The contribution of a volume on James Joyce to this series of Companions to Literature and Culture is not hard to justify in itself. Joyce’s work has outstandingly developed the kind of academic interest that would especially repay such treatment, with an intellectually distinguished as well as highly diverse body of criticism having grown up around it, at times exponentially. Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and, in its own way, Finnegans Wake (1939) have established quite unassailable places within the canons of twentieth-century modernistic literature, in Irish literature, more widely in the new, postcolonial, and global literatures in English, and in developments in the study of literary theory and culture, gender and sexuality, and so on. Joyce’s distinctive cultural placement as an iconic founding figure of British, American, and Irish modernism, as well as his unique and emerging significance as a prototypical figure for the discussion of modern multinational and transnational European cultural identity, contribute to the sense of a writer whose importance to a variety of key interests and constituencies is hard to overestimate and continues to grow.
Joyce’s work has been an inspiration to writers of prose fiction, poetry, drama, and film throughout the last century, with his status as a guru of the experimental or avantgarde frequently placing him at the forefront of significant cultural change. Innovations in literary and cultural theory (such as the revolutions in Continental philosophy associated with the post-1968 generation of Francophone intellectuals) as well as modern developments in academic empirical scholarship (such as historical and contextual study, reception study, and textual and genetic study) have frequently defined important stages of their progress in and through productive encounters with Joyce’s work. Joyce’s work remains authorial in a way that sometimes seems more comparable with the authorial status of a Shakespeare than with that of his modern contemporaries, whether you define that iconic position in relation to the newly independent Ireland, to the genre of twentieth-century prose fiction, or to our modernity itself.
Nevertheless aspects of Joyce’s work once provoked scandal and can frequently remain awkward, typically no doubt because of misunderstandings that may arise from the scale and complexity of the work. Significant areas of the work remain less well known, despite such attempts to put them back on the agenda as we can see in approaches to his stage play Exiles (1918) (whose revival in the 1970s by Harold Pinter is discussed here and which was produced on the London stage in a substantial new production in 2006); his critical prose writing, political journalism, and reviews (that became more available when re-edited by Oxford University Press for World’s Classics in 2001); his poetry (more fully collected in the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics series in 1992); and the prose poem Giacomo Joyce, on which the first full volume of essays appeared last year (Armand and Wallace 2006). These works are all touched upon in this volume, though its emphasis is on the canonical and later work.
Adding an expansive new Companion on Joyce provides the opportunity to mark a moment in this re-approach to Joyce for our new century, presenting distinctively themed, critical readings of canonical texts and places of entry into the wide variety of current approaches within a single volume, and contributing informative pointers to current and possible future movements in the study of Joyce.
That there have already been two Companion volumes published on Joyce tells its own story and is another of the issues which face the editor of this one. The first, edited by Zack Bowen in 1984, contained 16 articles and two appendices written by a variety of academic and some non-academic enthusiasts and it retains much of value – not least in its broad intellectual frame. It offers a critical overview of each of the texts (including the less-well-known texts) with only a single final chapter offered on “The History of Joyce Criticism” (Bowen 1984). Alongside it the more contemporary Companion edited by Derek Attridge in 1990 and updated in 2004 thoroughly responds to the theory revolution of the 1970s and 80s with five chapters on texts, two on geographical and one on historical contexts, and four on the topics of feminism, sexuality, consumer culture, and colonialism/nationalism (Attridge 2004).
The format of this present volume allows for a larger number of more diverse essays and points towards an expansion of these categories, both of the possible contexts and of the themes that might inform our study of Joyce, whilst by no means exhausting the possibilities of such expansion. There is much of value in offering newly themed introductory readings, new contexts and locations for reading Joyce, and new kinds of material that mark the influence of Joyce on later imaginative literatures across the genres in a range of different cultures, as well as discussing how Joyce inspired the visual arts and the theatre, and the increasingly important Joyce of the cinema.
Of course there’s an inevitable and necessary overlapping between categories here. Such overlapping means that some of the work of extending the range of texts receiving critical treatment can be seen in the thematic or contextual essays. For example, the essay by Mark Taylor-Batty, which treats Exiles most fully, appears in the “Approaches and Receptions” section and deals with the profound creative response to Joyce by Britain’s Nobel laureate Harold Pinter – a work of reception that is perhaps distinctive to the medium of drama where a writer may both write and direct the work the others. His essay offers an example of a late twentieth-century English reception of Joyce that is not always recognized in Joycean studies. Derval Tubridy likewise extends the coverage of the volume when she engages the question of Joyce’s poetry, and her chapter likewise invokes geography and contemporary literary reception – discussing Kinsella and the poetry of contemporary Ireland. John McCourt’s essay on Trieste is the one that involves most discussion of Giacomo Joyce. Robert Weninger’s essay on Joyce and German literature and that by Krishna Sen involve some treatment of the genre Joyce may be said to have invented (if not exploited), the short prose sketch or epiphany. There may not be a separate chapter here on Joyce and Paris but Jean-Michel Rabaté’s essay on Joyce and French theory ensures that the developing avant-garde Parisian context for Joyce after the Second World War is not forgotten. Other essays confirm the renewed interest in Joyce’s occasional writings as a lecturer and critic. It is the question of the biographical as well as that of the particular geographical context that emerges in John McCourt’s essay on Joyce’s Trieste in the “Contexts and Locations” section, as it does, perhaps more unexpectedly, in the opening biographical section of David Wright’s. Chapters on Joyce’s early publication in the modernist little magazines by Katherine Mullin, the spectral presence of “The Dead” in the cinema by Luke Gibbons and on the interests of the new technology of radio to his later work by Jane Lewty further diversify this volume’s coverage of both texts and their contexts. Unexpectedness and variety in the juxtapositions of these essays help both to expand and to redefine the ways in which Joyce might be understood.
The shared perception that we return to the reading of Joyce’s major texts and that we all agree that there is no single way of reading them paves the way I think for the section of exemplary textual readings by well-known critics that begins this volume. These essays by no means exhaust or even attempt to summarize mechanically the existing critical debate, but they do each combine a distinctive critical approach with the clarity and accessibility that is necessary for a reader new to the texts, and each offers a full bibliography which places their reading in the context of a debate, providing directions for further reading.
Since a primary goal of this volume is to refresh our approaches to Joyce’s writing it seems especially appropriate that we begin with a chapter from Vicki Mahaffey, who writes on Dubliners, approaching the stories as descriptions of the habitual activities of the characters and also as texts which challenge the habitual assumptions that we might bring to them as readers, assumptions which Joyce’s famously oblique narrative strategies might be shown to subvert. Mahaffey’s underlying intention, as in her recent study Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions, is to defend Joyce’s apparent difficulty, even in these early works, and to show how the reader’s confrontation with that difficulty can lead to substantial rewards (Mahaffey 2006). She achieves this through a reading of the stories in terms of their metaphors of economy and she explores the new kind of “covenant” between the author and the reader which Joyce’s stories may be said to establish. Developing from a reading of the concept of “grace” in the story of that name, which she wittily exemplifies in the figure of the passing cyclist, she argues that elements in these stories invite a movement from the coercively contractual towards the kind of literary environment in which the reader’s due care and attention can produce special insights. Such openness of the texts, as she argues in her account of “The Dead,” can be compared to the cardinal Homeric virtue of hospitality – explored through its roots in the Greek words xenos and mêtis and in the Latin hospes – a virtue of his own writing which Joyce sees as problematic when absent from the society which his stories depict.
John Paul Riquelme explores A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a text which stands closely beside an important predecessor: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. He considers the title’s invitation to approach the book in terms of the visual arts and places his reading securely within the developing tradition of discussing the book’s treatment of the maturing of Stephen’s sexuality, taken here, in the spirit of recent queer theory, as fundamentally ambiguous in its orientation. Powerful dynamics of entrapment and constraint are seen to govern this and other aspects of Stephen’s psychic and creative life and we are shown this especially in his encounter with the institution of the confession and its constraints which so intrusively govern his embodied sensibility. Riquelme notices the role of some minor characters, like Dante Riordan, Stephen’s schoolfellow Heron, and his teacher Mr Tate, and he identifies imagery of snakes which appears in the discourses that terrorize Stephen’s imagination of sin and guilt as well as appearing in one of the key points of reference for his aesthetic theory (as for that of many philosophic theorists of art of the previous century), the statue of Laocoön in the Vatican.
Maud Ellmann, returning to the vital theme of the body in Ulysses, confirms the enduring significance of that once-marginalized concern. In her essay she reiterates and develops the idea, first voiced by Beckett, that the language of Ulysses is not so much “about” the body as that it “enacts organic process”: that the body and language are both circulatory systems. She builds from this to a reading of Stephen and Bloom in the early episodes in terms of the organs of the body and the cloacal, and of the Bloom in the middle episodes as he is engaged in the economics of wandering and return in the urban and domestic worlds which he inhabits. The final gendered “punch line” of Ulysses emerges here in the suggestion that it is through her body that Molly Bloom achieves the creativity that is so frustrated in Stephen Dedalus.
Finn Fordham offers a thoroughly new introduction to Finnegans Wake in terms of its approximations – or refusals to approximate – to the paradigm of the novel. Not only this but many other kinds of duality are said by Fordham to be characteristic both of the Wake and of the approaches to it that have been adopted over the years. In these approaches he sees a profound debate between those who do and those who do not want to understand it (at least in a conventional sense), between the philologists who accumulate knowledge and the theorists who argue that the very nature of Finnegans Wake is to call such knowledges into question. To approach Finnegans Wake is to enter a discussion concerning the fluid nature of language which Fordham ties to Ezra Pound’s favored sinologist Ernest Fenollosa, who is quoted in Finnegans Wake. He suggests that the discussion of nature and the natural, though it is not often invoked in the criticism of Joyce, can provide a paradigm for understanding this extraordinary text as it plies between opposed tendencies to “irrepressible category-smashing energy” and system-building. Fordham concludes by offering the reader examples of the Wakean transformation of two of the simplest elements of narrative: plot and character, describing what is usually held to be the central family plot or plots in the first sketches which Joyce wrote and what are usually held to be the central overlapping characters, character forms, or so-called “sigla” of the book.
A second section on some of the places and contexts of Joyce’s residence and reception offers a deliberate expansion of the usual range of places in which Joyce’s work is understood, including nine essays whose keynote is their diversity. These are essays on familiar and unfamiliar geographical contexts for reading Joyce as well as ones which address theoretical problems of location more abstractly.
There is a recurrent debate in Joyce studies between the kind of cosmopolitanism that is implied by his several continental European places of residence and the kind of localism that is implied by his persistent return to the fictional subject-matter of Dublin. Each can be associated with a certain kind of politics. On the one hand the modernity and freedom of his cosmopolitanism is set against a backward-looking or procrustean aspect of the local, whilst on the other hand much recent work has tried to argue that it is his complex placement alongside the politics of an emerging national identity posed against repressive imperial domination that makes Joyce modern. No straight opposition between indigeneity and cosmopolitanism would do justice to the complex reformulation of the opposition between these terms either in Joyce’s work or in the contemporary cultural arena. Questions of where to locate or to relocate James Joyce in a twenty-first-century, global culture are not so easily resolved as by a return to Dublin or even to the succession of Joyce’s residences from Pola to Trieste, to Rome, Trieste, Zurich, Trieste, and Paris which are announced in the topographic by-lines that sign off A Portrait and Ulysses. As most readers will suspect, the “Gazeteer” of Finnegans Wake extends for hundreds of pages with its universalizing project of the overlapping of places through the alignments of their names.
There were different but no less significant cultural environments that informed the production and subsequent response to his work which recurrently radiated, for example, around literary London and which also depended vitally on Chicago and New York. Then there are the patterns of translation and/or literary reception which post-date the texts and make them come to figure in the many diverse narratives of Western European culture and of the cultural emancipation of one after another of the Western democracies and also the cultural modernization of Latin America, the former Eastern European countries, and the former imperial and postcolonial nations of the world. The reviews of three books in the February 2007 issue of the James Joyce Broadsheet bring some of the alternatives to the fore. Mark Sutton considers a book on Finnegans Wake by George Cinclair Gibson which places Joyce’s last work in relation to Irish Gaelic myth and cultural history (Sutton 2007). Fritz Senn reviews the Joycean rediffusion throughout Europe alone, charted in Geert Lernout and Wim van Mierlo’s 2004 volumes The Reception of James Joyce in Europe, which include some 29 articles on various Continental European countries, excluding Britain and Ireland though with an essay on Joyce and Irish-language writers (Senn 2007). This already encyclopedic project cries out for fuller extension around the other continents and language zones of the globe: a need to which this present volume can only gesture. Patrick O’Neill’s Polyglot Joyce is among recent studies that have begun to pay attention to this global “multiplicity” of Joyces: the Joyces of the 65 languages used in the Wake but also the Joyce of the languages into which his works have been translated (O’Neill 2005). This, as Fritz Senn has himself long argued, may constitute one of the richest territories for exploring the phenomenon of Joyce’s Dislocutions, where reading and interpretation may also themselves approximate to the activity of translation (Senn 1984).
Self-modernizing contemporary cosmopolitan Ireland is itself one among the places that has increasingly been led to reshape itself in the wake of the Joycean imagination. Yet if one wanted to locate Joyce as a force of cultural significance and of cultural emancipation for our time it would now appear too prudent even to limit that locationality to the well-developed academic centers of Britain, Europe, and North America, where most of the established academic authorities on Joyce are based. That would be to miss the larger picture of a writer whose liberatory cultural footprint, long planted on the bridges between Ireland, Britain, and Europe and between the larger Europe and North America, is now also poised to step out to the newer worlds of cultural communication that are opened up across the globe, between Europe with its rich inheritance of cultural diversity and Africa with its emerging national and pan-continental forms of cultural consciousness, or between Europe and America and Australasia and Asia that in their different ways have responded to Joyce.
English literary figures have written world histories from Walter Raleigh to H. G. Wells and the theorizing of a cosmopolitan ideal may be traced through Kant back to the Stoics (Nussbaum 1997), but our hotly debated contemporary impetus for global conceptions of culture and for a cultural conception of the global emerges hand-in-hand with rapid increases in the availability of cheap air travel, shared global problems such as climate change, and the everyday reality of instant global communications by means of the Internet. Global or cosmopolitan ideas may seem inevitably either homogenizing or idealistic. It may seem hard to imagine the cosmopolitan except in terms of the expert or even of an elite (Cucullu 2004). Perhaps the distinctive impact of Joyce’s later writing is to imagine a world in which a remarkable variety of places retain their distinctiveness whilst also showing up the comical and surprising aspects of their similarities to each other, where their unexpected fungibilities may reside. At any rate the conception of modernism was always a partly national and a partly international one. For Raymond Williams as for Bradbury and McFarlane the urban spaces which distinguish its emergence as a cultural form and the places it frequently chooses to represent are the modern international or cosmopolitan cities of modernity: London, Paris, Vienna, New York, as well as Joyce’s Dublin (Williams 1989; Bradbury and McFarlane 1970). The geographies of modernism, as a recent volume with that title attests, include a redefinition of nations, empires, locations and locationalities themselves (Brooker and Thacker 2005) and the postmodern cultural environment rapidly accelerates these trends. In late capitalism we see a rise of what Edward Soja has called the “prototopical” in which all places are the same place (Soja 1989) and may be driven all the more to pursue the specificities that Michel Foucault defined as “heterotopia” (Foucault 1986). Cultural productions can be defined as much in terms of the cultural environment, or what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “habitus,” in which they are produced or consumed (Bourdieu 1993), even whilst these habitations themselves can come to seem transmuted through their simulacra (Baudrillard 1983), redefined through the hyperspatial disjunction of the body and its built environment (Jameson 1992), or morph into the intermediate or “non-places” of the airport or shopping mall (Augé 1995). That new nations continue to be born out of old empires and vice versa and that the places of culture are by no means always identical with those of geography or politics may be thought to play into the broad environment for our reading of the many-faceted multi-locatednesses of Joyce and his diasporic texts as much as such traditional terms as exile and displacement.
In the spirit of this situation the essays on Joycean places in this section are arranged into two broad sub-groups, the first dealing with European and the second with non-European locations, though no attempt at coverage of such locations is implied.
Geert Lernout, whose two-volume work on the reception of Joyce’s work in Europe (edited with Wim van Mierlo) maps that field, here writes a more polemical essay. For Lernout the two traditions of reading Joyce are Irish and continental European and here he strongly defends the idea of Joyce as European writer, much of whose work can be understood to consciously subscribe to a broad continental European cultural tradition of “Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper” (FW 539 6) – a canon into which Joyce campaigned, for example, for an Ibsen to be admitted. That Joyce viewed “his own mission” along these lines is emphatically argued here as is the importance of his continental European defenders, most notably Valery Larbaud. His protagonists in Dubliners, in Exiles, in Stephen Hero, and in A Portrait and Ulysses and the sense of literary traditions and audiences which can be found in the critical writings and the letters and the multi-lingualism of Finnegans Wake are all invoked to add to this picture of a resolutely continental European Joyce.
John Nash writes a detailed historical essay on the specifics of Joyce’s early reception in the context of an independent Ireland. Figures like Ernest Boyd and Daniel Corkery, who slighted or resisted the Joycean example in this national context, come into view, as does the critic Stephen Gwynn, who was among the first to see the distinctiveness of Joyce’s Catholicism, and Shane Leslie, the Irish critic who called for Ulysses to be banned. We see here a counterview to the cosmopolitan perspectives of critics like Larbaud or Ezra Pound (who wrote of Dubliners in 1914 that “these stories could be retold of any town”) and those of less-well-known Dublin-based critics who could concur that the setting of the works may be no more than “accident.” According to Nash, on the historical coincidence between the appearance of Ulysses in 1992 hard on the heels of the Treaty of Independence, “not surprisingly, readers in Ireland found that the importance of the latter overshadowed the former.” From Nash’s essay the reader begins to get some bearings on the positions that were taken on Joyce early on in this complex and politically inflected terrain.
Joyce’s first long-term alternative home to Dublin, the place where he cemented his relationship with Nora and where they began to bring up their children, was Trieste. John McCourt’s essay on Joyce’s Triestine home from home offers an elegant and well-informed account of the approaches that have been taken to Joyce’s long residence there in the formative period of his writing. He charts Joyce’s experiences there and argues strongly that it was “not accidental that it was in Trieste that Joyce began to form the theoretical skeleton of the ideas that Bloom would later come to embody … his refutation of ‘the old pap of racial hatred’ (LII 167) in its Irish configuration.”
Robert Weninger’s essay starts from a location which Joyce never inhabited in his person, though his first full work of translation was from the German of Gerhard Hauptman and his Zurich residence (which is not independently treated in this volume) made him a long-term inhabitant of a German-speaking city. “James Joyce and German Literature, or Reflections on the Vagaries and Vacancies of Reception Studies” crosses boundaries and links approaches, partly offering a study of sources for and receptions of Joyce in German literature but also addressing aspects of reception study (themselves a “Germanic” academic practice) which throw up particular connections that may call many of our assumptions about influence and relatedness into question. His essay selects intriguing and less-explored trajectories in the linking of Joyce and Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit): a novel previously little known to Joyce critics though it sits on the shelves of Leopold Bloom’s library in the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses. This is balanced with an account of Joyce as a debatable influence on Heinrich Böll, surely significant at some level if elusive in point of fact, discussing the extent to which Böll might be said to have modernized himself in an encounter with Joyce and Ireland in the 1950s. Weninger goes on to reconsider the “connection, or ostensible non-connection,” that marks the “interrelation” between Joyce and Rilke, both residents of Trieste, concentrating, for example, on the comparable use of the epiphanic in their works. His is an essay that makes connections with others in this group as well as anticipating the section on approaches and receptions that is to come.
Between continental Europe and its others, the essay by Richard Brown discusses Gibraltar: that other location which looms large at the climax of Dublin-bound Ulysses. This is another place where Joyce himself did not live but it is one that figures in his work and might encapsulate many of its concerns about place and context. The presence of this remembered other place of Molly Bloom’s childhood that remains so vivid in her memory invites Joyce’s readers to revisit the meticulously constructed and embodied locations in his work. Researching some approaches to this other place that have appeared in criticism thus far, the essay argues that this “other location” may offer a libidinal alternative to the book’s main location, and one that anticipates contemporary cultural ideals. Joyce’s image of Gibraltar serves as a cultural critique and as a paradigm for a cultural audience or community – linked by the richness and diversity of its respective inheritances – that Joyce’s writings seem to envisage and even bring into being.
An engaged review of some of the distinctive contributions made by the postcolonial theory which has emerged in Joyce studies since the early 1990s can be found in Mark Wollaeger’s essay on the analytical and tropical modes of Joycean postcolonial theory which is revised and updated here. Wollaeger’s contention is that some tendencies in the postcolonial debate may paradoxically work to de-historicize Joyce, removing him from the lived cultural experiences and contexts and real histories in which he needs to be understood. One way beyond such a double-bind may be to break the binary modes and codes of such critical discourses to enable other histories to be told and familiar ones retold in new ways.
That there are other such histories can be demonstrated by the following three chapters in this book. It is, as Eishiro Ito writes, “fascinating to explore what James Joyce felt about Japan.” Ito explores the few comments in Joyce’s texts and letters and critical writings which relate to the key events of the period in Japanese history and to such well-known works in which Japanese culture is represented as Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Just as significant, though, is the reception of Joyce’s work in Japan and the creative responses to it which Ito charts from the purchase of A Portrait by Ryunosuke Akutagawa as early as 1919. Ulysses was translated three times in the 1930s, beginning in 1931, with the result that many Japanese readers could enjoy it before those in Britain or America, and Joyce had at least three Japanese friends in Paris. Though Joyce’s knowledge of the language was, Ito writes, “fragmental,” over 80 Japanese words and phrases appear in Finnegans Wake. Ito explains that Chinese, Japanese, and other oriental references overlap in the Wake, perhaps deliberately, since he describes the transformation of Joyce’s utopian phrase “United States of Asia” from a 1927 notebook entry to its final form, “United States of Ourania,” which appeared in Finnegans Wake.
Further acknowledgment of the breaking and expanding of the mould of Joycean cultural awareness and contextualization can be seen in the essay by Krishna Sen on Joyce’s encounter with India, which provides an extremely original perspective not only on some of the frequently ignored Hindu references in the encyclopedic Finnegans Wake but also on the ways in which contemporary Indian writers like Desai forge significant comparisons with Joyce. Compared to that in Eliot, Sen argues, India’s presence is “spectral” in Joyce and vice versa. On the other hand she suggests that we could see Joyce as a critic more than as a purveyor or victim of Orientalist fantasy and that the Hindu and Buddhist “decorative iconography” of Ulysses may be transformed into a “greater synergy” between Western and Eastern religions and mythologies by the time of Finnegans Wake. The attempt to “hindustand” (FW 492 17) correspondences between Wakean figures and such deities as Agni and Shiva mentioned in the Wake produces a richly inflected reading of some passages, phrases, and tropes from the Wake so that its familiar notions of dreaming and recirculation and even the aesthetics of the epiphany from Joyce’s earlier writings can be seen in new lights. Sen finds an analogy between Stephen Dedalus, with his Aquinas-inspired ideas, and the spiritual-aesthetic experiences of Abhinavagupta of the eleventh-century Abhinavabharati, revealing aspects of the “transcultural nature of Joyce’s thought” and reminding us that for Joyce in his “Drama and Life” essay of 1900 “beauty is the swerga of the aesthete.” That canonical Indian writers in English from Vikram Seth to Salman Rushdie freely engage Joyce’s texts in theirs and that such “counter-discursive” writers as G. V. Desani and Anita Desai acknowledge the Joycean example along with indigenous paradigms counteracts the impression of an occasional critical neglect. Joyce’s interface with India and India’s with Joyce are “subterranean,” Sen argues, “but the results,” as she shows in this densely packed account, “are no less rewarding.”
New contexts for reading Joyce can take us far enough around the globe. Another rarely visited location for Joycean criticism is the subject of David Wright’s essay on Joyce and New Zealand, which provides an intriguing example of the ways in which the expanded set of geographical and cultural horizons which are characteristic of our globalizing cultural consciousness can offer new information about contexts and new lights on the texts themselves. Much of Wright’s essay is devoted to an account of Joyce’s sister Margaret, who like many Irish Catholics emigrated to New Zealand, and the unearthing of her story leads Wright on to consider her possible appearance in “Eveline” and in Ulysses, the presence of New Zealand references in the texts including the haka in Finnegans Wake and then the cultural resistances to and influences of Joyce on subsequent New Zealand writers from Janet Frame to Maurice Duggan.
Such glimpses clearly suggest what a fascinating and dynamic cultural document a world encyclopedia of Joycean receptions and responses might turn out to be. As Joyce becomes a world author of the twenty-first century, the negotiation of cultural otherness refracted through such “fragmental” or “subterranean” connections as through the agglomerative carnival surreality of the later Joyce, can certainly present problems of “hindustanding” but also opens opportunities for the reader. We may be only beginning to glimpse the post-history of the diasporated Joycean text but then, as Ato Quayson has put it, postcoloniality is not so much a condition as a process and some aspects of this collection may reflect and indeed assist a little further in the process of decolonizing or postcolonizing Joyce.
Having sketched some unlikely as well as some more familiar contexts, we move to essayists, in this third and longest section, who write on themes that go beyond the geographical – though their essays may at least offer glimpses of such missing contexts as Paris and London and the links between modern Ireland and classical Greece. These essays bring us back to the works through the approaches taken to them by critics and scholars and by some creative artists over the years, charting critical methods that have defined or continue to define the intellectual agenda and selected aspects of the wide range of creative and cultural response that may be found in more contemporary work which can often be illuminated in terms of its relationship with Joyce.
That one of the most established of critical approaches to Joyce considers the debt which the title of Joyce’s Ulysses announces to Homer makes the placement of Declan Kiberd’s refreshing and distinguished essay on Homer and Joyce an especially welcome beginning to this section. Kiberd’s prominence among Irish critics of Irish literature and of the creation of modern Ireland gives his argument about Joyce special interest. It is as an Irish Homer that he reopens Ulysses, but more particularly his theme is that it is the modernity of the Odyssey that Joyce’s translation of it reveals. That all texts are rereadings of other texts is an underlying thread through all the essays in this volume and especially those in this section. Here the Odyssey is seen as Homer’s anti-militaristic rereading of the Iliad: a work that anticipates the modern bourgeois world as much as it recalls the ancient one. This is the Homer which Horkheimer and Adorno open up when they explore the anti-mythological in his thinking. The epic is cinematic in its form, even its gods are seen as what Eric Dodds calls “monitions” and therefore closely alignable to Joyce’s representation of mental interiority; its genius is in its location of the everyday in the epic simile’s “as if.” Kiberd’s is an essay for our times when, as he says, Penguin Books sells more copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses than of the Odyssey.
Kiberd reminds us that Joyce was not yet “James Joyce” when he wrote Ulysses, but it is the unabashed history of the appearance of this “James Joyce” of theory (the author as Michel Foucault’s “inventor of discursivity”) that Jean-Michel Rabaté offers here in what one might call a “companion” piece to his essay on Joyce’s residences in Paris during the 1920s that appeared in the Cambridge Companion to Joyce. The group of intellectuals that formed around the periodical Tel Quel are claimed as the Parisian successors to the avant-gardism of the 1920s and 30s represented by the transition group and by Eugene and Maria Jolas, who were so supportive of Joyce. Readers who have been inspired by theory or had difficulty following its personalities and key debates will find much of value in this chapter, which focuses on the Paris of the 1960s and after and on the importance of Joyce to its cultural debates. Joyce is here placed in the development of the discourses represented by the Tel Quel group, and two great, if notoriously impenetrable, post-Joycean theoreticians, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, are here introduced with great clarity and command in terms of the substantial roles played, in their developing thought, by their encounters with James Joyce. Rabaté’s essay gives a thorough and informative account of one of the most controversial and innovatory strands of cultural thinking in the humanities subject area since the 1970s – one which has often gone together with the study of Joyce.
Such theory may not always be easy or widely popular but it certainly engages with questions of popularity just as the belated academic acknowledgment of popular cultures has frequently depended upon an awareness of cultural theory. R. Brandon Kershner gives an informed overview of the ways in which discussions of popular culture in the academy have been especially useful in bringing new perspectives to Joyce’s work and he combines this with a discussion of what we have come to know about Joyce and music, including the popular music that fills his work. Hampered at first by senses of the seriousness of literature that we may find in both F. R. and Q. D. Leavis (according to which popular literature was either overlooked or treated as a kind of addiction), Kershner explains the substantial recent changes in attitude and practice both in England and America, connecting the newer attention to popular culture with the rise of theory, of studies of sexuality, and of postmodernism. He details the contributions of a generation of Joyce scholars who have encouraged a celebration of the richness of this body of material in Joyce and also remind us of the extent to which such study continually presents questions about our disciplinary goals.
Preferring the selection of a few representative examples over the construction of an academic history, Daniel Ferrer’s accessible and concise introduction to the excitement of studying Joyce’s manuscripts begins by pointing out that all published texts begin as manuscripts and that, in Joyce’s case, such texts as Giacomo Joyce and Stephen Hero have undertaken that transformation through the advocacy of academic editors whilst others (such as the volume of early Finnegans Wake sketches that was proposed for publication by Danis Rose under the title Finn’s Hotel) have not. Joyceans, he suggests, may sometimes enjoy manuscript study not so much because it helps to clarify the substantial difficulties of the later Joyce, but because it promises to add a seemingly inexhaustible further supply of such difficulty. Approaching the text of Ulysses, so much the center of debate since Hans Walter Gabler’s edition in the 1980s, Ferrer discusses instances where the study of Joyce’s manuscripts can help correct an error in a published text and also those where a false editorial correction can be shown to have obscured highly complex intentions that need to be restored. The study of manuscripts reveals its own stories of foiled and changed intentions that can make the editor’s quest for the definitive text an endless one. Such is the case with the passage about “Don Emile Patrizio Franz Rupert Pope Hennessy” from “Circe” that Ferrer shows to have developed through fortuitous routes to two quite different placements in different “final” versions of the text. Ferrer’s examples grow still more complex and intriguing as he explores the composition of Finnegans Wake and the wealth of material that the manuscript archive can add to our knowledge of Joyce’s creative experimentations even when these were not incorporated into published texts.
Four essays that follow give instances of the important place of Joyce’s work in four different expressive media. Mark Taylor-Batty’s essay provides a striking contribution to what is (even despite the mediating presence of Beckett and Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties) a surprisingly rarely treated area – the importance of Joyce to later twentieth-century British drama – in a chapter which argues that the playwright Harold Pinter showed a good deal more enthusiasm for Joyce’s one play Exiles than do many current academic supporters of Joyce’s fiction. Taylor-Batty’s research in the staging of Pinter’s production of Exiles in London’s Mermaid Theatre in 1971 unearths a correspondence with Beckett (in which Beckett recommends emphasizing the “apartness” of the characters on the stage) and plots the traces of Joyce’s play in Pinter’s subsequent writing, including the title of his play Old Times. Taylor-Batty also explores the theatrical potential of Joyce’s “cat-and-mouse” work through Pinter’s connection with it and the mutually informing perceptions about ambiguity, trust, and betrayal in human relationships and the “unpossessibility of the other” that is central to both writers. He also shows how both respond to an Ibsenite tradition. “Joyce harnesses Ibsen’s structure, and undermines the traditional communicative function of stage dialogue to demonstrate how individuals might exile themselves from those who might best bring them comfort,” Batty argues, whereas by contrast Pinter restores an Ibsenite sense of “duty to oneself.”
In her recent 2004 exhibition and book on Joyce in Art, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes has revealed more comprehensively than previous critics the extent to which visual artists can be seen as important heirs to Joyce. Taking them seriously as his “interpreters” and even “scholars” may, she argues, yield new perspectives for Joyce studies but also for the history of art. Invoking Derrida’s concept of “performative interpretation” and “postproduction,” she opts (after David Hopkins’ The Duchamp Effect) for a discussion of what she calls the Joyce “effect,” including, for example, his effect on the work of Richard Prince, a visual image of whose commitment to Joyce is offered as an illustration here. Lerm Hayes concludes that artists attracted to Joyce since the 1960s have found in him a precedent for their attention to forms and to “the fleeting nature of hierarchical power structures.” Those “who have possibly most profitably responded to … Joyce, have done so obliquely and often irreverently or subversively,” she claims, using as her examples works by Joseph Beuys, Patrick Ireland, Rebecca Horn, and James Coleman. Joyce reading groups may themselves represent a kind of cultural practice that aligns with that of “performative interpretation,” she writes, and the “relational” work of the artist is also something that should be taken into account since artists like Tony Smith, Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland and John Cage, Susan Weil, and Rauschenberg have been participants in such groups and they extend the dialogic trajectory that Lerm Hayes sees as the completion of Joyce’s art.
For Derval Tubridy the dilemma of the Irish poet begins with that defined by Thomas Kinsella in 1928 between the relative attitudes taken by Yeats and Joyce to what Yeats called the “filthy modern tide,” albeit siding with Joyce’s modernity defined as an “ability to engage with the immediacy of Irish experience.” Joyce’s own poetry is, as Seamus Heaney and others have observed, hardly the most modern and experimental part of his oeuvre but the poetry of Joyce’s prose is “central rather than supplemental,” inspiring the range of contemporary Irish poets from Austin Clarke and Seamus Heaney to Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian, according to this account, which includes glimpses of the less familiar Joycean presence in the Irish Gaelic poetry of Seán Ó Ríordáin. Fullest is Tubridy’s account of Kinsella’s 1997 collection of poems, The Pen Shop, which, she argues, rewrites Bloom’s odyssey from the “Hades” episode of Ulysses in reverse, for the poet-speaker journeys through the center of Dublin in the opposite direction to the protagonist of Ulysses. But the contemporary writer has also partly outgrown Kinsella’s dichotomy, being now able to “commute,” to be both present and absent, local and international, at once.
Such cultural mobility might define the position of the Irish cultural critic who, like Luke Gibbons in his elegantly written chapter on John Huston’s cinematic version of “The Dead,” may find the cosmopolitan “haunted” by the specter of its local other as well as of the past which its modernity may purport to transcend. Contrary to the frequently voiced account, Gibbons claims, it was not Huston who introduced a nationalist “undertow” to Joyce’s story. Rather Huston draws upon what are increasingly recognized in cultural history as the spectral and haunting aspects of the cinema as a modern technology and “medium,” finding a “visual tonality” to capture nuances in Joyce’s original that open up Dublin’s modernity to an awareness of the voices it excludes. Story and film embody the same “spirit.” He finds in the story and in Huston’s film a “spectral modernity,” one that comes “from the unrequited voices in the margins” such as “the ‘servant girls’, the lily flourishing and growing on the arms of Galway city.”
Katherine Mullin’s essay is on the also sometimes obscured cultural and sexual politics of the modernist little magazines in which Joyce’s work first appeared: London’s The Egoist, which serialized A Portrait and then Ulysses; The Little Review from Chicago, whose serialization of Ulysses got it into trouble with censorship; and transition in Paris, in which parts of Finnegans Wake were serialized in the 1920s and 30s. This is an engaged and engaging overview of this history in which a shared set of cultural problems concerning the role of literature in sex and gender politics across the international field hoves into view. In step with contemporary historicism, Mullin refuses the assumption that Joyce was completely aloof or alienated from the publications in which he wrote as if they were mere vehicles for his independent artistic vision, instead presenting a picture with a sharply formulated contextual edge in which the importance of Joyce to the agenda of the magazines as well as vice versa becomes more clearly apparent.
That Joyce’s work is full of disembodied and distorted means of communication may be a familiar enough concept. In an essay as immersed in the history of radio technology as it is in the reading of the later Joyce, Jane Lewty takes this point and glosses it through the emergent communication technology of the radio which is referred to in Finnegans Wake but which also might provide an analogy for aspects of its communicative strategies. Patented by Marconi in 1900 the characteristic voicings and problems of the radio medium become a significant presence in Finnegans Wake. Lewty points out references to Irish, French, and BBC radio programmes, discusses the technical specifications of the radio set detailed in III.2, and makes a convincing case for the otological basis of much in Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s visual impairments as well as his poet’s fascination with the musical sound of words may make it all the more convincing to think of him as a writer of the ear. According to the argument in Sara Danius’ book The Senses of Modernism (2002) we can observe a specialization of the senses in the forms of early twentieth-century modernity and its cultural technologies. That would appear to be confirmed in the specializations of our contributors too, if we contrast Lerm Hayes and Gibbons, who touch on Joyce and the visual, with, for example, Kershner’s discussion of music and the world of sounds that Lewty foregrounds here.
It may not be entirely fortuitous that this collection ends with a chapter by Luke Thurston on Joyce and psychoanalysis that imaginatively argues for the significant contemporaneity of his work with that emergent field of discourse in Freud and his subsequent direct influence upon the later twentieth century’s interpretative sciences of the mind. Thurston develops some aspects of his recent book, exploring the connections between Joyce and Jung as well as supplementing aspects of Rabaté’s earlier chapter on French theory with an extremely helpful account of Joyce’s knotty relationship with Jacques Lacan which, as he explains it, hinges upon and closes our collection with the labyrinthine figure of the Borromean knot, in itself an irresolvable puzzle, though one that can in its way be resolved by a return to Joyce’s texts.
It is nothing if not apparent that the reader of this volume might gain many different things from the variety of its contents and enjoy a wide range of exploratory journeys through geographical, historical, textual, linguistic, cultural, and psychological space. That Joyce’s texts sustain repeated revisitations will be among the first of this reader’s rewards but as the volume develops it should become apparent that the physical displacements around Europe that defined Joyce’s writing life, the encyclopedic and multi-dimensional meaningfulness of his texts, especially his later works, and the extraordinary and repeated symbolic placement of his work at the center of many of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century’s most innovatory developments in culture and thought make the Joycean journey an ever more diverse and far-reaching one whose many manifestations, contexts, and opportunities hardly seem likely to be exhausted or resolved any time soon.
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