GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES – Issue 20 (Spring 2020)

Editorial: 20 Years Genetic Joyce Studies Dirk Van Hulle

Genetic Joyce Studies celebrates its 20th birthday. Just as young as the millennium, we started as an online journal ‘for the study of James Joyce’s works in progress’. Since this is enough to keep us busy for the rest of the millennium, this is what we would like to keep offering, online and for free. It makes us happy to hear from young scholars in India and elsewhere that they appreciate GJS so much because it is the only Joyce journal they can access, due to the limited resources of their institutions. We are glad to be able to present a dozen genetic studies in this issue, plus a cartographic excursion by Tim Johnson about the Sandycove Atlas, wishfully speculating if this might be the ‘gorescarred book’ from which Stephen is teaching in the Nestor episode of Ulysses. A major theme in this issue’s genetic articles is Joyce’s re-use of old notes, reprocessing notes for Portrait in Ulysses, and recycling notes for Ulysses in his ‘wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer’, Finnegans Wake. Twenty years ago, opening in medias res, we started without preface, with just an ‘About’ page noting that we are ‘a peer-reviewed open-access journal devoted to the study of James Joyce's works with a focus on the writing process’: ‘The purpose of this digital journal is to create a forum for genetic Joyce criticism, where a broad audience can read the results of recent genetic investigations.’ The epigraph to the first article was an appropriate quote by Borges: ‘The concept of the “definitive text” corresponds only to religion or exhaustion.’ We would like to thank our readers and all the contributors to Genetic Joyce Studies, who have shown and keep showing in multifarious ways what is not definitive about Joyce’s texts, or how they came into existence, through gradual and sometimes chaotic accumulation of textual sediment, like Dublin’s and Here Comes Everybody’s history of urban accretion or – accreting even more accretively – like Anna Livia Plurabelle’s alluvium. About these accretions, Fritz Senn wrote a short, memorable contribution in the early years of the journal, called ‘Genetic Fascination’. As ‘an onlooker who has watched genetic scholars from the safe sidelines’, he presents himself as part of ‘we others’, even though he also has his own memories of glimpses into Joyce’s workshop, feeling the thrill of examining some of Joyce’s manuscripts at the British Library:

I remember how thrilled I was to note how Joyce added Buck Mulligan’s advice to Stephen on reading Homer and the Greeks: “You must read them in the original” (U1.77) and similarly added Stephen Dedalus's remark about Saint Thomas Aquinas (in the presence of Mulligan): “... whose works I enjoy reading in the original” (U9.778). The two insertions occurred not too far apart in the revisions of 1921 (JJA22:7, 18:196). They seem to be related, Mulligan and Stephen flaunt Greek and Latin respectively – a trivial insight, but one that was triggered off by exploring marginal accretions. (GJS Special Issue 2003)

We believe that, in the meantime, genetic criticism has become such an integral part of Joyce studies that there is no need to speak of ‘genetic scholars’ and ‘we others’, separated by ‘the sidelines’, but of just one ‘we’. We also hope that Genetic Joyce Studies will keep inspiring Joyce research of all types by evoking some of that thrill and ‘genetic fascination’ that Fritz Senn talks about, endlessly energized by his encouraging words, wishing us all ‘perspicuity, vigour, stamina, funds and serendipity’.