Joyce's Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation

Tom Venetis is a professional journalist and editor in Toronto.

James Joyce said mistakes in works of genius are not errors, but portals
of discovery. The problem with Joyce is figuring what was a
“deliberate” mistake on his part and what was a printing error.

Certainly, it is not easy in the case of Ulysses. Joyce complained from
its first printing that it was riddled with errors. He notoriously made
alterations on top of alterations to his text with each proof sent to
him, leaving the printer confused as to what exactly was to be included,
excluded, or corrected. Some scholars go so far as to argue that no
final or definitive text of Ulysses exists. Much ink has been spilled
over each new and “definitive” edition of Ulysses, resulting in one
epic battle between John Kidd and Hans Walter Gabler over Gabler’s
restored text of the novel.

But does all this matter? Do such battles or minutia and errata in
Joyce’s text miss something essential—that for Joyce “error” has
a certain aesthetic function?

Ezra Pound, Joyce’s contemporary, tolerated errors in his monumental
Cantos because errors, he suggested, challenged the ideas of epic
authority and offered pathways for new kinds of living and thinking.
Conley suggests something similar with Joyce’s errors and narrative.
He argues that Joyce’s errors are not accidents or editorial mistakes
needing correction, but are, in fact, part of Joyce’s authorial
intention to create new kinds of life out of life’s radical
incompleteness and to defer any final meaning.

Conley’s study examines all this with a great deal of subtlety.
Though his prose is often dense, relying on close readings of various
critical and literary theorists to advance his argument, attentive and
patient readers will be rewarded.