James Joyce: Commentary (11)

Robert Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History (OUP 1994): ‘History is more than just a theme in Ulysses; it is to an exceptional degree a condition of the novel’s aesthetic production.’ (p.4.) ‘In recent years the interdependence of history and language has become of vital concern to scholars of literature, just as the inseparability of the factual and the fictional dimensions of historical discourse is increasingly probed by historians. More and more as disciplines converge and overlap in the academy, critics are turnign to the category of history, variously and polemically defined, in order to redescribe aesthetic texts and contexts. Adherents of the New Historicism, cultural poetics, popular culture studies, materialist feminism, metahistorical theory, to name just a few formulations, have worked to rescue literature from deconstructive strategies of reading, which, for many scholars, have come to seem abstract and self-indulgent, totalizing in their epistemological claims, but curiously blind to the ways literary texts process nonliterary discourses and institutions and are in turn shaped by those forces. […] I argue that Stephen’s “nightmare” and the text of Ulysses itself are distinct but related responses to what Nietzsche called “the malady of history”, the cultural obsession with the past and with the explanatory power of historiography, which, Nietszche believed, was destroying intellectual and moral health in the nineteenth century. For Stephen, as for Joyce, this malady takes many forms, from Hegelian notion of history as realization of Spirit to the sacrificial, teleological master narratives promoted by [6] Irish nationalism. In each case a totalized interpretation of the past threaten to overwhelm human freedom in the present moment, in particular the creative force of the artist. […] Joyce’s whole career may be viewed as a crusade against the historical Devourer.’ (pp.6-7.) ‘My study rehabilitates Stephen as the novel’s hero by showing that the persistent historiographic concerns of Ulysses are ultimately his concerns, that his intellectual attitudes, though seemingly remote from the style of later episodes, continue to shape the text’s contestatory stance towards history long after he has receded as a character.’ (p.8.)

[ top ]

Robert Spoo (James Joyce and the Language of History, 1994), cont. - quotes Joyce: ‘This spirit of our age is not to be confounded with its works; these are novel and progressive, mechanical bases of life: but the spirit wherever it is able to assert itself in this medley of machines is romantic and preterist’ (Workshop of Dedalus, p.69) - and remarks: ‘Beneath the obscure, youthful rhetoric is a startling proposition, one that runs counter to the prevailing view of “the spirit of the age” at the turn of the century. For in this passage Joyce evicts the time-spirit from its usual Victorian habitations - the progress of liberalism, the spread of empire, the growth of material benefits. He then relocates it in imaginative, iconoclastic aspects of culture: in socialist and anarchic politics and in the exertions of dedicated artists, those Symbolist priests of the eternal imagination like Yeats’s monk-aesthetes, Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne, who fascinated Stephen Daedalus with their “infrahuman or superhuman” morality and their determination to “inhabit a church apart[,] having chosen to fulfil the law of their own being.” [SH178, 1963 Edn] […] As Joyce implied in his remarks about the spirit of the age, the process of achieving the “simplest liberation of rhythms” also liberated the artist, for better or worse, from the idols of the marketplace; the act of expressing the self freely and fully in supple, periodic prose was analogous to more active, political forms of resistance, such as the socialism and anarchism with which the young Joyce implicitly linked the artist’s work. This belief that genuine creativity drives out false gods, that honest, expressive fictions defy and subvert dominant discourses, is the basis of Joyce’s historiographic art.’ (p.5.) ‘Joyce’s writings - in particular Ulysses and Finnegans Wake - are exemplary of, though unique within, the larger phenomenon of modernist historiography, which might be defined as the attempt to extend practices of aesthetic innovation to the representation of the past.’ (p.8.)

[ top ]

Robert Spoo (James Joyce and the Language of History, 1994) - cont. [Chap.: ‘Joyce’s Attitude Towards History: Rome , 1906-07’]: ‘[T]aken as a whole, Joyce’s letters from Rome reveal a far more complicated set of attitudes toward history and his Irish past than this excerpt [“Yesterday I went to see the Forum … I went home sadly. Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse” (25 Sept. 1906; Letters, Vol. II, 165) would suggest. The Eternal City catalysed Joyce’s thinking about the temporal process and its figural, representational possibilities at a time when he was poised uncertainly between the scrupulously mean realism of the Dubliners stories he had recently completed and the more complex, multi-vocal fictional textures he would begin to weave with “The Dead”, which he wrote after returning to Trieste in 1907. In his letters to his brother, Joyce’s biographical self and epistolary persona combine to generate a restless, insistent historical impressionism, a variety of postures and pronouncements that reflect the Victorian-Edwardian preoccupation with the problem of history and anticipate, in their complexity and ambivalence, the historical attitudes of another of Joyce’s personae, Stephen Dedalus. Joyce’s Rome sojourn unfolds as a resonant text that must be resituated and read with the context of nineteen-century discourses and counterdiscourses of history.’ (p.16.)

[ top ]

Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge 1995): ‘The modernity to which Joyce responds, then, is not transnational or universal, and the major trends in Joyce Criticism have occluded the particularity of Irish historical experience as it determines and is reflected in his fiction. His commentators have instead insisted on both reading “Ireland” through Joyce and interpreting Joyce as “Irishman”. [xii] The former procedure grants the artist authority to comment on his native culture, while the latter constructs him as passively typical of it - ironically, a judgement itself based on evidence gathered from his own texts, and from what is presumed to be his own portrayal of national character. Each approach involves critics in stereotyping discourse about Ireland and the Irish […]. The American liberal tradition in Joyce studies, which now dominates the international James Joyce industry, is founded on a belief in the writer’s pacifism and tolerant pluralism. Recent accounts of the texts influenced by post-structuralism and French feminist theory have argued that Joyce’s writing dismantles those traditional ideologies which render us sexed and civil subjects, among them nationalism. In all of these cases, the latter is considered chiefly in the context of European fascism: such accounts do not acknowledge that nationalisms vary, and are internally divided and disputatious. / Hence this book aims to offer a corrective to the pervasive and systematic misreading of Joyce [illustrating] how these interpretations symptomatise a crucial failure on his critics’ part to attend to the full complexity of nationalism in the political culture of modernity. (pp.xii-xiii.) [Cont.]

Emer Nolan (James Joyce and Nationalism, 1995): Nolan writes that ‘[a]n image of Joyce as an Irishman unswayed by patriotism, who not merely refused to participate in a popular nationalist movement in his own country but rebuked and challenged it at every opportunity, thus contributes significantly to our current approval of his ideological maturity. The high value accorded to his art is thus closely involved with orthodox perceptions of its “universalism”. […] And if his texts include anything so parochial as a message specifically for his own people, it surely must be the recommendation that they too embrace this modern world, in all its complexity and potential.’ (p.2). ‘Art, for Joyce, should be autonomous, above the realm of propaganda and politics [but that it is] ‘misleading to consider Joyce’s relationship to Irish politics solely hin these terms. As a novelist, Joyce worked in that literary mode most closely involved with the culture of the modern state: nationalism.’ (p.23; quoted in Brendan Mitchell, PG MA, UU 2009.) ‘The city of Dubliners should no longer be critically depicted as a provincial backwater […] Rather, by attending to the lived ideology of nationalism, we can observe how Joyce preserves a linkage between modernisation and regeneration. This is obscured if we view the book solely in the context of European naturalism, and, alternative, symbolic readings of Dublin (as we shall see) merely gesture towards it.’ (p.31.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Emer Nolan (James Joyce and Nationalism, 1995) - cont.: ‘The Ireland Joyce knew, it should be emphasised, lacked virtually any tradition of bourgeois, liberal or individualistic dissent. Such calls for a common, disinterested cultural programme as have been issued in [44] Ireland arise consistently from within the Protestant community, which historically has been viewed by the great majority of people as the ally and beneficiary of a repressive colonial administration. […] Joyce’s apparent taking up of the cause of disinterestedness, along with that of the autonomy of the artist, from within the Catholic community, must be distinguished from both an Anglo-Irish and an English liberalism. It comes, that is to say, from a society in which such questions as whether Jesus was the only man with ever had pure auburn hair [&c.] are serious topics of discussion.’ (p.45.) ‘Although Joyce’s text does significantly register the advent of mechanical reproduction in the modern city, this is largely mediated through the consciousness of a figure (Bloom) who compulsively generalises his own specific condition to a pervasive mechanisation of social experience as such.’ (p.81.)

[ top ]

Emer Nolan (James Joyce and Nationalism, 1995) - cont.: ‘[T]raditonal accounts of “Cyclops” are in general rendered incoherent by their refusal to attach any positive qualities to the Citizen or the kind of language that he speaks, in spite of the fact that his voice is one of the most “interesting” in literary terms, and probably the funniest in the book.’ (p.96.) ‘[T]he shade of Parnellism - which haunts all of Joyce’s texts - is merely the measure of his inability to move with the political times, his commitment to a lost cause of history […] Perhaps Parnell, who by 1912 functions for Joyce - however erroneously - as a symbol of the futility of constitutionalism, compromise and pragmatism, can alternatively be read as the image of a real past out of which a better future might have been built.’ (p.131.) [See longer extracts in Ricorso Library, “Criticism”, infra.]

[ top ]

Declan Kiberd, ‘Story-Telling: The Gaelic Tradition’, in Terence Brown & Patrick Rafroidi, eds., The Irish Short Story, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979): ‘[…] the greatest collection of short stories to come out of Ireland, Joyce’s Dubliners , bears positively no trace of the oral tradition. Where the oral tradition took the spectacular as its subject, Joyce finds poetry in the commonplace. Where the oral tales climaxed in blood-baths and supernatural reversals, Joyce’s epiphanies describe nothing more momentous than the passing of a coin. Nor is Joyce alone in this proud immunity to the Gaelic tradition. George Moore and John McGahern might also be cited as writers of real class whose work bears no trace of the folklore of the rural Ireland in which they grew up. One reason for this may lie in the [21] fact that a tales which had previously been told in the Irish language passed over into English only to a very small extent.’ (p.21; note: Kiberd’s footnote at this point refers to Seán O’Sullivan, The Folklore of Ireland, London 1974, p.15.)

[ top ]

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape 1995): ‘Joyce’s Stephen Hero, noting the willingness of the Catholic clergy to support the [Gaelic] League, said that the priests hoped to find in Irish a bulwark against modern ideas, keeping “the wolves of unbelief” at bay and the people frozen in a past of “implicit faith”. This was rather sour response from a Joyce whose experience of the League had been fatally narrowed by his attendance at the Irish classes of Patrick Pearse [who] in his youthful days found it impossible to praise Irish without virulent denunciations of English (…; p.141.) ‘Finding himself nowhere, Stephen attempts to fabricate an environment: “signature of all things I am here to read”. But the problem is that his learning is more dense than his setting. He is a dire example of the provincial intellectual weighted down by the learning of the European tradition. (…; 346.) Yet what he finds, almost at once, is that there is no “society” to report, even within Bloom’s own household in Eccles Street. A few pages of interior monologue are sufficient to make clear that the Blooms can never [know] one another as the reader will come to know them. Indeed the tragedy of the interior monologue will be revealed to lie in the counterpoint between the richness of a person’s thoughts and the slender opportunities for sharing those thoughts with others in conversation. What is depicted in the ensuing chapters can hardly be called a society in the conventional sense, being rather a gathering of fugitives, of submerged groups, of clamorous competing voices and of speakers who do not often listen to one another. If the traditional European novel has a plot which hinges on a number of crucial dialogues, then this is not such a narrative at all, being constructed more around monologues, soliloquys and reveries.’ (pp.346-47.) ‘Joyce concludes that there can be no freedom for his characters within that society: they exist in their interior monologues with a kind of spacious amplitude which proves impossible in the community itself. So his refusal to provide a “satisfactory climax” […] is his reject of the obligation felt by realists to present a coherent, stable, socialised self.’ (p.354).

[ top ]

Declan Kiberd, on the Penguin Joyce publishing project, gen Ed. Seamus Deane (UCD): ‘The task is to situate Joyce in his immediate context before returning him to the wider modernist world … to historize him.’ (Q. Source; Irish journalism.) Note: introductions in the series were provided by Deane, Kiberd, Terence Brown, et al.

Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London: Faber & Faber 2009): ‘It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people. […]. Whereas other modernists feared the hydra-headed mob, Joyce used interior monologue to show how lovable, complex and affirmative was the mind of the ordinary citizen.’ (p.11.) Further: ‘Acting out is one response to repression; keeping things in is the other. If the healthy person is one in whom every internal impulse is balanced by an external one, this raises the question of a pathological element in Bloom's monologues. […] Stephen in “Proteus” is anything but healthy in its level of self obsession; and “Aeolus”, by mocking Bloomian telegraph-language, opened the possibility that even his monologues may contain a satiric element.’ (Ibid., p.127; both quoted in Jonathan McCreedy, PhD [draft], UU 2009).

[ top ]

Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge UP 1995): ‘Joyce [chose] to reject the Celticism within Irish Nationalism, founded as it was on this binary trap. As I have suggested, his argument that the Irish should look beyond their narrow provincialism and their affairs with England and develop a more international consciousness was an attempt to break out of such constricting dynamics and terms, in which an Irish essence could be defined only on the conqueror’s terms (such as [55] those posited by [Matthew] Arnold) and in reaction/response to English claims. For Joyce rejected wholesale the Celticist argument for racial purity and national characteristics, which he found to be as specious as the English stereotyping of the Irish character as the “baboon-faced figures” (SH 64) and “the unbalanced helpless idiots we read about” (CW 171) in the English papers and magazines. […; here Cheng quotes: ‘Our civilisation is a vast fabric […] the race now living in Ireland’ (CW165-66), also cited at paragraph-length on p.217.] / In rejecting the argument that the “race now living in Ireland” has somehow remained “pure and virgin”, Joyce is rejecting the ideological foundation behind the Citizen’s, the Gaelic League’s and the Literary Revival’s motivations. In arguing that in Irish civilisation [“]the most diverse elements are mingled”, Joyce is acknowledging the hybridity and collaboration of discoursive influences and cultural formations. His works, as we shall see, become increasingly informed by his sensitivity towards the nature of hybridity, ambivalences, and interpetrations involved in hegemonic and discursive formations. This is, of course, the understanding of discourses that Foucault advanced in The Order of Things when he suggested that the histories of the Same (Self) and the Other were [56] inextricably implicated and interpenetrated […] as Shem/Mercius would say to Shaun/Justius in Finnegans Wake, “the days of youyouth are evermixed minine” [FW194.04].’ (pp.55-57.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Vincent Cheng (Joyce, Race and Empire, 1995) - cont.: ‘For the pacifist, exiled, and multilingual Joyce, the “spiritual liberation” of Ireland and the creation of the “conscience of my race” involved getting out of the binary structure and into an internationalist, multilingual, and multiculturalist perspective.’ (p.52; quoted in Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz, ‘Joyce and the Tradition of Anti-Colonial Revolution’, Working Papers Ser., Washington State Univ. 1999, p.11.) Further, ‘Stephen’s resentment at the English [sic] occupation of the tower for which he pays the rent is suggested, not only in his opening question to Mulligan [“… How long is Haines going to stay in this tour?”] but again in his response to Mulligan’s Wildean witticism about Stephen’s face in the mirror being “the rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in the mirror” [U 1.143]. While Buck may be willing to condone the English racialisation and simianisation of the Irish as native “Caliban”, the Irish response […] was often the rage of the Irishman precisely at seeing his face represented in the English mirror as Caliban, and the parallel rage of not seeing in one’s reflection oneself as one’s own master. For Stephen’s response to Buck is that the mirror is “a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant” [U 1.146], a comment which voices and reasserts the [152] resentment of the Irish at being forces (and racialised) into the servitude of Caliban. (…; p.153.)

[ top ]

Vincent Cheng (Joyce, Race and Empire, 1995) - cont. Here Cheng quotes: “Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea […]”, and remarks: ‘This is the delighted response of the native informant who has discovered something else he can peddle to the ethnographer […] a touch of local colour, a native witticism.’ (p.153.) On Bloom’s postcolonial hybridity: […] ‘It is inevitable that Bloom is both a consumer and a product/propagator of the dominant (and racist) cultural discourse about otherness; but - perhaps because he is himself repeatedly being typed by his fellow Irish as just such a reified Other - he is repeatedly sceptical of such images and sensitive to the cultural processes by which they are erected. / Bloom, we discover, has an intense fascination with and awareness of the viewpoint of the other, of cultural difference - as evidenced in his interest in the customs of other peoples. […; 176] Not only does Bloom repeatedy show an interest in foreign customs and cultural difference, be he seems always to accept them without having to label or type them as barbaric, perverse, or unacceptable - in stark contrast to the way we repeatedly see his xenophobic fellow Irishmen, frearing foreignness, label him with the stigmatised marks of an absolute difference. Bloom is able to hold sumultaneous perspectives, to imagine being other and thus to transcend the monologic narrowness of a single, cycloptic perspective […] This is a multivalent perspective (and imaginative courage) in which many of his fellow Irishmen (such as those he will encounter later in the “Cyclops” episode) are lacking.’ (pp.176-77; see further extracts in Ricorso Library, “Criticism”, infra.)

[ top ]

Thomas C. Hofheinz, Joyce and the Inventions of Irish History: Finnegans Wake in Context (Cambridge UP 1995): ‘The Free State thereby enshrined as law the predicament that appears again and again throughout Joyce’s fiction: Irish homes in which fathers crippled with alcoholism, impotence, and rage beat, neglect, or drive their wives into states of enervation and despair and throw their children to the wolves. Joyce agreed with De Valera that the foundation of Ireland is the patriarchal family, but that concept for him was one laced with horror and outrage. / The awakening of Ireland into modernity is thus wedded in Joyce’s last novel to a resurgence of patriarchy, the primary organising principle of metaphysics and social formation in the Western world. An Irish father’s accountability or lack of it, evoked in jagged edges of narrative expressing the patriarchal order’s knots of contradiction and pain, laces upward through the blindness of Irish habit into the historiography of Finnegans Wake, an anamorphosis waiting to materialise behind the screen of historical discourse. [… &c.]’ (p.38.) [Cont.]

Thomas C. Hofheinz, Joyce and the Inventions of Irish History: Finnegans Wake in Context (Cambridge UP 1995) - cont.: ‘Irish historians of the late colonial era, in their question to resurrect a lost Ireland that would clarify their living present, sought to decipher the epitaph of an Ireland buried alive. The crytology involved in topological history - the working backwards from the scattered topoi of a shattered past - depends upon the logic of a crypt, a hidden space where one seeks to wake the dead. The writing of history, though, obviates such a question. Writing cuts the epitaph for the past’s translation into the present. Whether Irish historians and antiquarians of the late colonial period read ancient Irish documents in the “original” or in English translation, they affirmed the destruction of the Irish Gaelic they sought. Such a loss of the Irish past through inscription may be the reason why Joyce cited Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies both by Moore’s titles and the names of the Irish airs to which his poems were adapted. […] the search to find concrete centres for Ireland’s competing names and claims, consequently gave oppsoing Irish parties common mode of reference, a mutual agreement ot encrypt the present in topics of the past.’ (p.73.) ‘Gabriel’s vulnerability to the Irish dead on his journey west is precisely what Stephen Dedalus attempts to avoid on his abortive journey East to the European continent. […] Joyce’s insistence that Ireland either wake up or lie down in the grave forever is not so much a scornful dismissal of his country as it is a concise utterance of the question raised throughout his work with irony and compassion: the difference between a wake and an awakening, between locating oneself in the past and finding oneself in the present, depends upon an existential assessment of names and claims wound into one’s identity.’ (p.73; for longer extracts, see RICORSO Library, “Major Authors”, James Joyce, infra.)

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Allegory, History and Irish Nationalism’, in Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork UP 1996), pp.146-47: ‘It is these restless shades, and the culture of the west imbued with the memory of the dead, which come to haunt Gabriel Conroy in the closing scenes of the story “The Dead”. When the thoughts of Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, turn westwards, opening up an irreparable gulf between them, it is because of her hearing “The Lass of Aughrim” [144; …] political resonances in view of tendency to allegorise Ireland as a female […/…] Revenants of the Williamite past [145]; notes that Joyce spoke of ‘a “double struggle”, the anti-imperialist struggle, on the one hand, and, on the other, an internal struggle “perhaps no less bitter”, between constitutional nationalism and a dissident, insurrectionary tradition beginning with the Whiteboys and passing through the Fenian (IRB) movement.’ (Critical Writings, 1966, p.188.) The Hegelian standards of clarity and abstraction prescribed for political consciousness in the metropolitan centre do not exhaust all possibilities of national identity. The owl of Minerva may only fly at dusk, but Dedalus was able to wing his way through the Celtic twilight, albeit by flying close to the ground.’ (p.147).

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’, in Field Day Review, 1 (2005), pp.71-86: ‘[…] a question arises here: Is Dublin, or for that matter, the Ireland out of which Joyce emerged as a writer, to be defined solely, or even primarily, in terms of space as conceived by high modernism? Certainly there have been enough studies of geographic and topographical relationships in Joyce, but for the most part they assume the sovereignty of space in Joyce’s imagination, as if Dublin were simply another metropolis like Paris, Berlin or Boston. In Ulysses, Robert M. Adams writes, “Joyce does not seem to have an antiquarian eye for old Dublin”, but is it indeed the case that Joyce’s Dublin is confined to the extended present which modernists claimed to be the product of the spatialised drive of painting and of cinematic form? is the past simply erased and, thereby, are the disparities of time removed from the public sphere to the domain of what Edmund Husserl referred to as “internal time-consciousness”?’ (p.72.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’ (2005) - cont.: ‘At one moment Fr. Conmee is on the Malahide Road; the next he has travelled back in time to his period as rector at Clongowes: but whether the latter is a subjective memory on his part, or an objective flashback, remains unclear as intrusions from the past disrupt the apparently homogeneous spatial form of the present. that the logic of spatial form no longer applies amid the switching currents of time in the “Wandering Rocks” episode is finally evident as the episode draws to a close with the slow procession of the viceregal cavalcade through the opposite side of Dublin. […] Further: ‘The breakdown of simultaneity in Joyce’s Dublin, the dislocation of the synchronicity by aberrant senses of time, is nowhere more evident than in the phenomenon of parallaz, which Hugh Kener and others have rightly identified as one fo the key organising (or disorganising) motifs in the novel.’ (p.79.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’ (2005) - cont.: ‘As Bloom understands it, the timeball on the top of the Ballast Office registered Greenwich Mean Time as an aid to shipping and for communications with England, but the clock on front of the building [fig.6] registered Irish (Dunsink) time, which was twenty-five minutes behind London, was established at the Washington Conference in 1884. So while modernity sought to standardise time to facilitate synchronic timetabling at a global level, the imperial connection and the need to facilitate shipping from Britain imposed another time scale on Irish society, undermining that simultaneity. [Gibbons quotes Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe (2001), and Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason (1994)] As Bloom understands it, the timeball on the top of the Ballasth Office registered Greenwich Mean Time as an aid to shipping and for communications with England, but the clock on front of the building [fig.6] registered Irish (Dunsink) time, whcih was twenty-five minutes behind London, was established at the Washington Conference in 1884. So while modernity sought to standardise time to facilitate synchronic timetabling at a global level, the imperial connection and the need to facilitate shipping from Britain imposed another time scale on Irish society, undermining that simultaneity. (p.80.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’ (2005) - cont.: ‘The paradox here, however, is that in the very sundering of the past from the present, new media technologies such as cinema also created - or articulared - ways of reliving memory with unprecedented, almost visceral immediacy. the issue here is not one of residual traces of the past: the remnants from other eras whcih have survived into the present, like the herding of those chattle through the streets of Dublin for the boat to Britain whcih the mourners at Paddy Dignam’s funeral momentarily glimpse on their way to Glasnevin. As Chakrabarty points out elsewhere [Habitations of Modernity, 2002], to speak of the “survival” of such practices is not to challenge “stagist” or stadial theories of progress, for it is clear that their days are numbered; they can “be seen as leftovers from an earlier period, still active, no doubt, but under world-historical notice of extinction.” (Habitations, p.12.) By contrast, the instablities of time that surgace in Joyce’s Dublin inhabit public sapce and co-exist with, or may even be actively produced by, the dislocations of colonial modernity. (p.83.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’ (2005) - cont.: ‘The alternative histories with which Ulysses abounds (many of which trace the genealogy of an independent Ireland) were still part of a contested public sphere in Ireland, and were not therefore in a position to accept their relagation by modernism to private, pyschological space. Rejecting Kern’s assertion of a clear boundary between inner and other worlds, public and psychological space, the new mass media infiltrated not only the conscious but even the unconscious, leaving little space beyond the reach of art. [Cites Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, Harvard 1983, espec. pp.60-64.] It is not even a matter of finding in the public sphere the equivalent of trauma, or related notions of “involutary memory” that are normally allocated to personal experience; rather, the true measure of psychic dislocation under colonial modernity is that both public and private are permeable, and that the unrequited past comes across with the lived intensity of experience. Whatever about the ahistorical triumph of space over time in metropolitan modernism, in Ulysses space, both outer and inner, is historicised through and through. This is the true nightmare of history to which Stephen bears witness: “Fabled by the daughters of memory […] one livid flame. What’s left to us then?” [2U, .9.-10; End].

[ top ]

James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Conn: Greenwood Press 1997), ‘Intelligentsia Fiction, 1900-1922’ [Pt. II]: ‘Joyce’s fiction offers the most subtle version of non-intellectual discourse in Catholic Ireland. For him, discourse within Catholic Ireland is a matter, not of the interplay of arguments, but of the exchange of what might be termed theological anecdotes, maxims, and metaphors whose purpose is to secure loyalty and reinforce an emotional identification, rather than to establish a reasonable case. A version of this process is to be found in “Grace”, the penultimate story in Dubliners(1914; refs. to Penguin Edn. 1992). In their efforts to persuade Kernan to agree to attend a retreat for businessmen in Gardiner Street Church, Power, Martin Cunningham and M’Coy try to enmesh Kernan in the web of anecdotes, maxims and metaphors on which their own faith is based in the hope that it will reinforce Kernan’s commitment. It turns into a form of anecdotal guerrilla warfare. Cunningham begins with a maxim, “The General of the Jesuits stands next to the Pope”, and later backs it up with an anecdote, “Every other order in the Church had to be reformed at some time or other, but the Jesuit Order was never once reformed. It never fell away.” (Dubliners, p.163) / However M’Coy’s maxim, “The Jesuits cater for the upper classes”, inadvertently allows Kernan to counter-attack with a remark about “those secular priests, ignorant, bumptious”. Nor is Cunningham able to retrieve the situation with his complacent, damage-limitation maxim, “The Irish priesthood is honoured all the world over” (Dubliners, p.163). Kernan presses home his counter-attack in the middle section of the persuasion, when the conversation turns to Fr. Tom Burke, the famous preacher. Cunningham repeats rather vague generalisations about him to the effect that “he wasn’t much of a theologian [… &c.]”.’ [Cont.]

[ top ]

James H. Murphy (Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922, 1997) - cont.: ‘In the end Cunningham persuades Kernan into going to the retreat with the pièce de résistance of theological anecdotes of religious loyalty and submission, the apocryphal story of Archbishop John MacHale [sic] of Tuam’s submission to the doctrine of papal infallibility in spite of his reservations about it.’ [/ …]. Murphy goes on: ‘It is an irony of intelligentsia fiction that characters seeking to change Catholic Ireland by means of reason generally ended up railing against it, the transition from reason to emotion marking Catholic Ireland’s victory against them. In the end they renounce their attachment to Catholicism. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) deals with the processes that end in extreme rejection of Irish Catholic identity.’ (pp.144-45.) Murphy identifies the dinner-table argument over the treatment of Parnell by the Church as ‘the locus classicus for the rejection of Catholic Ireland in Joyce’s novel [A Portrait]’ (p.145.) Further, ‘In this passage of the novel competing anecdotes and maxims, which deteriorate into crude slogans and even cruder name-calling, mark a characteristically emotional polarisation in which each side tries to exclude the other from participation in Irishness.’ (pp.145-46.)

[ top ]

R. F. Foster, W . B. Yeats: A Life - I: “The Apprentice Mage” (OUP 1997), ‘National Dramas 1901-1902’ [Chap. 10]: ‘[…] Joyce had already made his mark with a clear-sighted attack on the Irish Literary Theatre in “The Day of the Rabblement”, but he passionately admire WBY’s literary achievement: he could recite “The Adoration of the Magi” off by heart and the mesmeric beauty of certain poems (notably “Who Goes with Fergus?” from The Countess Cathleen) remained canonical for him. After glamorous but slightly scandalous career at the Royal University, he was following a haphazard course as a medical student. In October Russell told him that WBY would be in Dublin the following month and would like meet him (he had already dined at the Nassau Hotel on 4 November with Gregory and JBY). There was accordingly a rendezvous outside the Nation Library, followed by an awkward encounter in an O’Connell Street café. It was an intense occasion, much recapitulated and mythologized; Ellmann compared it to the meeting between Goethe and Heine, a symbolic conjunction in the history of world literature. More immediately apparent was mutual suspicion between an established Irish Protestant aesthete and a Jesuit-educated Catholic Dubliner with a preternaturally mordant eye for social pretensions. Soon afterwards WBY wrote (but never published) a slightly fictionalized account of their meeting. ‘He asked me “Why did I make speeches? Why did I concern myself with politics? Why had I given certain of my stories and poems a historical setting?” . all these things were a sign that the iron was getting cold.’ Joyce’s own affiliations and energies were strange to him; WBY realized that he was dealing with a new force, something that could not be predicted. His version betrays the wistful tone of a man nearing forty, confronted by the ruthlessness of youthful genius. ’Presently he up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, I am twenty. How old are you?’ I told him, but I am afraid I said I was a year younger than I am. He said a sigh, I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.”’ Joyce in later years denied this, but at a stage of life when good manners meant to him than they did in 1902.’ Their disagreement was inevitable. One of the points WBY recalled making to Joyce involved a defence of folklore a the ‘sterility’ of urban culture, Great Memory against individual consciousness. Joyce’s lofty and laconic reply rankled enough for WBY to repeat it than once. ‘Generalizations aren’t made by poets; they are made by men letters. They are no use.’ (p.276; see longer extract in Ricorso Library, “Criticism / Major Authors” - James Joyce, infra.)

[ top ]

Christine Van Boheemen, ‘Joyce’s Sublime Body’, in Vincent J. Cheng, et. al., ed., Joycean Cultures/Culturing Joyces (Delaware UP; AUP 1998), writes of Joyce and ‘the pain of linguistic dispossession, of the radical severance at the point of origin that belongs to growing up Irish’ (p.23): ‘‘The avoidance of pain, or death, or disfigurement, the awareness of mutability and embodied existence in general, would seem itself a characteristic feature of late-twentieth-century culture. This narcissism is, in turn, a form of belated complicity with Eugene Jolas’s proclamation of a new linguistic reality. His “new artist of the word,” recognizing the “autonomy of language,” had “hammer[ed out] a verbal vision that destroys time and space [Eugene Jolas, “James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word”, in Our Exagmination [ … &c.], 1929, NY 1972, p.79.]. Even Joyce himself (and not just Stephen Dedalus) might be understood as a votary to a poetics of linguistic transcendence in desiring a “language which is above all languages, a language to which all do service,” [Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982 Rev. Edn., p.397] betraying the dream of an ahistorical language, unmarked by difference or local embodiment. Finnegans Wake may well be considered the product of such an idea of language - an essential image beyond national language, time, and space; but its complex textuality also forces the reader to the realization that language cannot do mute service to the projection of a transcendent, disembodied subjectivity. It constantly rubs the reader’s nose in his or her limitations as a reader, and in our imprisonment in the linguistic web. Read with awareness, Finnegans Wake is a cure for narcissism. It forces even nonnative speakers of English into reading it out loud with an Irish accent. / ‘What strikes me as ironic is that the more pressing and clear this pedagogy becomes, the more that same text seems to serve as fetish to alleviate the very castration anxiety that it evokes and illustrates. It provides an ideal playground in which to forget that, for all its linguistic display, even Finnegans Wake is the product of flesh, blood, sweat, and pain - no creativity, especially not such obsessive creativity, without pain. In what follows, I have chosen to try to articulate the, obsessiveness of Joyce#3’s engagement with language - in connection with his obsessive fascination with speech about the body - as a symptom of loss, a record of trauma.’ (pp.23-24; for longer extracts, see Ricorso Library, “Criticism”, infra.)

[ top ]

Jean Kimball, Odyssey of the Psyche: Jungian Patterns in Joyce’s Ulysses (Southern Illinois UP 1997): ‘Ulysses is a book without a hero but with two protagonists who are together its subject. It is a critical truism that Stephen and Bloom are opposites, but together […] they represent Joyce’s vision of the artist as a divided self working towards integration.’ (p. ix.) Further, ‘In Ulysses Joyce split his autobiographical subject into two opposite persons, each of whom could reveal a part of the contradictory truth about himself. A Portrait had traced the development of Stephen, the self-conscious artist of Joyce’s original conception of his autobiographical fiction. The 1909 experience, however, including both the unfounded jealousy and its aftermath in the pornographic letters, which wallow in the excremental language and mawkish sentimentality at the same time, had revealed to Joyce, as an essential part of his true personality, “those poisonous subtleties which envelop the soul, the ascending fumes of sex”, which he associated with the modern theme. Stephen simply could not encompass the whole, for this realm of Joyce’s psyche does not belong to the artist-self that has been developed through Stephen in A Portrait, a basic incompatibility that Joyce must have realised when he attempted to attach this particular “poisonous subtlety” to Richard Rowan.’ (p.39.)

[ top ]

Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press 1998): ‘Joyce’s work is parodic, as many have remarked. But it is a subverse parody in which he has seized the rules of dominant decolonising discourse and disrupted what he sees as its flawed identitarian message. The creative artist cannot escape the languages of liberal and radical decolonisation; [83] indeed, Joyce does not actually want to “escape” them as he remains affiliated to a certain notion of Irishness which can only be imagined in terms of those discourses. However, by exposing them as discourses, as formal and historical organisations of signs, he can displace them so as to ward off, at least temporarily, the disabling structures into which they are locked. And the most disabling structure which Ulysses exposes is Irish literary criticism and the twin assumptions upon which it rests: a natural link between culture and nation, and a natural aporia between the primary (imaginative) and secondary (critical) discourses.’ (pp.83-84.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Gerry Smyth (Decolonisation and Criticism, 1998) - cont.: ‘Joyce’s resistance to Irish decolonisation takes the form of a challenge to a tradition of literary criticism organised around the notion of an indissoluble link between national culture and nationalist politics.’ (p.87.) Further, ‘In so far as he was an Irish writer, Joyce was a radical critic of English domination of Ireland; but in so far as he refused the limitations of both Irishness and Englishness, he managed to incorporate both these categories into a writing practice which itself refused incorporation into any dialectical discourse predicated on a subject who, like the critic, purports to stand outside his own constitution in discourse. After Joyce’s revolution of the word and [87] Ireland’s revolution of the sword, both the role of the national subject and the function of a critical discourse in which such a subject was constituted had to be renegotiated.’ (pp.87-88.)

[ top ]

Denis Donoghue, ‘Ireland, Race, Nation, State’ [Part 1], in Partisan Review, Vol. LXVI, No. 2 (1999), pp.223-34: There is no reason to think that he is being ironic at Stephen Dedalus’s expense when he has him exclaim: “I go to encounter … race.” It is possible to read that declaration ironically, but the irony soon becomes ashamed of itself.’ (p.229.)