Joyce’s work, especially the later books, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, teems with references to popular culture. As his writing grew increasingly encyclopedic, it came to reflect directly and indirectly all the levels of cultural production of the periods that concerned Joyce – 1904 for Ulysses and the twentieth century before the Second World War in the Wake – and this emphatically included what is generally termed “popular culture” or, more pejoratively, “mass culture.” In fact, since many of his characters were middle-aged in 1904 and were typically singing songs, reading books, or watching theatrical performances that had already been hallowed by tradition, much of the popular culture portrayed in Ulysses is actually mid- or late Victorian in origin. Ulysses mentions or features songs, from nursery rhymes to operatic arias; the bestselling magazines of the time; adventure novels and children’s stories; works of pornography and women’s romances; a large selection of newspapers; music hall performances; and unclassifiable snippets of gossip reflecting quotidian topics of 1904. Many Dubliners still insist that Joyce is not really an important writer because the whole of Ulysses is just a record of Dublin bar talk.
Given the pervasiveness of popular culture in his work, it would seem strange that, with the important exception of song, little serious attention was paid to popular culture by scholars of Joyce’s work until the mid-1980s. But this situation simply reflected the political and ideological stance of literary academics in general between the wars and during the immediate postwar period. In a time when the study of modern literature was still struggling to assert its own legitimacy as an academic subject, it could not afford to concern itself with cultural material that was generally regarded as trivial and ephemeral. During the 1930s in England, F. R. Leavis’ insistence on the bracing moral seriousness of both literature and literary criticism helped establish “Cambridge English” as a mature academic field. His extreme selectivity in setting a literary canon of the novel ranging from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad lent an air of authority to his sweeping judgments even as it helpfully restricted the amount of material students would be expected to master.
Extending their interpretations of the cultural criticism of T. S. Eliot and Ortega y Gassett, Leavis and his wife also portrayed popular culture as a degenerate, deadening form of the same cultural expression that at its highest – in the work of D. H. Lawrence, for example – has the potential to remake society and the individual conscience. Genuine literature, Q. D. Leavis asserted in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), allows the reader “to live at the expense of an unusually intelligent and sensitive mind, by giving him access to a finer code than his own,” whereas popular novels “substitute an emotional code which … is actually inferior to the traditional code of the illiterate.” Thus popular fictions “actually get in the way of genuine feeling and responsible thinking by creating cheap mechanical responses and throwing their weight on the side of social, national, and herd prejudices” (Leavis 1932: 74). Articulating a metaphor which was to become increasingly common during the century, Leavis refers to the taste for popular novels as “a drug addiction to fiction” (Leavis 1932: 152). Meanwhile, the literary object was increasingly decontextualized by critics, in part through the process of “close reading” that proved so successful in disclosing the depths and complexities of Joyce’s writing. As Terry Eagleton observes (1983: 44), “It was the beginnings of a ‘reification’ of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself, which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism.” Reification removed the historical and cultural origins and connections from the work of art, and thus further disassociated it from examples of popular art arising from the same historical moment. The literary work was made timeless, in effect, by suppressing its temporality, its historical situation.
In America, the professoriate was similarly at pains to establish literary criticism as a professional discipline, and the variety of socially conservative formalism known as the New Criticism, with its emphasis on “organic” values and the timeless truths of myths, was well suited to the political quietism following the Second World War in the United States. Here, too, exclusivity was key to the literary-critical assertion of a subject matter and discipline. In offering the new, difficult work of the literary modernists for study and emulation, the New Critics found it all the more important to reject merely popular writing with the same broad gesture. Indeed, as Ezra Pound argued, if written work did find a large audience, that alone was probably enough to indicate that it was insufficiently challenging or serious.
Certainly the increasing dominance of T. S. Eliot as a cultural essayist during the postwar period, when literary modernism was establishing its hegemony, tended to give a conservative and antipopular coloration to criticism. His influential essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” suggested that in echoing the Odyssey Joyce provides a structuring principle upon whose scaffolding he can mount the otherwise unredeemed chaos of modern life. This “mythic method,” he believes, is “a step toward making the modern world possible for art” (Eliot 1932: 681). Indeed, Eliot’s assertion of a literary tradition that had many similarities to Leavis’ Great Tradition (1948) implicitly upheld an exclusive, “timeless” canon whose selectivity was the key to its unassailable strength.
The branch of the American academy most invested in boosting modernist art – and this generally included its most imaginative, open-minded, and innovative members – found it effective to stress how the wealth of allusions to classical and canonical literature in Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Woolf, and the others demonstrated modernism’s close relationship with the classics, including the acknowledged masterpieces of the modern European languages. Indeed, more than the writers themselves, it was modernist critics who canonized modernist works by stressing their continuity with great writing of the past (which on the surface they certainly did not resemble) and their complete disconnection with and rejection of the popular cultural forms with which they were contemporary. As Andreas Huyssen attempts to show, modernist criticism usually codes the popular as female, as a defining distinction from the male masterworks of the twentieth century. The very elements that gave popularity to bestselling work, such as melodrama, sentimentality, vigorous action, and easy reader identification, became regarded as the abjected hallmarks of bad art.
Among cultural commentators in Europe, the most influential were probably the intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. Although these thinkers differed in many ways in their approach to contemporary culture, there was a broad consensus among them (with the possible partial exception of Benjamin) that the effect of what Adorno called the “culture industry” was stultifying and helped prevent “the masses” from coming to full revolutionary consciousness:
The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which […] enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. […] If the masses have been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsible for making them into masses and then despising them, while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit (Adorno 1975: 18–19).
Aside from its Marxist inflection, there was nothing new about this attitude. As Patrick Brantlinger documents, characterizing mass culture as a means of distracting the people from consciousness of their true condition of exploitation – a kind of panem et circenses – is a theme among social commentators that exists in both “right” and “left” versions and has done so since classical times. For the Frankfurt School theorists, the division between authentic art and its spurious imitation was clear: real art was a form of critique, and could not be reduced to ideology, whereas mass art was simply a form of ideology and participated in its function of distraction and concealment. A number of American commentators, such as the leftist intellectuals associated with the Partisan Review and Dissent during the postwar period, shared this cultural orientation. Not all American intellectuals dismissed popular culture in favor of “serious” art, though, and during the 1920s there was a flurry of interest in what Gilbert Seldes termed the “lively arts.” For Seldes, the best popular art – such as the films of Chaplin, jazz music, and experimental comic strips – were in fact engaged in the same work of cultural subversion of middle-class values in which modernists such as Joyce and Stein were embroiled. But Seldes was a public intellectual, and his views had little impact on the literary academy.
The formulation and codification of an alternative view of popular culture dates from the 1960s both in the United States and in Great Britain, and in both cases was tenuously but complexly connected with the emergence of a counterculture. In England the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham in 1964 helped consolidate the pioneering work of Raymond Williams in Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) as well as that of Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy: Changing Patterns in English Mass Culture (1957). The writers associated with the Birmingham Centre took popular culture just as seriously as did the Leavises or the Frankfurt School, but unlike them believed that it might very well be a politically progressive force; in any case, the assumption was that each instance of popular culture, from Mills and Boon novelettes to workingmen’s songs to punk subcultures, needed to be carefully investigated and analyzed. Above all, the implicit class-based condescension of the Leavises was abandoned even as their analytic methods were preserved and expanded, in part because many of the new intellectuals were themselves of working-class origin. Most were prepared to value and evaluate popular culture on its own terms – whatever that might mean – rather than as a pallid and debased reflection of “true” culture. As Paddy Whannel and Stuart Hall wrote in The Popular Arts (1964: 38), “It is not useful to say that the music of Cole Porter is inferior to that of Beethoven. The music of Porter and Beethoven is not of equal value, but Porter was not making an unsuccessful attempt to create music comparable to Beethoven’s.”
In the United States the two most significant figures are probably the Canadian Marshall McLuhan, with his hugely influential Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), and the maverick intellectual Leslie Fiedler, who staked out his position with a 1957 essay entitled “The Middle against Both Ends,” in which he began an enthusiastic and nuanced celebration of popular cultural forms, specifically associating them with the rise of a consciously antibourgeois (and anti-intellectual) counterculture. As Andrew Ross (1989: 17) observes, “it is probably fair to say that popular culture has been socially and institutionally central in America for longer and in a more significant way than in Europe,” so that it should not be surprising if most American critics have finally “abandoned the prestigious but undemocratic, Europeanized contempt for ‘mass culture.’ ” No doubt this also is one of the reasons why American academics have generally been the leaders in studying the role of popular culture in Joyce. Starting in the 1960s American universities began to offer courses in science fiction and fantasy writing and films, in rock, blues, and folk music, and, eventually, in comic-book art. A great deal of activity centered on the Popular Culture Association, although most of this work would later be regarded as undertheorized by the proponents of what came to be called “cultural studies.” By the mid-1980s there was something of a consensus among critics that the particular psychological and political effects of any particular example of popular culture could not automatically be assumed to be pernicious and needed individual investigation. As Jim Collins (1989: 16) put it, there was a shared “recognition that all cultural production must be seen as a set of power relations that produce particular forms of subjectivity, but that the nature, function, and uses of mass culture can no longer be conceived in a monolithic manner.”
Simply because Joyce’s texts are so densely allusive – and because critics soon learned of his expressed desire to provide puzzles and riddles enough to keep professors busy for years, and promptly played along – occasional articles have explored the role of popular cultural figures and texts almost from the beginning of serious Joycean criticism. For example, Gerhard Friedrich in a 1954 article looks at correspondences between a Bret Harte novel and “The Dead,” while a 1972 article by Marvin Magalaner explores the appearance of the popular novelist Marie Corelli and her work, especially The Sorrows of Satan, in Ulysses. The apparent rationale of critics doing this sort of work was that virtually anything mentioned in Joyce’s work deserved investigation or at least identification. Neither Harte nor Corelli here was “taken seriously,” insofar as neither critic looked for a significant dialogue between Joyce and the popular writer (in the relationship the critic M. M. Bakhtin termed “dialogism”). Neither critic looked to either Corelli or Harte to provide important insights into their culture and time. Rather, they were seen as the equivalent of the “street furniture” that Joyce often invoked to lend substantial detail to his novels. An exception to this rule in some ways, however, was the critical treatment of song and popular music, which will be discussed separately below.
Meanwhile, during the 1970s the gradual shift from mythical and New Critical paradigms toward the new European approaches, in particular structuralism, opened up the field of operations for American and British critics. Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1972) and Umberto Eco in The Role of the Reader (1979) demonstrated that the objects and events of popular culture, such as professional wrestling, the novels of Ian Fleming, or the figure of Superman, were susceptible to remarkably sophisticated analysis, even as structuralism’s demystifying shift of emphasis from the individual genius behind the literary masterpiece to the system of language as a whole vastly broadened the field upon which analysis could act. The success of structuralism in the American academy was no doubt due in part to the fact that it could easily be seen as another kind of formalism that was putatively even more rigorous. In retrospect, it is clear that the gradual shift toward cultural studies had begun, although the turn toward history had not yet started to change the character of literary criticism. During this period those of us who were later to concentrate on the issue of popular culture in relation to Joyce were exploring and experimenting with a variety of approaches. I had dealt with that issue in a very introductory way in my 1971 dissertation on the novels of Raymond Queneau and James Joyce, primarily because when I looked at Joyce next to his French disciple it became clear that both were in some way seriously involved with popular culture in their writings – Queneau more obviously than Joyce, though perhaps actually triggered by something in Joyce’s work that Anglophone readers had overlooked.
In 1975 at a meeting of the Southern Popular Culture Association in Tampa, Florida, I was able to discuss the issue with Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler, who had thought out the issue and its implications far more thoroughly than I, was very encouraging about my work, and I recall our agreeing that where Joyce was contemptuous of popular culture in A Portrait and had mixed emotions about it in Ulysses, by the time of the Wake he was outright celebratory. Only a few years before this, in a Joyce Symposium address that was published in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Modern Literature, Fiedler took the position that “the literary movement we have agreed to call “Modernism,” and at the center of which Joyce stands, is … now dead” (Fiedler: 1970: 21). In part he was acclaiming the new movement we now term “postmodernism,” in one of its early avatars, but he was also asserting that in his newfound enthusiasm for popular culture and his rejection of the mandarin values of modernism, he found himself rejecting Stephen and his values only to surprise himself by embracing Bloom and his. He asserts, “Like many of you here before me, like Joyce himself, I began by thinking that I was Stephen … began by thinking that I was the high flying boy doomed to fall in glory …. But I ended, as you will end, as Joyce ended, by knowing that I was Bloom, a comic, earthbound father who is also an apostle to the Gentiles” (Fiedler 1970: 29).
Fiedler’s other major statement on Joyce is collected in a series of essays inspired by the 1982 Joyce centennial conference at Rutgers-Newark, and the editor, Heyward Ehrlich, has grouped it together with an essay by Zack Bowen centering on music in a section on “Popular Culture”; other categories include “Experimental Literature,” “The New Sexuality,” “Avant-Garde Music,” and “Contemporary Philosophy” (including an excerpt from Margot Norris’ The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake). The trace of the countercultural ferment of the 1960s and 70s is clear in the volume as a whole. Fiedler’s essay, “To Whom Does Joyce Belong? Ulysses as Pop and Porn,” tries to distinguish Ulysses from the classical type of modernist fiction, pointing out that both Joyce and the book itself have a status within popular culture, if only because there are pornographic aspects to Ulysses – “both Bloom and his author are readers of porn at a second remove: meta-porn savored over the shoulder, as it were, of a female reader” (Fiedler 1970: 30). Fiedler goes on to develop the idea that Ulysses is transgressive in that it gives a voice to a kind of female who has not previously been represented in literature, and he associates this with Joyce’s knowledge of popular female novelists like Susan Warner, Mrs. E.D.E.N., Southworth, and Maria Cummins: “fully to understand [Joyce’s] novel, one needs to have some sense of what St. Elmo is really about (or The Wide, Wide World or The Lamplighter)” (Fiedler 1970: 34). Clearly Fiedler here anticipates Huyssen’s argument regarding the coding of popular fiction as female, and near the end of his essay he also suggests that it is essentially American.
As a leading intellectual, Fiedler was very much in a minority in the positions he took during this period, though I recall a man who in the 1950s had been a friend and colleague of his during the 1970s referring to him as a “clown.” This kind of strong feeling arose because in the discussion of popular culture a great deal more was at stake than was immediately apparent: the recent “culture wars” descend directly from these early debates. For one thing, the traditionalists of literary criticism felt that if popular literature was seen as having cultural value (and if it was admitted that its interpretation by critics like Barthes and Eco yielded significant insights into culture), then that would threaten the profession’s presumption that literary hermeneutics demanded special training only available within the profession because literary language was unlike other language uses. If, as Fiedler argued, some of the value assigned to classic texts reflected little more than class-based prejudice, then what would become of the whole idea of a canon? If the modernist proscriptions of sentimentality and melodrama are removed, then Fiedler’s assertion that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an important text begins to seem not only reasonable but obvious. But if we professors of literature are not perpetuating a tradition with its attendant values, then what, it might be asked, are we professing?
Questions like these became increasingly pressing during the 1980s, as the new cultural movement Fiedler had hailed began to be celebrated (and reviled) under the name “postmodernism.” Postmodernism was theorized in a variety of ways, changing as quickly as literary and artistic fashion changed, but in general was held to have a positive attitude toward popular cultural forms, in contrast to high modernism’s presumed revulsion from the popular. Many postmodern texts, for example, themselves played on (or with) the conventions of mysteries or science fiction or pornography. While continuing and even exaggerating some features of modernism, postmodernism was imagined to be somehow populist in contrast to modernism’s presumed elitism. But the discussion was further complicated by the revolution in critical approach that the academy was undergoing during the same period. The New Critical consensus began to give way to a group of newly arrived European critical approaches which became known collectively as “theory.” First structuralism and semiotics, then a variety of poststructuralist approaches variously and sometimes jointly inspired by Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Bakhtin, as well as the delayed inheritance of the Frankfurt School and theoretically sophisticated neo-Marxists such as Louis Althusser, became increasingly influential through the end of the millennium. None of these approaches respected the old designation of the “literary” as a privileged category, and none particularly respected the set of values designated by the term “humanism.” The newer critics worked on “texts,” and began with the assumption that the author was in some sense dead: no text was any longer marked by the “aura” and the authority of the literary genius. Instead, all texts were in some way produced by the culture as a whole, and participated in a myriad shifting “discourses” none of which could be tracked back to an originating and authenticating voice or selfhood.
The first major work on Joyce and popular culture to reflect some of these assumptions was Cheryl Herr’s groundbreaking study Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (1986). Herr’s study demanded attention from Joyceans of all critical persuasions in the first place simply because of the mass of original archival research behind her writing. Still, there was considerable resistance to the book among more traditional critics because of her theoretical approach, which paid little attention to Joyce as an individual and far more to the participation of his writing in a wealth of public discourses. As Herr announces (1986: 11), “what has often led to discussion of individuality and selfhood may lead instead to consideration of the institutions and discursive forms constituting cultural experience.” Thus Herr’s work formed part of the new wave of Joyce studies initiated by critics such as Margot Norris, Karen Lawrence, and Colin MacCabe, although it differed from them – and led more immediately toward our current critical preoccupations – in directing attention away from the pure play of language and toward the historical and cultural surroundings of Joyce.
Herr’s tactic was to investigate three major institutions of popular culture in Ireland: the press, the theater (especially the “panto” or pantomime and the music hall that were beloved by the working class, not to mention T. S. Eliot), and the clergy. Indeed, her book alternates between general discussions of each of these institutions and analyses of specific passages in Joyce’s writings that allude to them. Herr’s critical orientation is Marxist-semiotic, taking inspiration from the Tartu – Moscow group of semioticians that included Juri Lotman and Boris Uspenski, as well as from Umberto Eco, Terry Eagleton, and Fredric Jameson. The stage, the pulpit, and the press are only three areas of ideological play, but they help to determine the Weltanschauung of all Joyce’s characters, even as they allow us entrance into the popular cultural matrix of Dublin around the turn of the century. One of Herr’s presuppositions (1986: 4) is that “the daily newspaper, the popular play, and the sermon are […] signs for the institutions whose ideological practices they embody and articulate.” As she demonstrates, Joyce’s frequent allusions to them in his work are far more than documentary local color or the product of an encyclopedic mind neurotically driven to reproduce all the particulars of his hometown, Dublin. Instead, they point to the cultural dynamics by which dominant institutions competed for discursive power over the demotic mind.
There is a major theme to the discussion in each section of Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture: for the press it is censorship, for the stage dramatic transvestitism or “cross-dressing,” and for the sermon it is the conflict between economic realities and the church’s portrayal of the social order. Probably the most intriguing and influential section of the book is that dealing with the theater. Herr points to the apparent paradox that during a historical period when sexual ambiguity or impersonation was least tolerated in Anglo-Irish society as a whole, as the Wilde trial demonstrated, dramatic transvestitism flourished on the stage. Especially in the pantomime and music hall, beloved male performers appeared as female transvestites, just as well-known actresses impersonated males. Herr argues that the underlying function of the popular stage was to parade cultural anxieties about the essential nature of sexual difference, a difference that formed part of a series of class oppositions whose effect was to validate or legitimate oppression. Herr argues convincingly that the phantasmagoria of the “Circe” section of Ulysses, with its endless transformations and sexual impersonations, is one extended formal allusion to the pantomime. “Circe” destabilizes any essentialist notions of gender, she claims, not merely in Bloom’s case but for all the characters. In fact, Herr sees Joyce’s work as an assault upon the traditional notion of character, and an assertion that selves are cultural scripts, constantly written and rewritten in a complex palimpsest. And ironically, the implication is clear that the pantomime and music hall do much the same cultural work.
Herr followed up her interest in the popular stage with a significant anthology and critical study of turn-of-the-century Irish melodrama entitled For the Land They Loved (1991). The richness of Herr’s historical investigations into the situation of the stage during this critical period has helped establish the cultural milieu within which Joyce was working. In a book that appeared in the same year, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre (1991), Stephen Watt draws out further implications for our reading of Joyce from popular drama. Like most of the critics I discuss here, Watt endorses Jameson’s call to reconceive the high culture/mass culture opposition “in such a way that the emphasis on evaluation to which it has traditionally given rise […] is replaced by a genuinely historical and dialectical approach to these phenomena. Such an approach demands that we regard high and mass culture as objectively related and dialectically interdependent phenomena” (Jameson 1979: 133). Watt concentrates on the “New Woman” drama and its significance for Joyce, and in that respect he overlaps Richard Brown’s important work in James Joyce and Sexuality (1985).
My own contribution to popular-culture studies, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature (1989), complemented Herr’s work in several ways. For one thing, my book focused on Dubliners, A Portrait, and the play Exiles, while much (though certainly not all) of Herr’s book concentrated on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. For another, my interest was primarily in popular literature, including familiar classics such as The Count of Monte Cristo, works of pornography such as Eveline, once-popular but now unknown novels such as Tom Greer’s A Modern Daedalus, and even children’s textbooks such as the Peter Parley series. Although in practice both Herr and I would at times perform similar ideological analyses on the popular works at hand, her overall approach was Marxist-semiotic, while mine was an attempt to adapt Bakhtin’s criticism to Joyce. Thus my stress was upon ways in which Joyce’s narratives entered into dialogical relationships with the popular literature of his time. I looked particularly carefully at books we know to have been in his library or which he discussed. At least some of my effort here was to recontextualize Joyce’s writings, and a good deal of the new context toward which I pointed belonged to the nineteenth century. For instance, A Portrait, I felt, becomes a different book when it is seen among a group of well-known stories of public-school life, of which the most famous is Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The dialogical relationship between the two is less obvious than at first might appear: whereas Joyce’s book often plays ironically on the earlier work by reversing its apparent values, there are other occasions when the two books apparently endorse the same ideological position. Still, I was struck by the large number of occasions on which the popular works I examined seemed to be doing parallel cultural work to that of Joyce’s literary productions.
The year before Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature appeared, a book was published only one of whose chapters deals with Joyce, but which has had a serious and growing influence on Joyce studies (as well as upon modernist studies in general). This was Jennifer Wicke’s Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (1988). Wicke argues that advertisement becomes fully constituted as a discourse (in Foucault’s sense of the word) around the mid-nineteenth century, arising concurrently with the novel. The “dialectic between advertising and the novel reveals both how advertising was able to take on the status of a mass literature, enforcing its own codes of social reading, and how the novel relies on the conditions of advertising to permit it to become the major literary form” (Wicke 1988: 1). Wicke’s book has separate chapters treating Dickens, James, and Joyce, as well as a chapter concentrating on P. T. Barnum that explores the role of advertising in nineteenth-century America. The chapter on Ulysses not only reviews the ubiquity of references to advertising in the book, but launches a radical argument that the situation of advertising, like Joyce’s novel, has characteristics we often term “postmodern.” Wicke (1988: 121) approaches advertising
as typifying the modern condition of writing: it presages the “death of the human subject” of contemporary theory, produces the first intersubjectivity of reading and the formation of the subject in a uniquely historical and imagistic way, and offers a glimpse, however fallen, of the utopian powers of collective consciousness in a mass age.
Clearly, Joyce studies in the late 1980s participated in the general movement of critical attention toward cultural studies. Once advertising was seen as a fertile field of inquiry, Joyceans soon realized that it had always been a major subject of Ulysses. Jennifer Wicke and Garry Leonard co-edited a special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly (1993) on “Joyce and Advertising” that also included work by Michael Tratner, Mark Osteen, Ellen Carol Jones, Stephen Watt, Kevin Dettmar, Mary Lowe-Evans, and myself, displaying a remarkable variety of interests and approaches within the same general rubric. Lowe-Evans’ Crimes against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control, a study of the popular, scientific, and medical discourses surrounding that issue, had already dealt glancingly with popular culture. Watt and Dettmar’s interest soon led to their editing a collection of essays on literary modernism that took a somewhat demystifying cultural-materialist approach. Garry Leonard, whose first book was a Lacanian reading of Dubliners, established himself as a leading exponent of popular culture study with his excellent Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce (1998). Tratner’s book Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (1995) touched only tangentially on popular culture, but in its treatment of mass politics and literature brought up most of the same issues. My own essay in this volume concentrated on the bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, and like most of my work since Joyce, Bakhtin and Popular Literature examined the culture portrayed in Ulysses rather than simply works of popular literature. In the light of work done since then, the Joyce and advertising issue demonstrated vividly how many different critical approaches and literary interests converged on the subject.
One area of popular-culture studies developed more or less independent of – or in parallel with – the movement I have been discussing, and that was the branch inspired by feminism. Because Joyce certainly recognized that the popular was generally coded as feminine we come upon his female characters surrounded by fashions, advertisements, books, and magazines explicitly addressed to them – and indeed in cases like Gerty MacDowell we find it difficult to disentangle the elements of her own consciousness from the restless brooding of the commercial culture of Irish womanhood. As early as 1978 Suzette Henke’s study of Gerty dealt substantially with Maria Cummins’ The Lamplighter and the other examples of commercial fiction that seem so important in shaping her views of the world. Since then there has been a steady stream of articles interrogating the implications for women of both the culture reflected in Joyce’s work and Joyce’s relationship with that culture. Even the articles specifically addressing the implications for feminism of the “Nausicaa” chapter would fill out a substantial anthology, with considerable dialogue among the participants, and of course Richard Pearce has in fact edited such an anthology of articles on “Penelope” (1994). Among many others, Margot Norris, Ellen Carol Jones, Shari Benstock, Kimberly Devlin, Bonnie Kime Scott, and Carol Loeb Shloss continued the pioneering work of Hélène Cixous, Marilyn French, and Florence Walzl. Of course, the concerns of feminist criticism are so broad that it inevitably overlaps related critical issues. For example, Carol Shloss and I edited a special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly entitled “ReOrienting Joyce,” many of whose articles dealt with popular culture with a feminist slant, such as Shloss’ essay on Western representations of the harem. This is hardly surprising, given the critical consensus that a fundamental feature of “orientalism” is the feminizing of the oriental Other. An excellent recent book that incorporates a great deal of archival research into popular culture with special relevance to the image of women is Katherine Mullin’s James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (2003). Some of Mullin’s discoveries among popular magazines and newspapers demonstrate vividly how much we still have to learn from these sources that can seriously affect our reading of Joyce.
Meanwhile, during and after the late 1970s a great deal of work was being done investigating and establishing the details of Joyce’s use of popular culture from a pragmatic rather than a theoretical viewpoint. Among the leading scholars in this regard is Mary Power, who is probably best known for her discovery of the “circus novel” by Amy Reade that Joyce called Ruby, the Pride of the Ring (1981). Other scholars who have made occasional but significant contributions include Joseph Heininger, Joseph Voelker, Daniel Schiff, Joseph Valente, Mark Osteen, and Coilín Owens. A treasury of popular culture is John Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley’s Dubliners: An Annotated Edition (1995), which is full of period newspaper stories, advertisements, bits of street furniture, and period illustrations. Another good collection of images, far less scholarly but especially rich in photographs from the National Library, is Cyril Pearl’s Dublin in Bloomtime (1969).
Aside from the publication of critical articles and books, one enterprise has been remarkably interesting and useful for Joyce scholars as a whole, and this is the “Documentary In-Sights” project begun around 1980 by Kathleen Rabl, under the supervision of Fritz Senn at the Zurich Joyce Foundation. Following a suggestion of Hans Walter Gabler, Rabl began collecting items of material culture from Joyce’s time that might bear interestingly on Joyce’s work, items usually originating in Dublin, though more recently some coming from Trieste as well. The collection includes both period and modern photographs, slides, and CDs, pictures, postcards, books, pamphlets, journals, advertisements, programs, objects (such as a ceramic container for Plumtree’s Potted Meat), articles of clothing, films, musical and spoken tapes and CDs, and more. The Documentary In-Sights Group has organized exhibitions at various locations. Among the most successful was “Le Donne di Giacomo,” a Triestine exhibition organized by Erik Schneider and Simonette Chiabrando with the support of John McCourt and Kathleen Rabl. In addition to foundation staff, many Joyceans have contributed to the Documentary In-Sights project, including Schneider, Mary Power, Terrence Killeen, Peter de Voogd, Onno Kosters, and Marlene Corcoran. The material at the foundation is freely available for study by scholars, and will no doubt spark popular-culture studies for years to come.
Music can be an aspect of popular culture, but of course it need not be; it runs the cultural gamut from low to high, and one century’s middlebrow music (much of opera in the nineteenth century) may well become the following century’s highbrow entertainment. Joyce’s rather traditional musical tastes disturbed many of the same people who were appalled to find this ultimate literary rebel living the life of the haute bourgeoisie in Paris. Be that as it may, Joyce is an author generally beloved of musical readers. He interlards his fiction with references to popular and music-hall songs, poems set to music, liturgical music, art songs, madrigals, cantatas, arias, and lieder, as well as folksongs, nursery rhymes, obscene ditties, and advertising jingles – virtually anything that could be sung; he was, after all, a concert-quality tenor capable of accompanying himself on piano or guitar, and his affection for music is obvious in his writings. A song in his work may be as obviously important thematically as “The Lass of Aughrim,” which Gretta hears sung in “The Dead” and which sets her thinking of Michael Furey, or it may be as incidental as the vulgar rhyme Buck Mulligan belts out to amuse or offend his friends in “Telemachus.”
But whatever their importance, songs are certainly ubiquitous: according to Zack Bowen, in Ulysses alone there are some 731 musical allusions (Bowen 1995: 24). Joyce is known for often writing “musical prose,” whatever that may mean, and in the “Aeolus” chapter of Ulysses he announced his intention of creating the equivalent in prose to a musical composition – specifically a fuga per canonem, if we are to believe the “schema” he gave Stuart Gilbert – and this has finally brought him a small entry in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Since Bloom’s wife is a singer and middleclass Dublin a musical community, music arises as an explicit subject frequently in Ulysses, and almost constantly in the “Sirens” chapter. So there is no lack of subject matter here. The problem is that as soon as we set two distinct artistic modes against one another, we can only compare them or discuss their interaction in metaphoric and often vague terms. And this leads to considerable disagreement among critics about major matters. For example, while Stuart Gilbert insisted that “Sirens” was indeed a technical fugue with invariant, congruent repetitions of theme, Zack Bowen argues very persuasively that this simply does not describe Joyce’s technique, no matter what we take to be his “theme” (Bowen 1995: 25–6).
As is the case with popular culture, much pioneering work in the identification of allusions was done by Adaline Glasheen in her multiple censuses of Finnegans Wake (1977) and Weldon Thornton in his Allusions in “Ulysses” (1968). But while song in Joyce’s writing was the object of critical study almost from the beginning, the first substantial work on the subject was Matthew Hodgart and Mabel Worthington’s groundbreaking volume Song in the Works of James Joyce (1959). Hodgart and Worthington pay special attention to the Wake, which is of course a treasure-trove of musical allusion, and were clearly well in advance of their time critically in asserting that “one of the most useful aids to reading Finnegans Wake is a grasp of modern popular culture, such as the press, advertisements, radio, low jokes, and most of all songs” (Hodgart and Worthington 1959: 40). The majority of the book is a simple identificatory listing of music references in Joyce’s works from Dubliners and Stephen Hero through the Wake, with the great majority of the listings from Ulysses or the Wake. Hodgart and Worthington give page and line numbers for the songs, which are identified more completely in a listing near the end of the book. One introductory chapter deals with Joyce’s sources. A second treats what are from a musical standpoint some of the more interesting passages from the Wake, and here the authors show how a knowledge of the songs allows for interpretation of passages that would otherwise be obscure.
It was a stroke of good fortune for Joyceans everywhere that among the graduate students working with Mabel Worthington while she was preparing this book was Zack Bowen. Bowen’s mother had been a professional singer and had trained him with piano, organ, voice, and composition lessons. Although he had a fine tenor voice and performed professionally, Bowen was more attracted to academics. Under the influence of Worthington he discovered that he already possessed a great deal of musical lore that he could tap in the service of Joyce studies. As he continued to work in this vein he discovered that some of the thousands of allusions Hodgart and Worthington claimed were dubious, while there were still hundreds of others that had not been identified. Bowen and Worthington decided to divide their interests; Bowen’s first major work was Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry through “Ulysses” (1974), while Worthington did not live to complete her work on Finnegans Wake. Meanwhile, starting while he was still in graduate school, Bowen supervised the production of a series of record albums. These featured dramatic readings and musical performances of chapters from Ulysses: Lestrygonians (1961), Calypso (1963), Lotus Eaters (1964), Hades (1964), and Sirens (1966) were recorded by Folkways Records, now handled by the Smithsonian Institution.
Bowen’s Musical Allusions was by a good margin the most sophisticated sustained treatment of music in Joyce to appear in its time. Although the book was in some respects a continuation of Hodgart and Worthington, Bowen pointed out (1974: 3) that where “they merely identified musical titles, I will attempt to fit the musical works to the text, to make them understandable as working, integrated elements in the works considered.” Bowen does not simply look at the lyrics of a song for correspondences to Joyce’s subject matter at that point in the book; he considers the implications of the particular version of the song, the style of its performance and accompaniment, and the emotional effect of the melody, its mood, dynamics, and pacing – what we might call the musical gestalt. Of course, Bowen is necessarily selective in the musical instances to which he devotes substantial attention. Indeed, since the publication of that book he has written a great deal more in the same area, much of which is collected in Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music (1995). At times, he has revisited passages he treated earlier and discovered an entire overlay of new meaning. In analyzing Joyce’s use of music in Ulysses, Bowen distinguishes (1995: 10–11) five functions: (1) as a vehicle of association in a character’s stream of consciousness; (2) to represent thematically dramatic situations, such as the Molly – Blazes liaison, sometimes working as a Wagnerian leitmotif emphasizing or pointing to themes; (3) to underscore points in the narrative and lend them weight; (4) to help characterize or embroider upon the scenes and characters Bloom encounters; and (5) itself becoming a part of the plot.
An important book for students of Joyce’s relation to music is Timothy Martin’s Joyce and Wagner (1991). Less musically focused than Bowen’s books, Martin treats not only Joyce’s relation to Wagner as musician but to Wagner as thinker, and indeed to literary Wagnerism as a whole. Most of his book proceeds thematically, via topoi such as “the artist-hero,” “the Wandering Jew,” and “redemption”; the later chapters are more formal, covering “the comic rhythm” and “the art of arts” (dealing with music as subject). A 35-page appendix lists allusions to Wagner and his work in Joyce’s writings. Other well-known musical Joyceans include Michael Gillespie, Kathleen McGrory, Ulrich Schneider, Henriette Power, Myra Russel, Margaret Rogers, Sebastian Knowles, and Ruth Bauerle, whose James Joyce Songbook (1982) is both a delight to amateur Joyceans and a scholarly achievement. Bauerle’s collection Picking Up Airs (1993) includes essays by several of these figures, while Sebastian Knowles’ edited collection Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce (1999) features a large group of lesser-known scholars. A recent book dealing with Joyce and music more on the level of ideas than as an allusion study is Jack Weaver’s Joyce’s Music and Noise: Theme and Variation in His Writings (1998). Weaver takes seriously Joyce’s relation to modernist musicians such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky. He finds the structure of a five-part rondo in Portrait and argues that Ulysses has the form of a sonata. Weaver also develops a radical theory that Joyce at times meant to refer to key signatures (and thus particular emotional associations) through lone capital letters. Weaver’s study emphasizes the fact that while Joyce’s works themselves may allude preponderantly to traditional works of music, his writing as an example of formal innovation has far stronger connections to the avantgarde music of the twentieth century. This represents another aspect of scholarship on Joyce and music, one to which a variety of scholars have contributed for decades.
Glancing through a list of articles, books, and dissertations from the past five years on the subjects “Joyce” and “music,” I am overwhelmed by the wealth of inquiry represented. Clearly the subject is not near exhaustion, and at least as many of the authors are just beginning their careers as are established scholars in the field. As Zack Bowen has pointed out, there is no doubt that many allusions remain to be identified, considering how many basic identifications have been the result of chance; like popular culture as a whole, popular music was not carefully documented. What was assumed at the time to be ephemeral was given little consideration by the official guardians of culture, but it was cherished by Joyce, perhaps just because it was so fleeting. And every time a scholarly convention of Joyceans closes with the group singing “Just a Song at Twilight,” it seems clear that he was right.
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