ENDNOTE: HYPERTEXT AND GENETICS

What, until recently, we have called for ostensibly strategic reasons "the text," is entering a distinct epoch in which it will no longer be possible to limit the range of a material body of writing by enclosing it within a published volume, as, for instance, something we could call a definitive or even standard edition. The advent of hypertext and of the World Wide Web has opened the possibility that once "published," any document can be physically linked to any other document. Henceforth a citation, for example, need not signify a text which is absent, since any text available on the Web could immediately be accessed as if it were already part of the text in which the citation appeared. This is bound to have profound effects upon the way in which we read in the future, particularly the way in which we read such authors as Joyce and, say, Shakespeare. Already, in the case of both these writers, we have a situation in which there exist either variorum and composite texts, or distinctly different versions of texts published independently of one another and read contemporaneously.

The changing attitudes among editors as to the integrity of presenting a so-called "corrected" or "standard" text, at the possible expense of "other" texts, means that it is now not simply a matter of questioning the sense of something we could call a canon, or even a corpus, but of placing a question mark over individual "texts" themselves. By this it is not meant opening up the boundaries of all texts so as to include within the volumes of an author their various possible intertexts, historical and contextual data, and so forth (as some kind of universal library), but to scrutinise the material boundaries which, either through tradition, chance, censorship, or other contingencies, have been assigned to particular texts. In this regard we could say that at no other point in the history of western writing, perhaps with the exception of the translations of the Bible, has the role of editors been so obviously crucial in re-shaping the way we traditionally view "texts" and "textual history" as static and determined according to an index of proper names. The work of James Joyce, in particular, is a prime example of the way this re-shaping has effected the whole existing body of scholarship devoted to that author, and how it has given rise to a broadly different kind of scholarship which only with difficulty can be regarded as academic, in the general sense of that word.

With the rapid growth in availablity of hypertext and virtual reality technologies, there has also been a renewal and extension of existing theories of genetic "criticism," particularly at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes in Paris, and among various individual projects internationally. One of the things that textual genetics is able to offer us is the near future possibility of a Joycean "corpus" which will be unrestricted by conventional publishing logistics. Even though so-called standard editions of Joyce's work already often include annotations and sometimes record, usually buried in lengthy introductions, a few likely textual variants, these are more often tolerated as necessarily flawed than accepted as discrete reflections of an authorial intention. What has become increasingly clear, however, is that both this tolerance, and the utopianism against which it has set itself, can no longer be regarded as satisfactory, let alone good, scholarly practice. Indeed, it is ever more the case that serious "Joyceans" must now have access to extensive archives, typescripts, letters, workbooks, manuscripts, conflicting and competing editions of key texts, and so on. Obviously this situation is bound to give rise to an increasing number of problems, not least of which has to do with the relative inaccessibility of much of these materials. Perhaps no less of a problem is the way that more and more critical time and space is being given over to the study of manuscripts, largely at the expense of other equally important aspects of Joyce scholarship -- and as a result it seems one is always being haunted by the possibility that one's work may be somehow compromised by the latest development in the Joyce editing wars.

Whether we like it or not, however, even those "mistakes" which have been widely identified, but which continue to find their way into re-published volumes of Joyce's work, have a particular and necessary status in the genesis of our received notions of "the Joycean text". It is no longer possible simply to erase such mistakes or to substitute corrections in the way, for instance, one may once have believed that defacing certain monuments, or incinerating particular books, could bring about a more "correct" version of history. Even, or especially, the seemingly grossest errors will have left indelible marks, which our strongest desires for efficient reform will not be able to obliterate.

Hence the further importance of textual genetics and hypertext in tracing the formation of received versions of Joyce's work. We might envisage this combination -- genetics and hypertext -- as a type of "archaeological" machine, sifting through the probable ruins and simulacra of "the Joycean text," not with the aim of derivation or of restoring an Ur- text, but of setting these probabilities (and "plurabilities" [FW 104.02]) to work dynamically, so as to give an other text its chance.

What have heretofore been considered distinct, if problematic, features of Joyce's writing (textual deviations, omissions, printer's "corrections," manuscript variations, Joyce's own amendments and possible oversights, etc., etc.), would thus be brought within one another's sphere of signifying influence, as it were, as "material" parts of a single hypertextual apparatus. This apparatus, far from introducing a further "meta-level" of complexity into the Joycean text where it wasn't there before, or losing the integrity of Joyce's "intention" in the process, would in fact unleash the flow of certain significatory forces operating between the so-called text and its proto- or avant-texts which had previously been denied or restricted through, among other things, existing technologies and editorial practice.