Errears and Erroriboose

Book excerpt: Joyce was fascinated by error throughout his writing career, from the malapropisms of characters in Dubliners, through to misquotations and misappropriations in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the errors and gaffes committed by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. This interest culminates in the ceaseless perversions of language, perspective and fact in Finnegans Wake. Error is not, however, something that Joyce only writes about: it happens to him and his texts in the form of misprints and inadvertent factual errors, through the interventions of others and through lapses in Joyce’s own practice. Indeed, part of the richness of this topic for those who are interested in Joyce’s writing is the difficult process of disentangling deliberate features of the text from unintended slippages. Errears and Erroriboose is the first major collection of essays to address the topic of Joyce and error. It brings together eight essays in order to provide readers with an understanding of the diverse ways in which error features in Joyce’s writings. A variety of different critical perspectives and approaches to the topic can be found here and the volume is of interest to students of Joyce’s work at all levels. These include archival and genetic study of the role of error in the composition of Joyce’s works; consideration of the psychological implications of error; work on the material and historical consequences of error; and close readings of the verbal effects of errors and mistakes.