This Bloomsday (June 16), UVic celebrates a rare Ulysses library discovery.

Matt Huculak, a University of Victoria post-doctoral fellow, just realized every literary scholar’s dream. Poring through the University of Victoria’s Special Collections catalogues earlier this year, Huculak discovered a rare pirated edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the pages of an obscure literary journal.

Huculak made the discovery earlier this spring in the university’s Special Collections library while working for the SSHRC-funded Modernist Versions Project, an international digital humanities venture headed by UVic researchers that will allow readers to compare the different versions and editions of modernist fiction and poetry online.

Huculak was scanning old library catalogues dating back to the early days of Victoria College–the University of Victoria’s precursor–when he spotted an entry for a rare magazine called Two Worlds. “I recognized the magazine title in the catalogue,” says Huculak, “but I couldn’t believe the University of Victoria had a copy.” The call number was so old even the librarians didn’t recognize it at first.

But when the box of papers arrived, the soft-spoken Huculak was so surprised he broke library rules and shouted “You’re not going to believe this!” to another PhD student working in the library, The box contained not only the first four editions of the Two Worlds magazine, but a treasure trove of papers related to James Joyce’s early struggles to stop pirated copies of his work being sold around the world. Although these papers had originally been catalogued correctly according to general library standards of the 1950′s, they were missing the more detailed information university libraries use.

Stephen Ross, an associate professor in the university’s English Department and one of the lead researchers for the Modernist Versions digital humanities project, says Huculak’s find is important. “Not only does it help us understand the complex publishing history of Ulysses,” says Ross, “It also sheds light on the origins of present-day international copyright law. Two Worlds published segments of Joyce’s Ulysses without his permission as a protest against the US censorship restrictions at the time, but this literary piracy provoked an international protest by 167 authors in 1927. That protest eventually led to our present-day international copyright agreements.”

UVIC University Librarian Jonathan Bengtson says Huculak’s discovery underlines the international significance of UVic’s’ collection of original modernist texts. “It’s exciting to see a new generation of scholars taking advantage of our rich Special Collections legacy and developing digital tools to make this legacy available to other readers and scholars around the world.”

The aim of the project is to collate and edit modernist texts that exist in multiple versions so that we can achieve new critical insights. The task here is much more than simply to allow comparison of texts to identify where variations occur. Instead, it is to facilitate new interpretive possibilities. That is, out of the collation of text A and text B we will generate a set of variants, that can stand as text C. We want to read text C to see what it can tell us about the evolution of a given novel, say, and then to link those changes into the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts that produce them. The theoretical issues that arise concern what counts as a text and how we can read the third possible text — the C text — that emerges out of the incompatibility between text A and text B. The aim is to read the gap between one version and the next, following Derrida’s imperative to attend to difference itself as the source of meaning rather than presuming that it is a merely negative product of the non-coincidence of two entities: text A and text B. Given modernism’s own fascination with radical breaks, discontinuities, and making things new, the theory behind our approach to textual variation is in many ways deeply modernist itself. Following the lead of such writers as Conrad, Forster, and Joyce, and the ways in which their innovations in narrative informed much of later twentieth-century theory, the Modernist Versions Project concerns itself with what gaps, silences, and difference itself can tell us. It does not pursue the holistic text of the genetic edition, nor the definitive edition of the “corrected text,” but rather the trace of what has been erased, of erasure itself, as the most productive point of meaning. In doing so, we hope to be able to restore to our understanding of modernism a key element of its production, an aspect which modernism itself elided, but which remains central to understanding it as fully as possible.

Proust’s modernism is the result of an experiment.

Nearly a quarter of a century after Proust’s passing in 1922, his niece opened a cabinet in her home to reveal stacks of notebooks and piles of torn draft pages that had been hidden away since the close of the nineteenth century. The mass of archival material, generated more than two decades before the appearance of Du Côté de Chez Swann, composed the manuscript pages of Proust’s nineteenth century novel—a novel Proust never finished.

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