader to the level of the author. Any author would feel vindicated when readers notice details. This is not a meaningless pursuit at all- it is what draws a few of us to art and literature. Kidd would perhaps enjoy reading french art historian Daniel Arasse's book 'Take a closer look'- and when you do take a closer look, another world appears.
19
My friend was a budding Joyce scholar but he suffered from type 1 diabetes and wasn't able to finish his dissertation. I got to really enjoy Ulysses and Paradise Lost through his enthusiasm. I did the perfunctory trip to Dublin. I went of Howth, Dalkey, St. Stephens Green and Glendalock to name a few places. I enjoyed the pubs. I went to Trinity College and marveled at the Book of Kells. I bought a Ulysses concordance and Gabler's version of Ulysses. My friend was studying Jungian mandalas and was obsessed with the phrase, "coigne of vantage." I have read Ellman's biography of Joyce and his daughters love of Samuel Beckett. Joyce's panicked flight of Geneva in 1941 when the NAZIs were about to enter Paris. Anthony Burgess added to my enjoyment breaking down words in pieces and showing how they were bricks to understand Joyce. Thanks for the interesting article.
20
I guess I am not of the "great minds of literature" set. Well read, well spoken, degreed, and all that, I could not get past page 2 of Ulysses. In a similar vein, I barely got page 2 of this tome. It seems that there are many people who wish to immerse themselves in the torturous task of wading through plethora of words in search of some great and/or hidden meaning and, if the conjecture here is correct, come to a similar end. Great work is never simple, but is most assuredly is not convoluted or obscure.
7
Why would anyone care about your very tiny opinion of Ulysses?
2
Wonderful article. Learned more about "Ulysses" than I ever knew.
19
A beautiful piece and a thoroughly enjoyable read. This is why I subscribe!
30
I'm glad Hitt sought to "fill the void" in this literary mystery, and not just find Kidd after so many years, but let us hear him speak and explain himself. Fascinating story and excellent journalism.
46
“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken
68
The kind of obsessive nonsense disguised as scholarship in this article should be banished to Mars. There are children starving in many places. This kind of foolishness deserves to get its budget cut. I wonder if Joyce anticipated this??
13
What budget? Kidd shared a bank statement from 11 years before, and it showed he averaged $15k in his account. If you think people like him are the major ways money is being siphoned away from poverty amelioration, I don’t know what to tell you.
6
"Ulysses" is one of the greatest novels ever written. It's explication needn't compete with efforts to aid starving children.
Or perhaps you'd like to curtail performances of Mozart as well, as the cost of symphony players could be better spent elsewhere?
3
"This?" According to your theory, you would have wished to banish Joyce too.
2
A pity nobody ever taught Kidd how to code. He has the kind of brain that could have made a fortune.
19
Perhaps he feels like a billionaire - of words. What is a fortune?
7
My favorite sentence in this article is, "Run."
Which indeed is not a fault-finding, nor damning w/ feint praise (spelling intended.) Joyce was not a good fit in this profit-obsessed world, and was constantly cadging a little something from Ms. Beach and his other patrons. Bless them, they got him through.
Let a thousand flowers Bloom (a schlub? I nearly quit the read right there!); I even enjoyed the much-maligned Jos. Losey film, what w/ the great Milo O'Shea and all. The drinking scene in the maternity ward waiting will be w/ me always, what w/ the lads drinking gov't-subsidised (for the anxious fathers to be!) hooch, surrounded by posters of luridly rendered female equipment and the nun ever-judging keeping an eye on the proceedings.
",,, ad introibo ad altare Deum..." All the gladness and joy!
17
If we're talking precision in the English language, it should be "none of them is" in:
None of them are absolutely perfect, but each of them, nevertheless, is “Ulysses.”
None and each both take singular verbs.
28
Should “none” be used with a singular or a plural verb?
Some readers insist that “none” must always take a singular verb. They argue that “none” means “not one,” and so is inherently singular.
But most authorities, including The Times’s stylebook, disagree. Here’s our entry:
none. Despite a widespread assumption that it stands for not one, the word has been construed as a plural (not any) in most contexts for centuries. H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) endorsed the plural use. Make none plural except when emphasizing the idea of not one or no one — and then consider using those phrases instead.
--Philip Corbett, 2015 NYT blog entry, "After Deadline"
2
Kidd loves genius. We love Kidd!!
6
Re: Kidd's unusual "gaucho/gauleiter" turn of phrase and pronunciation: living in Rio and speaking "fluent Portuguese" (and thus presumably immersed in Brazilian culture) Kidd, one would think, would have been referring to Brazilians living in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul when he used the term "gaucho" and would have pronounced it "ga-OO-shoo," which would have been more illustrative and accurate to mention than the incorrect pronunciation of "gauleiter."
8
Just read the article nonstop then all 45 comments--a truly wonderful diversion from the usual news of the day in these Trumpian times. Mr. Hitt's devotion to the mystery of Kidd and summation of the narrow, carping world of academe make for delightful reading. Ah, to be flush enough to obsess over trivialities as children torn from their mothers languish in southern warehouses and our Attorney General puts down his little foot on women fleeing from domestic abuse. Ah, the vicious ironies of this life.
37
Thank you, Mr. Hitt, for a well written and fun article.
15
Outstanding. Not since the lateTom Wolf has anyone told a story with such juice and energy about nothing interesting until he put the words down. Also proves how you could spend your life in academic with respect and enough money to travel and eat well while doing nothing of interest to less than say 12 humans on the planet. I am off to find more from this writer. I grabbed my unread Ulysses and wouldn’t you know it, no large dot.
19
Wonderful reporting●
66
Lol. I see what ya did there!
So for the first-time reader of “Ulysses,” which version would you recommend?
6
No idea, but I think the article made clear there IS no "best edition".....
Apparently Kidd is no longer pursuing his.
Exzciting journalism about philological warfare, who would have thought! Thanks for this.
12
bravo!! now i need to obtain a "period" edition with "word known to all men" and to read more of Jack's writing....wonderful article
11
By leaving his own "unfinished edition" is Kidd trying to outJoyce Joyce?
5
William Burroughs revised "Naked Lunch" from one cut up permutation to another. Printings are different by his own hand. The movement of experimental writing, stream of consciousness ends with a few masters. "Absolam, Absolam!" ended for me in a climax, a mental sexually comparative single sentence.
I could never read Joyce other than the "Dubliners" those coherent short stories. My friends of the time when attempts were made were the artists Robert Armstrong and Gaye Dowling who are now famous Dublin artists.
"He just wrote in Gaelic. That's the big joke." is what they said.
That doesn't change the big period problem.
Most of us end up using the King James Version of the Bible. Key is how it is read to you in the church by the spiritual season. I use the Bollingen Series 6 version of the I Ching. There the Readings have no season.
I think it is great that detail and minutia is how some people read. It is more profound that the Book of James is left out of the King James Version. That we are all divine matters.
"Little fish don't eat big fish." Phd. Kidd has been the smaller fish of this story. I salute him.
5
“a self-directed scholar” “thinking through the theories and details of wide-ranging and all-encompassing narratives.”
I know this kind of person! He’s been working on a medieval long poem (several manuscripts, all them slightly different - an enigma, the earliest literary work in Spanish). He wasn’t a literature scholar when he started - 46 years ago. But he became mesmerized, obsessed, dedicated to understanding the meaning and “unity” of this work. It’s been 46 years! And daily he’s revising what he’s written down (but never published!) in order to pass along his life’s work - his health failing, on oxygen 24/7.
American Academia seeks to judge “scholarship” so narrowly, so superficially. There’s no room for someone whose “life-work” takes a lifetime, who values true scholarship so intensely as to shun short articles that just skim the surface and lack depth and width.
He was a wonderful professor. His students loved him. But he’d been educated in Spain (political science/philosophy actually) and did a US Ph.D. in Spanish literature, somehow ignoring the literary experts in favor of his own views and research. As long as his health permitted, he taught and worked on his solitary task: to understand every word, every allusion, the meaning of the whole and all its parts.
Harvard, right now, has the opportunity to house his work in one of their libraries. (Or elsewhere, if Harvard fails to understand the value of the gift that’s on offer.)
22
Just an fyi:
Have to say after reading and very much enjoying this article that I'd bet money Dr. Kidd is an "aspie" or Asperger's syndrome person. (Aspergers and most now know was considered a different diagnosis than autism when first diagnosed by Dr Asperger in the 1940's, but is now considered to be at the "highly functioning" end of the Autism Spectrum.) If interested in the kind or type of mind that characterizes Aspergers, see: https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/
The bit about Lucia & Joyce's insistence that she was a greater creator than he is baloney. He was tormented by her illness, which is not related to his writing at all.
2
Fascinating article. John Kidd is like a character out of a Borges story.
16
Reading this reminds me of the pointless obsession over Dylan's poetry which, while engaging and interesting, is little more than hastily cobbled together words that rhyme about girlfriends, ex-friends, and, well, whatever. Good word smithing doesn't necessarily equate with deep thought.
Any man who devotes his life to the study of similar half-mindless scribblings by Joyce has probably got whatever happens to him coming to him.
Seriously folks......
4
Which of the two Dylan are you talking about? It must be none of these because your comments dont match any of their poetry/lyrics.
1
Great article! Thank you.
2
To throw one’s life away on “Ulysses”, the esoteric block-chain excess of the modern novel, is the mark of foolishness, possibly insanity, and certainly life wandering “The Waste Land”. Not worth the time invested.
"Paradise Lost", "Devine Comedy", and even "Decameron" are much better choices for time invested, more accessible and go well with evening conversation and wine.
2
have read them all but the 7 years our intrepid group took on ulysses was priceless!! Decameron0 source of Winter's Tale BGTW...
now on 13 years of Finnegans wake- great fun!!
5
You've got to be kidding!
...and you must be talking about lots and lots of wine...
is that the "Andy Devine Comedy"?
1
"the greatest James Joyce scholar alive" ? -- No, I don't think so. There have been many others at his level or higher, all more sophisticated in their interpretations, more valuable to other scholars, and more interesting altogether: Richard Ellmann. Bonnie Scott, Jane Miller, Harry Levin. The author of this article lost me in the first paragraph when he revealed his ignorance of Joyce scholarship with that silly hyperbole.
5
it doesn't really matter all that much about misprints or errors creeping into novels or texts. it matters a bit, some more to others, but in the end, is not quite as important as all that, except to obsessive types like Kidd. there is no greatest novel, greatest play, greatest poem, in literature. the premise of the article is based on a fetishization of the text. excellent article, but really, in the end, doesn't strike me as addressing a real issue as much as a kind of trope that borges would have invented. the dot.
7
I agree with you, there is no "greatest." But it seems to me that 'Ulysses,' depends more on textual accuracy than any other novel. Unless Joyce intended his text to be ambiguous. I wouldn't put it past him.
15
Great article. I was a university English minor 45 years ago and had two wonderful professors. One for Russian Lit., and the other for Shakespeare. I still feel the souls of those authors studied in my bones. As a person, husband, father, and businessperson my life is richer because of those passionate professors. I’d give almost anything to take a Joyce course from Mr. Kidd.
51
I was pleased to find "the rest of the story" in this amusing bit of gonzo journalism about a scholar living dead in Brazil and buried in something to do with a reordered dictionary.
I remember the Kidd/Gabler controversy with a nose for bad cheese. It's colorful to focus on the back and forth without mention that, in the main, Gabler got it right. What's the box score? Out of how many corrections were the corrections correct? Pragmatic data are the bane of eccentricity.
Who reads this book, and why? Readers who prefer "antic" Sterne, Joyce, Rabelais or Cervantes over the others are very different people. My preferences are in that order, but the point is that readers of a book form an attachment that is beyond understanding: attachments are expressions of idiosyncracy.
James Joyce does not have a literary legacy one can point to, unlike Shakespeare or Whitman. His readers, and writers who revere him, seem alike in their belief that minutiae matter. The bald fact is that Joyce, as a writer and an influence, is a dead end; "Ulysses" is a great book in some ways but also a highly derivative, heartlessly sentimental and overtly virtuosic bit of stylistic breccia.
Joyce wanted to fix his writing in the details and allusions, and in that way lost sight of the main thing a great book should do. Kidd's life shows how far his readers match Joyce's limitations, and lose sight of the novelistic forest for those dot sized textual trees.
16
I wholeheartedly agree. But it was nice to hear from a Gablerite for balance.
Who would you rather have a pint with, Joyce or Oscar Wilde? Wilde for me.
1
"Yes I said yes I will Yes."
I, too, opened this article first after looking at the headlines re: Trump/Kim/G-7 (soon to be G-6), etc. and found it delightful and inspiring, fascinating and ominous. Thank you. By the way... I just put a hold on "Ulysses" at my local library. I wonder which version they have!
53
love your comment...
1
Great article. I remember following the controversy between Kidd and Gabler back in the day. Always wondered what happened.
Nice to learn the outcome.
...
I own a 1946 edition of Ulysses published by Random House (The Modern Library) without the dot
18
Ulysses is a book about the futility and sovereignty of love. It is fitting to see Joyce and his beloved daughter, Lucia, together, one a diver, one a drowner in the mysteries of prose.
51
I'm grinning from ear to ear. - not the usual reaction to a lit crit exploration. Kidd almosts Joyce.
58
Thank you. Brilliant story. The beauty and enigmatic nature of hermeneutics, semiotics, or, just plain interpretation, the basis of all literary criticism. Ulysses lives on.
25
I started reading this lengthy article, about an eccentric academic's obsession with James Joyce's notoriously impenetrable tome 'Ulysses', considered the greatest novel of the Twentieth Century. What I thought would be a dry, stuffy article delving in literary ephemera turned out to be one of the most riveting pieces of journalism I've ever come across.
John Kidd is a fascinating character, a real person who could easily be the subject of a novel or a film. Whatever one think of him, he is an epic unto himself.
139
I think this article is fascinating. It is a snapshot of the kind of academic feuds that are tempests in teapots and at the same time provide insights into an important work of art. It is also a human interest story about Professor Kidd. And throughout there are the echoes of Joyce himself. Not surprisingly, the many threads of the story are left hanging; on this subject, how could it be otherwise? And so far, the comments, too, are fascinating and mirror what the article is about.
66
Escava Isaura is [also] the title of a telenovela -- Spanish subtitles online. Wonderful article. Now that I understand the premise behind "Ulysses" and the period and the word.... just maybe … and the time requirements just maybe....time to immerse or at least dip a toe.
Reading the dictionary OTOH -- would improve one's score on the Verbal SAT.
4
So June 16 is coming around again and we have another article in the Times about Ulysses, and this one is one of the more specious.
While all the research and detective work in comparing dueling texts and finding Mr. Kidd is interesting it is apparent that Hitt really has no idea what Ulysses is all about.
This is apparent by Hitt’s description of Bloom as a “schlub,” i.e. according to Merriam-Webster, “a stupid, worthless, or unattractive person.”
Bloom a schlub? Not so much.
Let’s consider a few facts about Ulysses.
First, from a Cliff Notes level, the novel Ulysses is named after Homer’s great hero, Odysseus/Ulysses, the figure whose journeys, trials and tribulations are set out in the epic poem the Odyssey. The chapters of Ulysses chronicling Bloom’s travels roughly follow those of the Odyssey.
While Bloom is no Ulysses, he does have certain characteristics in common with the mythological hero: he’s a man perambulating Life, with all its highs, lows, trivialities and tragedies.
In short Bloom represents a distillation of Mankind with all the uniqueness and commonality that entails:
“From inexistance to existence he came to many and was as one received: existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.
...
What universal binomial denominations were his as entity or nonentity?
Assumed by any of known to none. Everyman or Noman.”
Bloom a schlub? Not so much.
18
You missed the irony. Unless your post was ironic, in which case you win.
11
Not really.
The text I quoted regarding Bloom’s Everyman status is contained in “the long hilarious chapter” as Hill puts it, of questions and answers in Ulysses.
Far from being hilarious, though parts certainly are, the chapter is the key to understanding the novel and Joyce’s views on the meaning of existence.
Hill doesn’t get it.
Brilliant writing! Spent the morning discussing the piece with my husband and son. Haunting characterizations (the little steps), and hilarious asides. I’ll have to look up this Jack Hitt to read more by him.
74
Lovely story, but as we're being picky about small points: Gauleiter (capitalized, & singular/plural are the same) is actually pronounced gow-lighter.
66
Great essay. Thank you!!
18
John Kidd, I'm so glad you are here amount the living, being your eccentric self and able to afford many fine dinners. I would love to sit in a corner watching you, listening to you, all the whole savoring your above the fray specialness....I'm bitter over a marriage that ended 20 years ago and can completely understand your agitation over the huge slights and lies to your work and character, but, if I could change anything about your lifestyle it would be to eliminate that pattern of self destroying thoughts. You are beyond us petty people. Do what you do and find a harmony of some sort. You deserve it .
39
One reason Kidd's Arion Press Ulysses is selling for the seemingly insane price of over $25000 is that it is illustrated with 40 etchings by Robert Motherwell.
45
Stately Hans Gabler patted his wallet.
Random House, too, like a round kangaroo.
70
“Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.”
33
Cat, while understanding that you had a run-in with a groundhog, I cannot be your companion in squirrel-stalking on your morning walk, but with some gentle persuasion, you are now out and about in leaps and bounds. Little do you know that our country is reminiscent of the story of a solitary human, afraid to come out of his apartment because a pigeon is in the hallway.
6
Funny thing is, I knew a guy like this as well: brilliant scholar, obsessed with “The Tin Drum” and “Don Quixote,” went off to Nicaragua at the end of the revolution in ‘84 and disappeared.
7
Overwhelmed by his obsessions and compulsions, Kidd has descending into a pool of Joycean madness.
5
I bet he's been "this way" all of his life...
Dr. Kidd is an "aspie" or Asperger's syndrome person. (Aspergers and most now know was considered a different diagnosis than autism when first diagnosed by Dr Asperger in the 1940's, but is now considered to be at the "highly functioning" end of the Autism Spectrum.) If interested in the kind or type of mind that characterizes Aspergers, see: https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/
(this article is about the huge number of Aspies who work in Silicon Valley).
Seeing this headline, I opened this article first. Reading it reminded me why I didn't pursue academic research as a career.
At the end you perfectly summed up the current Babel of information, which isn't knowledge and isn't scholarship. A scholar should love and respect the material as well as understand it, whether he or she follows Kidd or Gabler's training and methodology.
Finally, a correction on pronouncing "Gauleiter": in German, "ei" is long "i" as in "eye". Guess I'm not a gaucho despite what my professors thought.
8
Thank you for this. I am glad you found Mr. Kidd.
19
terrific story...great to hear he's still alive and at it...would love it if an (authentic) embedded hyperlinked edition was actually published...would that Mr Kidd had been able to see that completed...
42
Yes, the hyperlinked edition would be a wonderful thing, a nearly complete education in the foundations of Western culture.
8
“Ulysses,” arguably the greatest and definitely the most-obsessed-over novel of the 20th century.
The greatest novel? Something of a snooze after about 200 pages if you ask me.
6
I'm not asking you!
I wonder about individuals who want to impose their taste and views on the rest of the world?
So you didn't like James Joyce and I do.
Have you never heard that "there is no accounting for taste"?
However, sometimes the impact of a work of literature or of folk art (Homer's Ulysses) on other authors and impact on the literature of a given language is taken as an indication of its "greatness". It doesn't matter than you dont like to read it, what matters is how it affected other writers, and perhaps among them are one or two that you enjoyed reading?
6
Never said I don't like James Joyce. I just find Ulysses to be "something of a snooze after about 200 pages."
really?? cyclops episode a tour de force-comic masterpiece-- rumbold the executioner etc......and ithaca episode brilliant as well--the great catechism...
2
Perfect timing for this piece! Time to unshelf my own annotated, underlined, remarked upon copy for Bloomsday. Find a live reading, readers, and revel in what remains a literary challenge and a delight.
10
John Updike's criticism of Gabler's paragraph indents was not trivial or microscopic. They made the text absuedly hard to read, and di not match the style of the original -- which Joyce certainly approved of: it couldn't, unlike the many errors and misapprehensions in the text, be missed even by a man with failing vision.
54
The "Slave Isaura" (1875) is a racist and abolitionist book by Bernardo Guimarães (which Jack Hitt didn't bother to mention). With all due respect to John Kidd, it is not that well written. Yet, the story, which portrays the tyranny and arbitrary upon the Mulattos, is essential to the understanding of Brazil's past and present. Based on the book, a Brazilian telenovela produced in 1976 with 100 episodes had a worldwide success. By the way, the Pampas include Argentina, Uruguay and South Brazil with "gauchos" living in all these regions.
43
Did he have tenure? Couldn't find the word in the article.
BU is simultaneously a legit research institution and also pretty mercenary by reputation.
4
Did he have tenure at BU?
1
These types are a dime a dozen in academia. Tenure destroyed the ordinary incentives and social modes that create productive lives and actual social civility. Then this generation of abusive snores got the social justice bug and ushered in a new generation of even less productive, even more abusive tenured infants who know nothing but to lazily flap on about the one thing they know: how to weaponize social justice. Meanwhile, the real work of academia -- teaching students -- is shunted off on impoverished permanent part-time adjuncts and graduate students who will never get a job unless they can master the art of spitting out more social justice toxic pabulum. And so it has been in higher education humanities departments for sixth or seventh years now: giant babies who soiled their discipline. Joyce would take one look at this mess and return to the grave.
10
Living in Florida in walled off condos that border golf courses, and driving as quickly as possible through the more run-down portions of the state, why, yes, the "social justice bug" is such a troublesome reminder of exactly where we are and where we are heading. So annoying for concerns about social justice to crop up here and there, when what's really important is getting the ac recharged on the Cadillac, and getting reliable help to clean the condo.
62
Joyce was deeply concerned about social justice. It might come as a shock to you, but there have always been individuals who care about their fellow humans. Admittedly so much fewer than the individuals who not only dont care but who give implicit and/or explicit support to the individuals who are committing atrocities against their fellow human beings.
So I tend to put it in a simplistic terms: "who would be hiding Ann Frank and who would be denouncing her?" Or who put hide and help slaves escape and who would turn the over to death by torture?" etc etc etc Sadly i have to conclude those questions with so many etc......
Do these individuals who resist, who hide and help the oppressed, redeem the human species? I dont know but I sure hope so.
Your comment echoes so many made over the millennia about the generations following that of the speaker (it also make me embarrassed as i too am a senior, perhaps even older than you, but having survived WWII thanks to my mother's resistance and fight who also saved other people, I'm admiring of younger academics who have the courage to actually care....
33
Bravo Kati. Today, June 12, is the anniversary of the birth of Anne Frank.
Bravo Jack Hitt! Great detective work, perseverance and down-to-earth erudition. It's clear Kidd is a “take no prisoners” scholar. Bless him for that.
59
It's nice to know that when eccentric scholars die in sordid circumstances, buried in debt, detested, insulted, alone, that they go to Brazil and eat churrasco.
326
laughed aloud! thanks!
1
I think that's where I'd like to go when I die, too.
Great article! It shows how the democratization of knowledge via the Internet has also dissipated focus.
14
Terrific writing. However, the piece's tension and forward momentum (i.e. what happened to John Kidd? Is he dead?) are broken about a third of the way into the story by the photo of Kidd in his Rio apartment, bearing the caption "John Kidd, very much alive, in his apartment in Rio de Janeiro."
A pretty boneheaded move by the person who lays out the story.
134
Agreed!
1
Yes! Exactly. Very distracting!
1
There is a photograph of him right at the top of the piece.
"“Wonder. Go on and wonder.” -The Sound and the Fury.- Mamas...don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys or Joyce scholars.
9
Thank you for a wonderful, unique, charming, informative, revealing, entertaining, intriguing, and purposefully meandering story.
18
Fascinating!
7
Thank you for creating a graphic trek using the limitations of semantic language in which no word can ever adequately represent the target which IT is meant to express, given the ongoing interactions between what is known, currently unknown because of gaps in knowledge, understanding and necessary relevant technology, the unknowable, and our inability, all too often, to consider not knowing that we do not know.
6
Thanks for the great article. I never got Joyce, but I see why the professors would canonize him.
I’ll stick with Proust and The Anatomy of Melancholy.
I once encountered a minor Joycean in a research setting who muttered muted disapproval of the querulous Kidd’s jubilant textual carping. I thought to myself, how utterly curious, and pointless, this waste of time and energy.
6
Fernando Pessoa, a contemporary of Joyce, left behind a large chest of writings that scholars have been pouring over for decades. It's unclear, however, if Pessoa wanted anyone to see those papers; or if there are any "perfect versions" among them. If you're searching for where John Kidd might turn up next, I guess we'll see him roaming the streets of Lisbon sometime soon.
6
The same Jack Hitt responsible for the This American Life episode where he followed a group of inmates at a high-security prison as they rehearsed and staged a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet? Listening to this episode on a road trip with my teen-aged children was a life-changing experience for us. They still have the cassette tapes of the program I gave them at their high school graduation. With this extraordinary piece, Mr. Hitt has become one-third of my proverbial dinner party invitees.
176
And the other 2, assuming one is not you?
One of the most enjoyable articles I’ve read in a long time. I always wondered what happened to John Kidd and his edition of Ulysses. I guess I can stop waiting for it to come out.
66
"...what happened to"- the idea of an electronic Joyce database" in the '90's and then never heard from again?
Probably, all tangled up in ownership and copyright only to be shelved far away and stored this century. Excellent article.
This was really lovely. Funny enough, I felt that your piece beyond helping me see Mr. Kidd, also took me to Boston and Rio.
Thank you for your hard work with this, you have a great gift of description
100
I remember the Kidd-Gabler Wars: they mattered, and this piece matters. Thank you for this.
170
"Mattered"? In what way? I'm not trying to be snarky, but am just wondering, as I often do, how these purely academic debates actually help materially improve people's lives.
1
It's not purely academic when it's a book which many people have read. The text should be correct. Reading Ulysses does improve people's lives because it challenges them to think and not just ingest.
The standard of "materially improving people's lives" is unrealistic. Beethoven's 9th does not materially improve people's lives either. I could go on with more examples, but I've made my point: everyone has different values systems, and you and I disagree on what matters.
3
Let's be clear about this: this article is about people (one person in particular) who spend their careers studying/analyzing/deconstructing other people's work -- not creating new works of art, not solving social problems, just studying works which have already been created by others. Sorry, but these sorts of esoteric debates exemplify much that is wrong with modern academia. For every professor like the subject of this article, there are three more profs who engage is such "research" just to get tenured.
Excellent story--surprises kept popping up all the way through. Jack Hitt is a talented writer.
116
Brilliant story on a fascinating man, subject and novel. Thank you for such a meticulous yet riveting piece. The craft of research, actual personal investigation, and thoughtful and stimulating writing is on full display.
276
this comment does not really say anything....
1
Are you referring to your comment?
It almost seems that a “perfect” version of Ulysses will never exist, since scholars will never agree on the minutiae. And therein lies the beauty of academics in the humanities: they build entire careers and occupations out of endlessly examining things, trying to find answers to questions that don’t exist.
77
I would rather find my beauty in existing things. By the way religion.....???
My comment applies equally to religious texts, since they are also works of fiction - like Ulysses.
A bit like the endless study of the Torah.
Great reporting! Joyce would no doubt be immensely amused, his work continuing to be composed as crabbed brains concentrate, errors are repaired, and accidents, inaccuracies, and misunderstandings multiply.
150
I was doing post-doc work on “Ulysses” during the years of the controversy. While Kidd may not have issued a new edition in the short order the copyright situation required, he permanently raised the bar for “Ulysses” scholarship. It's good to hear that he is still at work on another difficult text that speakers of Portuguese see (as the Irish now see “Ulysses”) as a touchstone for their language and culture.
Literary scholarship is often thought of as a competition, a race for prizes and books and status. Yet it is something else, really—a rich conversation across generations, cultures, and centuries. To turn the evolving conversation to new issues, re-grounding critical analysis in as-yet unobserved details of the text, is in itself an important achievement.
Many thanks for this fascinating article, with its update on Kidd's work now. Even if one were available, a "definitive" text of “Ulysses” would, as Jack Hitt's conclusion hints, be less than Joycean in a larger sense. In the hands of the "gauleiters," for one thing, such a text could just as often be used not to enrich the conversation but to shut it down, foreclose it. I think the initial negative reaction to Hans Gabler’s edition had much to do with his insistence that only his text was “definitive.” This proprietary claim inspired something like an immune reaction among many scholars of Joyce.
328
And of course, Kidd: "Making the Wrong Joyce"
Wait a minute! Either I missed the point of this article, or I'm not understanding yours. Why is having a definitive version of "Ulysses" such a wrong (as you seem to be suggesting)? All books have a definitive version, save those from antiquity. When Joyce said that he was giving generations of scholars work, he didn't mean in figuring out what he meant to write, but rather about what he meant.
The treasure hunt for what he meant to write seems to be because of the haphazard way that Joyce wrote. So that metaphor about gauleiters adds a sense of mystery and threat to the whole affair, but Joyce is the ultimate gauleiter, as is any writer. Just because interpretations of the meaning of his very ambiguous text wildly vary and create a "rich discourse" doesn't mean that Joyce didn't want a fat dot at the end of that sentence. You're being Talmudic about being Talmudic!
This is a wonderful article. Mr. Kidd is the kind of eccentric found only in the academic world. Way back when, I got a Ph.D. in English but left the academic world for a business career — a choice I never regretted. One of the reasons I left was my feeling that academics sometimes argued strenuously and at length over minutiae.
Mr. Kidd, for all his evident genius, is this kind of academic in extremis. His disputes with other Joyce scholars remind me of a comment Borges one made in another context. It’s like watching bald men fight over a comb.
285
I always remember a line I read years ago:
"The battles in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so small".
11
I'm happy you left the academic world. You're an inspiration.
5
Like people in business don’t fight to the death over minutiae? I’ve also worked in both. The difference is that in business you actually have bosses (with bosses) who can stomp out the silliness if they chose to.
2
This is a fascinating article, with all it's minutiae, was entrancing. I somehow was drawn into reading and then couldn't stop. It reminded me of why I did not pursue a PhD in English, for example. I suppose there needs to be a place somewhere for people who are completely consumed by details that most of us consider meaningless. There also must be room for nursing ancient, barely remembered grudges. In this careful exposition of Professor Kidd's mind, we learn so much about our own concerns, which would seem so petty when examined by others.
251
Now the question is "did you ever read Ulysses?"
I completely disagree. This article reminds me of the fun I had pursuing the Ph.D. in English. I'm not trying to insult you, but the fact that you don't get it, the whole thing altogether, the writer included and the entrancing piece he wrote, kind of means you were absolutely correct in not getting that particular degree.