James Joyce: Commentary (12)

Terence Killeen, review of James Joyce, Occasional Critical and Political Writings, ed. Kevin Barry [Oxford World Classic] (OUP 2001), in The Irish Times (3 March, 2001), calls Joyce’s essays on “Art and Life” and “Mangan” ‘a fine illustration of Oscar Wilde’s dictum on the importance of seeing the object as in itself it really is not. Joyce needed a safe precursor figure, a prophet, and Mangan conveniently filled the bill. These pieces should be read in conjunction with Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; when they are they fill perfectly. They are continuation of fiction by other means.’ [Note that they both of course ante-dated those writings.] Killeen remarks that Joyce was a ‘hopeless reviewer’ who gives the ‘impression of a determined withholding of personal involvement, a refusal to engage with the works under review’. He quotes Joyce on the Ireland of the literary revival as ‘a land almost fabulous in its sorrow and senility’. Of the Triestine pieces: ‘those who have wished to promote a nationalist view of Joyce have been happy to use them as evidence, but there is a great deal of ambiguity in what the pieces actually say [… a]long with a more passionate ambivalence towards the Irish themselves and the mess they have got themselves into.’ He concludes, ‘no coherent political or ideological stance can really be taken from this very mixed bag.’ Killeen notes that the editor refers to distortion of readings seeking for a political message; commends Barry’s introduction as valuable in tracing the ‘complex process whereby Joyce, in his Triestine writings, began to liberate himself from the fixed antinomies and stereotypes that were the norm of Irish history and to embark on a process of crossing-over and inversion of such antinomies that he took much further, in his creative work’.

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Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts 2000), summarising remarks of Seamus Deane: ‘Deane demonstrates Joyce’s difference from Arnoldian cultural liberalism, which embraced the Hellenisation of England and the Celticisation of Ireland. To reject the latter is also to reject the former, and this is what Joyce achieved. He famously had no time for the Celticism of Yeats and the Revivalists, but he also saw that it was derived from Arnold’s opposition of Hellenicistic and Beraix culture. In Joyce’s repudiation of Celtic heroicism, essentialism, even racism, he was at the same time effecting a critique of the Arnoldian idea of culture as discourse that could help bind the English middle classes to their poorer countrymen. To this extent, Joyce becomes an anti-hegemonic writer, since Arnold was never less than sure that culture was a force for the state, the stating being the material manifestation of man’s best self.’ (217.)

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Patsy McGarry, ‘Once a Catholic, Always’ (The Irish Times, 16 June 2001), raises the question whether James Joyce died a Catholic on the basis of the belief held by his siser Gertrude Mary Joyce, who lived as a Mercy nun in New Zealand and received letters from Joyce, destroyed at her death. Joyce saw her off at Kingston in 1909, when she took the surplice he had worn as a boy. She held him to be the most religious of the family, claiming that he never read [books] during Lent, and called him the inspiration of her own vocation. She received a call from a Jesuit on the death of Joyce in 1941, telling her that he died with a priest in attendance. The informant is a Fr. Feehan and the priest purportedly bearing the news a Fr Leonard. (Query: doesn’t this rather raise the question of the Jesuits’ long-term interest in Joyce and their willingness to deceive a Catholic nun for her own good and that of the congregation.?)

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David Fuller, James Joyce’s Ulysses (Harvester Wheatsheaf 1992), on Joyce and Yeats: ‘Yeats was antithetical to Joyce in his politics. Joyce’s seedy urban realism is a kind of answer to Yeats’s idealising picture of an authentic rural Ireland of aristocrats and pesanta, heroic myth and widely disseminated imaginative legend. Joyce and Yeats offer competing versions of Ireland and, beyond that, competing versions of what it is to be human, as Yeats acknowledged by attacking Joyce in the first edition of A Vision (1926): Joyce is an example of the fractured modern consciousness against which his own work strove.’ (p.14.) Further, on Ulysses and Dubliners: ‘Joyce also portrays the city by drawing in a number of characters from Dubliners. It is fiction referring to fiction, but, amongst so much realistic Dublin detail, the knowledge that these characters exist outside Ulysses heightens the feeling of reference to an actual world. The Dubliners characters bring with them Dubliners themes: emotional paralysis and religious factionalism.’ (Ibid., p.42; the foregoing quoted in Laurie Magowan, UG Diss., UUC, 2006.)

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James Baldwin: ‘“James Joyce was right about history being a nightmare”, wrote the African American essayist [sic] James Baldwin, “but it is may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” […] Just thee months after the murder, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the bus boycott that would kick-start the civil rights era, she said Emmett Till was on her mind.’ (See Garry Younge, [article] on reopening of the Emmett Till murder case [Mississippi, 1955], in Guardian Weekly, 17 June 2005.)

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Justin Beplate, review of Geert Lernout & Wim Van Mierlo, The Reception of Joyce in Europe (Continuum/Thoemmes 2005): ‘[…] One of the more intriguing elements of Joyce’s European reception, outside France and Germany, was the affinity felt by certain nationals towards a politically and culturally marginalised Ireland. In Norway, for example, Bjorn Tysdahl suggests that Joyce’s enthusiastic reception was fostered by this sense of shared history - of relative cultural decline after the Middle Ages, of troubled relations with powerful neighbours, and of recent movements for national independence. Joyce’s well-known admiration for Ibsen strengthened such associations, and fortified the view that both writers spoke from a shared colonial experience, In Spain, Joyce assumed particular importance for a group of Galician writers who, on top of the shared Celtic origins of Ireland and Galicia, saw their own preoccupation with cultural marginalization and nationalism powerfully expressed in the Irish Literary Revival. In the 1920s, the Galician journal Nós (a title that echoes the sentiment of Sinn Féin’s “We Ourselves”) devoted a number of issues to the theme of Irish-Calician relations. Perhaps the most memorable contribution was that of the journal’s Editor, Vicente Risco, who imagined Joyce’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus going on a final adventure to Galicia, where, as part of his pact with the devil, he will be the last pilgrim to die on Celtic soil; he thus closes the circle of martyrdom opened by his namesake St Stephen - the first Christian martyr.’ (In Times Literary Supplement, 29 April 2005, pp.4-5.) Further, regarding ‘Joyce’s appropriation by “foreign” interests’: ‘Recent trends in Joyce studies […] suggest a return to something many early critics took for granted - that Joyce was Irish and that the formative experiences of colonialism and Catholicism lay at the heart of his work. At a time when the prominent Joyce scholar Derek Attridge has acknowledged the “excessively cosy relation between Joyce’s text and the cultural envelope within which it finds its meanings”, and when the Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly has argued that “we must inoculate ourselves against Joyce with a proper hatred of his pre-eminence”, it may be that the best prospect of recovering the roots of Joyce’s radical difficulty lies in those readings which restore him to an Irish context, rather than pursuing the revolution-of-the-word legacy of French theory. Then again, the Irish turn in Joyce studies may simply rehash, albeit with a new critical vocabulary, what has already been written elsewhere and otherwise, as if we needed reminding that our insights to Joyee are caught up in the same Viconian ricorso of the Wake - “happy returns” of the “seim anew”. (Times Literary Supplement, 29 April 2005, p.4.) Note, Beplate’s article elicits a letter from Jonty Driver (East Sussex) in a subsequent issue of TLS attesting that he found a copy of Ulysses in the Jagger Library of Capetown University and read it at one sitting.)

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Hans Walter Gabler: ‘The true status [of workshop materials] is not that of separate sub-texts, or side-texts. They are, on the contrary, integral to the literary work itself, seen as a continuous text in its extension in time from conception to completion.’ (q. source.)

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Eric Bulson, Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge UP 2006), paraphrases Joyce’s 1912 Lectures on Defoe & Blake in which he wrote of Defoe’s “Duncan Campbell” [being] a spiritualistic study of an interesting case of clairvoyance in Scotland which relates what happens when the realist comes into a mystical place where ‘telepathy is in the air’ [JJ]. Bulson quotes Joyce: ‘Seated at the bedside of a boy visionary [i.e., “Duncan Campbell”] gazing at his raised eyelids listing to his breathing, examining the position of his head, noting his fresh complexion, Defoe is the realist in the presence of the unknown, it is the experience of the man who struggles and conquers in the presence of a dream which he fears may fool him; he is, finally, the Anglo-Saxon in the presence of the Celt.” (Occasional Writings, ed. Kevin Barry, OUP 2001, p.171.) Bulson remarks: ‘Unfortunately for us Joyce fails to elaborate and we are left wondering how Defoe’s description of the boy visionary necessarily translates [...] the encounter between the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt. The realist Joyce seems to be [28] suggesting here, that we can never get beyond the material world, much as the English coloniser cannot get into the mind of the colonised Irish race. Joyce was particularly pleased with this lecture and sent it to a prestigious literary journal in Florence call the Marzocco. Corinna de Greco Lobner suspects that the editors refused to publish it because Joyce’s thinly veiled anti-British sentiments would offend British subscribers.’ Bulson points out that Joyce argued that Blake was Irish, reflecting his reading of Yeats’s introduction to the Works of William Blake, edited with Ellis, remarking: ‘James Joyce was not the first to make Blake a Celt. Yeats [on the] ‘shakiest evidence tried to prove Blake’s father James Blake was born James O’Neill.’ (Bulson, pp.28-29.) Bulson quotes Joyce further: ‘In English literature Blake represents the most significant and the truest form of idealism. He was not however an Anglo-Saxon. Instead he possessed all the qualities contrary to this type and most of all his hatred of commerce. He was Irish and he manifested in his art those characteristics most particular to his people.’ (Barry, ed., op. cit., n.p.; here p. 29.)

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Alan Roughley, Reading Derrida, Reading Joyce ( Florida UP 1999), Preface: ‘The writings of Joyce and Derrida rupture the taxonomic structures that are founded upon these concepts and principles [presence, facticity, genre, teleology, progression, linearity]. These ruptures are analogous with the gap into the unconscious opened by Freud and the practice of criticism after Joyce and Derrida in some aspects engages in the same project as psychoanalysis followed after Freud […; &c.] [xv] ‘Since Joyce, and perhaps even more since Derrida, our understanding of the form of a book as an ideal structure has been radically changed. […] Both have produced books without conventional structures or endings. They both teach us that the concept of the book as an ideological form as well as our ideas about the relationship between speech and writing can, and should be, radically rethought.’ [xvi] ‘For both Joyce and Derrida, marginal parts of a text are capable of a force that produces important effects within the text’s main body/ The operations of this forces can disrupt and overturn the traditional hierarchy of evaluation of the main body of a text as more and powerful than its marginal counterpart. […] In Ulysses both the jar of Plumtree’s potted meat and the slogan advertising it are relatively unimportant […] Joyce’s writing, however, gives this marginal textual fragment a power belonging to its status as a minor realistic textual detail in the narrative by making the potted meat and its advertising slogan signifiers of humour, love, betrayal and death as well as the textual slippage that undermines a strictly representational reading of Joyce’s text.’ (Refs. Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, Cornell UP 1990, p.227; here p.xix.) [Cont.]

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Alan Roughley (Reading Derrida, Reading Joyce, 1999) - cont.: Roughley notes that Derrida read Joyce at Harvard [1]; speaks of Levinas’s ‘encounter with the absolutely other’ [18]. Re Derrida at the 9th International James Joyce Symposium [Paris]: ‘Deconstruction could not have been possible without Joyce’ (vide, Jones, 1988, p.77.) Further: ‘Although the word “perhaps” still hangs over Derrida’s assessment of Joyce as “the most Hegelian of novelists”, there is much to support the [91] argument that Derrida finds Hegel’s encyclopaedic and totalising philosophical project parallel (or “completed”) by Joyce’s “most powerful project for programming the totality of research into the onto-logico-encyclopaedic field”. For Derrida readers and scholars who engage with Joyce’s writings find themselves playing “with the entire archive of culture - at least of what is called Western culture, and in it of that which returns to itself according to the Ulyssean circle of ‘the encyclopaedia’”.’ (Quoting Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Deux Mots pour Joyce’, trans. as ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, in Derek Attridge, ed., Acts of Literature, London: Routledge, 1992,253-309; here 91.) ‘Derrida uses the Wake’s metaphor of its language as a river to re-mark the continual return involved in such a rereading and to signify how returning to Joyce’s work produces the effect of encountering that work anew each time.’ (Roughley, op. cit., p.91.)

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Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge UP 2001): ‘[…] in view of Terry Eagleton’s these that Ireland’s colonial status, together with its strong traditional social organisation, created ideal conditions for the formation of a conservative modernist sensibility, the role of anthropology in the Celtic Revival becomes pivotal, since both sought to conserve the pristine social conditions of primitive societies and both had to contend with the tensions and contradictions that arise when a traditional culture comes into contact with a modern - that is to say, a civilised - observer. This is certainly the case in Synge’s ethnographic account of the Aran Islands and Yeats’s folklore collections and folkloric fictions, for both Yeats an Synge presupposed certain key elements of anthropological theory having to do with primitive cultures and emplyed, however inconsistently or even unwittingly, techniques of participant observation [à la Malinowski]. But other features of modernism, specifically narrative self-reflexivity and plurivocality, are less evident in early Revivalist writing, in part because of the conservative tendency of Anglo-Irish literary production. When we do see these features - for example in Synge’s “exaggerated” realism and in Joyce’s experiments in style and point of view - they signal a commitment less to an enthnographic imaginatgion than to a critique of that mode of imagining. Joyce’s workd (and, to a lesser extent, Synge’s) serves as a salutary self-criticism of the Revival’s reliance on a redemptive discourse that purports to offer a pro-nationalist representation of traditional Irish culture, while at the same time it assimiliates that culture into an essentially anthropological frame of reference. The chief difference between the participant observer and the Revivalists like Synge and Joyce with regard to self-reflexivity and narrative plurivocality lies in the fact that the former must repress the desire for subjective response and “counter-narratives” in the production of a primary, authoritative ethnographic text (relegating the expression of such desires, when they arise, to unofficial or private texts), while the latter is free to incorporate such subjective responses or the fragmentation and multiplication of narrative perspectives.’ (p.30.) Castle compares the assumption of a “sovereign” Western observer’s personal experince and point of view with the interplay of multiple and divergent voices and intersubjective approach characteristics of the “new” or “revisionist” anthropology associated with James Clifford, et al. [Cont.]

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Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge UP 2001) - cont: [on “The Dead”:] quotes Fanon, “political education means opening [the peoples‘] minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence; as [Aimé] Césaire said, it is “to invent souls.” (Wretched of the Earth, [1967] p.197; here p.173]. ‘But it is in Ulysses that Joyce is able to recognize the productive power of this interaction and to transform a critique of Revivalism into a new revival, an awakening to the revolutionary possibilities of a “political education” in which both the traditional and the modern have a share in the invention of souls. / The first stage in this awakening is Dubliners, a text that is often regarded as a premier example of either realism or naturalism, part of a tradition that features European masters like Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. To be sure, this view of Joyce‘s first major work would not be out of place in a literary history of realistic fiction. However, as recent critics have begun to notice, Dubliners has complex ideological commitments to cultural nationalism and anti-colonial resistance, and its realist strategies are not strictly consonant with those of nineteenth-century practitioners, though Zola‘s interest in unmasking the hidden sources of social oppression is similar to what we find in Joyce. In some cases, as in Nolan‘s discussion of “The Dead,” Revivalism is identified as an important context for understanding these commitments. It hardly bears repeating the conclusion drawn by so many critics that Gabriel Conroy experiences a conflict over the values of cultural nationalism as they manifest themselves in Miss Ivors‘ enthusiasm for the Aran Islands. My discussion of Synge‘s own experience there indicates the extent to which the West of Ireland attained a nearly iconic significance for cultural nationalists and continued to hold that significance well into the opening decades of the twentieth century. Michael Levenson has drawn our attention to the significant fact that the Playboy riots of late January and early February of 1907 took place during the time Joyce was composing “The Dead.” He writes that Joyce, “who was living out a few months of his exile in Rome, eagerly followed the controversy, clearly sensing that here was a foretaste of a feast being laid for him. The Playboy affair made clear that in the midst of an ongoing colonial struggle, the boundaries between art and politics were highly permeable, where they existed at all.” (Michael Levenson, ‘Living History in “the Dead”, in Dubliners: Text, Criticism and Notes, ed. Robert Scholes & A Walton Litz, Penguin 1996, pp.421-38.) Joyce, then, picks up where Synge leaves off, exploring in his own anthropological fictions the permeability of boundaries that Synge had tested and exposed.’ (p.179.) [Cont.]

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Gregory Castle, (Modernism and the Celtic Revival, 2001) - cont. [on Joyce’s reference to ‘my nicely-polished looking-glass’ in letter to Grant Richards]: ‘We should not fail at this juncture to notice that Joyce, in flourishing his “nicely polished looking-glass,” employs a metaphor that had been used against Synge during the Playboy controversy. A reviewer of The Playboy had lamented Synge’s refusal to represent the Irish realistically, asserting that the Abbey Theatre directors “were expected to fulfill the true purpose of playing - ‘to hold as ‘twere the, mirror up to Nature,’ to banish the meretricious stage, and give, for: the first time, true pictures of Irish life and fulfillment of that pledge.” (Anon., Freeman’s Journal, 29 Jan. 1907; rep. in James Kilroy, ed., The Playboy Riots, Dolmen Press 1971, p.20.) Perhaps more effectively than Synge, Joyce reveals the complacency of those people whose faith in “true pictures” blinds them to the constructedness and the interestedness of realistic representation, as well as to the deleterious effects of Revivalist programs of cultural redemption that offer meager and ineffective alternatives to colonialist and nationalist idealizations whose reliance on a primitivist discourse was largely unexamined and uncriticized. Joyce’s employment of the mirror-image, however, is both ironic and strategic, for, while it appears that Joyce’s stories are meant to represent the social world realistically, we are constantly pulled, [181] despite the narrators’ scrupulous attention to detail, toward the subjective responses of characters to that world. This ironic deflection of the reader’s gaze from the realistic detail to the subjective experience of characters who all too often simply fail to see , constitutes a strategic reversal of the aims of realistic discourse: to imitate through language the social and material relations of the external world. Joyce simply brings to the fore the ideological assumptions about what aspect of that world is “real” and proper for representation and how those assumptions fail individuals who abide by them.’ (p.180-81.) Note: Castle goes on to quote Roy Pascal on Flaubert’s form of realism, which he likewise ascribes to Joyce - see Notes, infra.

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Valentine Cunningham, ‘James Joyce’, in Andrew Hass, David Jasper & Elisabeth Jay, eds., The Oxford Handbook of English Literature (OUP 2007): ‘As this neo-Christ, Bloom is the very essence of the heretical fleshly Word. [...] For “Circe” is an anti-Apocalypse, a triumphant carnival of the blasphemous New Bloomusalem, an apocalypse of the bad body and the sinful word, all egged-on by uncouth American evangelist A. J. Dowie, a messianic Elijah come at last. “A. J. Christ Dowie” urges the whole debauched crew, “Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ”, to “be on the side of the angels” and expect “the second advent” on Coney Island, to the tune of his “glory song” from THE GRAMOPHONE, “The Holy City” of Edward Weatherby and Stephen Adams bastardised: “Whorusalaminyourhigh
hohhhh …” Whorusalem. A new Jerusalem of the whole. The Bible’s Scarlet Woman rampant. / We hear THE GRAMOPHONE winding down at that very point. It winds up again, so to say, in Finnegans Wake, that extended glossalalic Day of Pentecost, or pun-full fulfilment of the Scriptures: ut implerentur scripturae. (U424.) A pleromatic of Joyce’s own scriptures, of course, a text replaying the whole preceding Joycean word-game, but also revamping the church’s texts and textuality, a practice of scriptural fulfilment as a kind of annagrammatical gibberish, a pentecostal exiling of clear meaning, an extended jubilee of the fallen letter - a textuality delighted in by deconstructionist critics high on postmodernist models of mystagogic textualism (such as Beryl Schlossman [Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of the Word, Wisconsin UP 1985]), and encouraged of course by certain of Joyce’s closest discipes, especially Eugene Jolas, preacher of the surrealist “Revolution of the Word” in Our Exagmination (Jolas, 1929, pp.77-92.) A textual revolution which invests in the kind of linguistic and interpretative bottomlessness that more recent deconstructive Joyceans want to celebrate Joyce for bringing out as the real linguistic, epistemic, and hermeneutical truth of the Bible and the Christian tradition discourses with, allegedly, no fixed meanings at all, but existing rather as infinitely rewriteable and reinterpretatable sets of meaning potential, as amply exploited by Joyce.’ [Cont.]

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Valentine Cunningham, ‘James Joyce’, in Andrew Hass, David Jasper & Elisabeth Jay, eds., The Oxford Handbook of English Literature (OUP 2007): ‘Which is an argument - potently put by Gian Balsamo [Scriptural Poetics in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, 2002), and William Franke (‘Literature as Liturgy and the Interpretative Revolution in Literary Criticism’, in Gian Balsamo, op. cit., 2002, [?Foreword] pp.v-xiii) - that certainly has its force. Except that Joyce’s is a neo-logocentrism that does indeed keep touching bottom - and not least with bottom-obsessed Molly Bloom. Not to mention excrement-dotty Leopold Bloom. Dowie-Christ man only return jokily, and the word of his coming may be a mere throwaway covered in gutter-filth. But we never get the olefactory shock of the soiled work-paper of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake out of our nostrils. And Bloom’s dark horse Throwaway did have that funny way of coming in a winner. And of course Molly Bloom’s talk goes on and on, and the flow of Anna Livia Plurabelle is an endless circling. Cunt indeed proves oracular. With these grandiloquently eloquent females, at the long climax of Ulysses and in the unstoppably cyclical flow of the Wake, the voice of the already usurped patriarchal texts is taken over and metamorphosed yet once more into this transformed, unquenchably undone and redone voice of the post-orthodox female: Irish virgin, old pious mother, Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother Church, triumphantly traduced. And, of course, as Ulysses suggests, this voice of the transgresive female if, so to say, the voice and text and textuality of Bloom as gifted with an oracular vagina [519] as in Nighttown, where, as the “new womanly man”, he gives birth miraculously to many sons - including one Chrysostomos - while remaining virgo intacta. So that Bloom is both the new father of the new Joycean fatherland and also Virgin Mary rediviva, all in one. Which couldn’t be more transgressive, and blasphemous and heretical, and shocking - Bloom all at once the startling Father and Mother of the new logos, the new logocentrism, that Joyce’s later texts like to think themselves as comprising.’ (End; pp.519-20.)

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Garry Leonard, ‘James Joyce and Popular Culture’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce Studies (London: Palgrave/Macmillan 2004): ‘[…] T. S. Eliot famously wrote in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, ‘I have measured out my life in coffee spoons’, but Joyce is far more contextual than this. He asks: where did you buy the coffee? What brand? Who was it advertised and how did that affect the choice? What were you thinking when you bought it? […;’ p.46]. ‘As my reading of moments of consumption suggests, the momentary is momentous because it remains unexplained and unaccounted for by what the Marxist critic Gramsci called “hegemonic discourse.” Discourse [47] more generally an be understood as the various conceptual frameworks that facilitate some modes of thought and exclude or invalidate others. In this way, various institutions sustain their privileged position. (p.48.) Further: ‘The “escape” afforded by chronicles of disorder […] is not an escape from history but rather an escape from the historicised, to the not yet historicised, where the colonial subject may have access to actual possibilities ousted by the exclusionary “actualities” imposed by historical narratives.’ (p.49.) ‘For Joyce the momentary is momentous; the “everyday” is not where we make history, but where we live and “low” art chronicles this disorder. If we seek the full splendor of Joyce’s accomplishment, examples of “low” art are what we must read and read doubly, instead of our Roman history.’ (p.50.) See also remarks under Matthew Arnold, supra; and note: coffee-spoons are used for stirring in sugar not measuring coffee and are nowhere mentioned in Ulysses.

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John Gross, review of New Dictionary of National Biography, in Times Literary Supplement (17 Dec. 2004), pp.12-14: ‘[…] In general, contributors have avoided academic jargon, especially its more recent varieties, and few of them have been tempted to put their authors through the mangle of literary theory. A partial exception is Bruce Stewart, in his article on Joyce. Much of the time Stewart offers a straightforward and often spirited account of the writer’s life and work, but he is also at pains to inform us that “ écriture féminine was the very definition of Joyce’s way of writing from “Penelope” [in Ulysses] onwards”, and that “the nature of the colonial world from which he sprang dictated that the only authentic representation of reality in language must follow the contours of a divided world.” In his final summing-up, Stewart is heavily preoccupied with the efforts made by some Irish critics to “repatriate” Joyce or enlist him under the banner of Irish nationalism. Stewart’s own view is that the paradoxes of Joyce’s position - at once very Irish and very cosmopolitan - are best accounted for by “the post-colonial concept of hybridity”.’ (p.13.) Gross reads R. F. Foster’s - free from theory - article on W. B. Yeats as a ‘model contribution’ (p.12). For full draft version of this article, see “A Short Life of James Joyce” [infra].

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Aaron Kelly, Twentieth-Century Literature in Ireland: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2008): ‘Famously, Joyce refused to sign a student petition condemning the play. Indeed, Joyce also looked favourably on the Irish Literary Theatre’s second play, Martyn’s The Heather Field (1899), and he would later produce a version of it in Zurich in 1919. / However, “The Day of the Rabblement” signals a very abrupt change of Joyce’s opinion in regard to the overall direction of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1901. For the year in which Joyce (hastily) wrote his polemic saw the Theatre produce Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope, 1901) and Diarmuid and Gráinne (1900) by Yeats and George Moore (1852-1933). To Joyce, the production of these plays indicated that the Irish Literary Theatre had been intimidated by the controversies surrounding its initial work and had capitulated to the demands of what he regarded as a crass, populist nationalism. Such a retreat, for Joyce, betrayed the original intention of the Irish Literary Theatre to produce work not only by Irish dramatists but also by the great European playwrights such as Joyce’s hero Ibsen: “the Irish Literary Theatre must now be considered the property of the rabblement of the most belated race in Europe” [Joyce, Critical Writings, Cornell UP 1989 Edn., p.70]. So, according to Joyce, both the Irish Literary Theatre and populist nationalism hold each other in a mutually destructive embrace. Notably, Joyce recognizes “a time of crisis” for literature and art at the onset of the twentieth century, and therefore a concomitant need to defend and sustain art’s integrity against decay in a convulsively changing modern world - a sentiment he in fact thus shares with the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre. Nonetheless, Joyce evidently feels the frustration of an opportunity missed, that the Irish Literary Theatre backtracked after the bad press surrounding its formative productions and surrendered the opportunity to establish what Joyce would have considered a more European and international theatre and concomitant intellectual crosscurrent of ideas. Hence, provincial, populist acceptance becomes the bargaining chip by which the Irish Literary Theatre relinquishes its artistic integrity and its more cosmopolitan mission statement. Joyce was particularly frustrated by the fact that Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) and The Power of Darkness (1880) by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) were plays that were both banned in England by [23] the British government but could have been performed in Ireland had the Irish Literary Theatre had either the courage or conviction to do so. (Critical Writings, p.71; Kelly, pp.23-24.). [Cont.]

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Aaron Kelly, Twentieth-Century Literature in Ireland: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2008) - cont.: ‘[...] Joyce is seeking to redefine Irish identity rather than avoid it completely - a fact that was largely lost on literary criticism until the development of Irish Studies in the last three decades of the twentieth century. While Joyce ponders whether nationality is a “convenient ficiton”, he is also passionately concerned about the state of Irelnad, and his antipathy to mainstream Irish Nationalism should therefore not be misread as apathy.’ (p.26.) ‘[...] Joyce’s critical writing specifically distances his own work form what he adjudges the mythologizing, folkloric nostalgia of Yeats and others [...] What Joyce did share with Yeats and the other Revivalists, however, was an acute conern with how to use the English language in expressing Irish experience, and Joyce, in his own way, reinforces Yeats’s resistance to Irish literature being swallowed up as a mere regional variation of English literature. Joyce has a shrewd grasp of British cultural hegemony [27] and its capacity to appropriate [sic] and rewrite Irish ltierature in its own dominant terms.’ (pp.27-28.) ‘It is worth reiterating though that Joyce, in signalling the depleted state of the Irish language, attends directly to issues of culture and power. It is highly significant that the first English presence in Ulysses is not Privates Carr or Compton - figures of military domination who appear in the “Circe” chapter of the novel - but Haines the cultural imperialist or whom the Irish language becomes another of his accumulated cultural treasures while simultaneously being denied any living currency among Irish people themselves. Joyce is careful, however, to frame the action of the first chapter in the Martello Tower, a former British military garrison built to protect the occupation from French attack or invasion, so that Haines’s Matthew Arnold-type cultural appropriation and [29] pseudo-anthropology are seen as directly connected to military power and vice versa.’ (pp.29-30.)

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Fran O’Rourke, ‘James Joyce and the Greeks’, at http://www.eens-congress.eu: ‘[...] For the curriculum of the Intermediate Examination in English, Joyce was required to study Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses; examination questions of the time indicate that a very detailed knowledge was required. Presented with the topic “My Favourite Hero” for an English essay, he chose Ulysses as his subject. On another occasion, when permitted to select his own topic, he wrote on Pope’s translation of the Odyssey. Joyce later recalled: “I was twelve years old when we dealt with the Trojan War at school; only the Odyssey stuck in my memory. I want to be candid: at twelve I liked the mysticism in Ulysses.” [George Borach, “Conversations with James Joyce’ in James Joyce: Portraits of the Artist in Exile, ed. Willard Potts, Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1979, p.69f.] Joyce was impressed above all by the completeness of the character of Odysseus. Most revealing is a conversation with the sculptor Frank Budgen, who posed the question from the perspective of his own artistic technique. “What do you mean by a complete man? For example, if a sculptor makes a figure of a man then that man is all-round, three-dimensional, but not necessarily complete in the sense of being ideal. All human bodies are imperfect, limited in some way, human beings too.” To which Joyce replied: “[Ulysses] is both. I see him from all sides, and therefore he is all-round in the sense of your sculptor’s figure. But he is a complete man as well - a good man.” [Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” OUP 1991, pp.17-18.] Joyce asked Budgen if he knew of any complete all-round character in literature, and pointed out lacunae in the personalities suggested, such as Faust or Hamlet. Joyce did not even consider Christ a perfect man: “He was a bachelor, and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man can do, and he never did it.” [Ibid., p.19.] Ulysses meets all of the requirements: “Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all.” [bid., p.16.]’

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Susan Brown, ‘The Mystery of the Fuga per Canonem Solved’, Genetic Joyce Studies, 7 (Spring 2007) - Remarks on the discovery of Joyce’s schema for fuga per canonem on cover verso of a draft of Sirens in NLI papers (catalogued 2002): ‘[...] On a broader scale, the new “Sirens” manuscripts, the fuga per canonem notes, and Joyce’s source for these are critical keys as we connect the dots about why and how Ulysses underwent a radical change at this moment in its composition. As a comparison of the two newly discovered drafts reveal, the original plan for the episode did not include Bloom; he is missing from the first half of the earlier draft. Ferrer asserts in his article, “What Song the Sirens Sang . . . Is No Longer Beyond Conjecture,” Joyce suddenly embarked on “a new departure in the development of Ulysses ,” the use of “counterpointed voices” with the insertion of Bloom and Bloom’s interior monologue into the narrative (59-60). / It is after Joyce has investigated the fugue and cribbed these notes onto the cover of the II.ii.3 copybook that Joyce suddenly leaves behind the security of the initial style and commits to creating a new type of literature. Ferrer concludes, “The presence of these notes on the threshold of the second draft and the juxtaposition with the earlier version. ... gives us the impression of observing at close range a crucial turning point in the history of Ulysses – one could say in the history of literature” (63). ’ [Cont.]

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Susan Brown (‘The Mystery of the Fuga per Canonem Solved’, 2007) - cont.: ‘The discovery of these exciting new materials, however, is only the beginning of the scholarly odyssey. Yes, the fugal structure was more than a metaphor or bogus claim for Joyce. As Groden points out, “Here is his (Joyce’s) indication to himself of a fugue’s structure, which he apparently planned to superimpose onto an episode that was already partially drafted” (44). However, what Joyce meant by these eight terms and how he applied them is far from immediately clear. One stumbling block is that these eight parts are possible or potential parts of a fugue, not a fuga per canonem. Nor is it possible to simply, as many of us tried, to take these terms as a jumping off place for analyzing the radical new rewriting of “Sirens.”’ The article identifies the source of Joyce's actual notes on the fugue - as given under Notes, infra - in Ralph Vaughn Williams' entry in the 1906 edn. of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (the standard reference work), and offers an account of Joyce’s notetaking methods, here in Italian where the original is in English, and often conducted according to the procedure she calls the ‘Stephen Dedalus School of Speed Reading’ with reference to the practice sketched in Ulysses: “Two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? ... Hurray for the Goddamned idiot” (40-41). She crucially notes that Joyce simply missed the distinction between the fugue and fuga per canonem in the relevant article by Williams. She goes on: ‘Unfortunately, the new notes and their source bring us no closer to definitive answers [...]’ (Online; accessed 21.05.2010.)

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Heather Ingman, A History of the Irish Short Story (Cambridge UP 2009): according to Anne Fogarty, reviewing, Ingman argues that Joyce’s “The Dead” is subtly read not just as an attempt to outdo George Moore’s naturalism or to break loose from Irish cultural nationalism but as an implicit engagement with Yeats’s portrayal of mystical states in The Secret Rose. (See The Irish Times, 19 Sept. 2009, Weekend, p.11.)

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Sean Latham, Introduction: Joyce’s Modernities, in James Joyce, ed. Latham [Visions & Revisions Ser.] (Dublin & Portland: IAP 2010)pp.1-18: ‘[...] We may, in fact, have become too comfortable with Joyce as a modernist writer, comfortably attributing the complex challenges his texts present to the deliberate difficulty of their form. Rich analytical insights have unquestionably been produced by linking Joyce to other formally innovative writers of the early twentieth century, ranging from Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot to Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. As a card-carrying member of what Hugh Kenner famously calls “a supranational movement called International Modernism” Joyce has become familiar to us as an experimental writer engaged in an attempt to challenge the prevailing codes of realism by inventing new modes of literary and linguistic representation. The problem with treating Joyce simply as a modernist, however, is that such a moniker now provides a convenient way of bypassing the very real challenges his work presents to us, allowing us lazily to chalk them up to the contingent concerns of a now rapidly receding place and time. Indeed, the fact that we now depend so heavily on lengthy annotations and even critical introductions (like this very book) suggests that Joyce’s modernism no longer has much connection to our own modern moment. That is, we can attribute those places where the texts become particularly opaque to the widening gap between Joyce’s poverty-stricken, “semi-colonial” Dublin and the wealthy, cosmopolitan capital of today’s Irish Republic. Joyce’s modernism thus becomes increasingly isolated from the very concept of [3] modernity itself, his work preserved in the mummifying amber of literary canonization. / Salvaging Joyce’s works from mere aesthetic difficulty requires us to position them instead at the intersection of discordant, competing and often contradictory modernities - including our own.’ (pp.3-4.) [For extracts from sundry essays in the collection, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Major Authors”, via index, or direct]

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Michael Groden, in James Joyce, ed. Sean Latham [Visions & Revisions Ser.] (Dublin & Portland: IAP 2010): ‘Starting with “Cyclops”, each episode seems to be written as if it is the start of a new novel; in “Ulysses” in Progress I argue that Joyce did not start working on Ulysses with a plan to use a new technique in each episode in the last half of the book, but rather eventually felt that he had exhausted the possibilities of his original method and began experimenting with other ways of telling his story.’ (p.119.) Further: ‘While the Little Review was serializing Ulysses, Joyce worked quite consistently and submitted the new episodes with impressive regularity [...] Significantly, as I wrote in “Ulysses” in Progress, once Joyce was freed from Little Review deadlines, the episodes started taking more and more time to writer, and they grew increasingly elaborate. More recently, scholars have argued that Joyce reacted to the declaration of obscenity by emphasizing the schematic elements as a way of evading the censor and by encouraging critics such as Valery Larbaud and Stuart Gilbert to interpret Ulysses through the schema rather than through the possibly obscene thoughts and actions of its characters [vide Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship: the Trials of Ulysses, Macmillan 1998] and that Joyce added the courtroom scenes and legal terminology and even the ‘legal interrogation technique of “Ithaca” [vide David Weir, ‘What Did He Know, and When Did He Know It’, in JJQ, 37, 2000) in response to the Little Review trial. (p.124.) Quotes FW: ‘Wipe your glosses with what you know’ (403 n.3) and equates it with ‘wipe your asses (... &c.)’, remarking: ‘Joyce’s note points to the notorious lack of guide posts in Ulysses, since if you have to produce your glosses you are to a large extent on your own both in terms of what you undestand and how you respond. For many readers, this is a major part of Ulysses’ ultimate triumph.’ (p.135.)

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Lidia Vianu, ‘Eliot’s Hidden Agenda: Joyce?’, in The European English Messenger, 19.1 (2010), pp.43-46: ‘[...] I used to think Eliot was lucky to have been a poet, because it takes half an hour to read The Waste Land [...] while it takes a lifetime to finish Joyce’s Ulysses. [...] What changed my mind was a look at Eliot’s Ulysses, Order, and Myth (1922). He makes two significant statements there. First, when talking about “classicism”, he focusses on ‘those who have won their own discipline in secret and without aid’. He means himself, of course. Any act of writing is a discipline and a kind of order, a discipline and an order that depend on each individual writer. The same as with the objective correlative, with this sentence Eliot discovered America. [...] Eliot claims to be defending Joyce. He invokes a classical discipline to be acquired ‘in secret’ by a selected few (’only those’, he says). Re praises Joyce for all the wrong reasons. He extols his “mythical method” of ordering the text. Actually, the farthest thing from Joyce’s mind was order. As a matter of fact, if anything, he was very keen on putting down to paper the very soul of disorder. [...; 44] / As if his idea of classicism had not been devious enough, Eliot added to it a few ridiculously self-assured words: ‘the novel is a form which will no longer serve’, it “ended with Flaubert and with James”. [...] Eliot’s hidden statement had, in fact, something to do with the fact that Joyce also wrote poetry, made use of poetic techniques in his Ulysses, and was more resourceful with words than Eliot, but he did not stop there. He used poetry as a narrative tool, he made it a vehicle for the story. I wonder if Eliot ever forgave him that.’ (&c.; for full text version, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Major Authors > Joyce”, via index, or direct.)