Showing papers in "James Joyce Quarterly in 2002"

The Sounds of Silence in 'Sirens': Joyce's Verbal Music of the Mind

Abstract: Of all the crossovers in the history of arts interrelationships, beginning with the ancients' love affair with the analogy between painting and poetry (the ut pictura poesis tradition that originated with Simonides1), none has captured the imagination of recent novelists like the marriage of literature and music (ut m?si ca poesis?).2 Perhaps the modern writer's espousal of music as hand maiden to literature is partly rooted in Walter Pater's provocative claim that "every form of art is perpetually aspiring" to the condition of music,3 although it is not fully clear what that condition implies beyond the interp?n?tration of form and subject. It has something to do with the expressive realms of nonverbal reality that modern nov elists have accessed by means of musical allusions, devices, or struc tures?the nonverbal strategies they have used to unlock elusive uni versal truths beyond any specific cultural context. Indeed, a roll call of major writers since Romanticism who have made musical analo gies the centerpiece of their major works reads like a "Who's Who" of great novelists of the western world: Arthur Schnitzler, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Joyce, and more recently, according to Alex Aronson, even Patrick White.4 The move to musical analogies not only revealed the modern writer's attraction to a medium that promised to endow the written word with ineffable magic, but it also betrayed a growing disen chantment with the limitations of verbal discourse itself. For the mod ern novelist bent on unraveling the psychic complexities of the human soul, music was the perfect aesthetic equivalent to the Interi or monologue, making possible, in Aronson's words, "expressiveness uncontaminated by the ambiguity of verbal communication" (22). However, the problem with relying on music to articulate ineffable conditions lies in the tendency of language, when pushed to its expressive limits, to lose its primary syntactical clarity, as happened in Joyce's last novel Finnegans Wake. But Ulysses still retains a tenuous balance between rhapsodic musical associations and narrative logic.

Exchanging Letters and Silence: Moments of Empowerment in Exiles

Abstract: Jacques Lacan, in his "Seminar on "The Purloined Letter/" shows how the transfer of letters equals the transfer of power among the story's primary characters.1 According to Lacan's theory, each character's "displacement is determined by the place which a pure signifier?the purloined letter?comes to occupy in their trio" (45).2 As characters in turn receive, steal, fabricate, steal the stolen, and then return the letter(s), each participant moves from a position of know ing, of seeing, of thinking she or he knows, to a position of not know ing. With this example, Lacan creates "an allegory of psychoanalysis" that demonstrates the way the position of a symbol (the letter in this case) determines the meaning of the subject.3 To represent this trans fer of power, Lacan creates a triangle and, by positioning characters at each of the points, shows how the role, or position, of each character coordinates with the movement of the letter. In James Joyce's play, Exiles, the characters also exchange letters. However, unlike the signi fier in "The Purloined Letter/' these letters are never stolen but are always freely given?a defining point in marking the difference between the two texts. This act of giving letters in Joyce's play demonstrates how the exchanges break down, rather than represent, the hierarchy outlined in Lacan's analysis of "The Purloined Letter." Ultimately, the consequences of this hierarchical breakdown lead to a redefined marital relationship between the play's two primary char acters and an opening in language that anticipates the theories of sev eral French feminists.

Besteglyster and Bradleyism: Stephen Dedalus's Postcolonial Response to English Criticism

Abstract: Given the density of the wordplay throughout Ulysses, James Joyce may use the phrase "looking forward" here with ironic delight. In this passage from "Scylla and Charybdis," the speaker, Thomas Lyster, refers to George Russell (AE), one of the backward-looking Anglo-Irish participants in the round table at the National Library. Russell, even more than his colleagues?Richard Best, John Eglinton, and Lyster (in effect, Besteglyster)?represents the culturally conservative tendencies of Irish nationalism; Russell, and others, such as Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, ostensibly looked forward, hoping to re-create the conscience of the Irish race, but they did so through a return to the myths of a heroic Irish past Throughout "Scylla," Stephen Dedalus bitterly opposes Russell's influential version of Irish literary nationalism. As L. H. Platt has demonstrated, one of the many dialectics in the episode pits a mar ginalized, Catholic Stephen against the Anglo-Irish, with the librari ans adopting the role of self-proclaimed executors of Ireland's cultur al heritage.1 Through a rhetorically dazzling critical analysis of Hamlet, Stephen registers yet another form of opposition: a polemic against the tired literary criticism of the librarians. Stephen's criticism resembles a particular version of biographical Shakespeare criticism present at the margins of the academic wTorld in the first two decades of the century but one not rooted in the acade my until the early 1930s. His reading of Hamlet resists the dominant trend in English criticism in 1904, a practice dismissive of the notion that a narrative of William Shakespeare's life could be reconstituted through a careful attention to his art. In effect, by the end of "Scylla," Stephen has articulated a postcolonial reading of Shakespeare, refus ing to mimic the interpretive strategies that the librarians shared with

The logic of incest : Issy, princes and professors.

Abstract: There are two forms of incest at work in Finnegans Wake: there is what might be called the "logic of incest" or the technique of the text, and there is the accusation apparently leveled against its main protagonist. The upshot of the logic of incest is that no per son, event, or phrase can be known in and of itself but only in relation to the myriad similar identities that pervade the text, so that, in effect, anything goes: characters mutate into others of that archetype, and sex can be described in the terminology of cricket or nursery rhymes. The problem that arises from this logic is that no singular event is ever independently determinable. If the logic of incest operates, therefore, there can be no identifiable act of incest. Yet, it is on the basis of this logic of merging anything with anything else that incestuous relations can occur. So, the logic of incest makes the act of incest possible but precludes its identification. Having said that, however, there do appear to be definite suggestions regarding specific instances of incestuous relations between Issy and HCE in Finnegans Wake. The problem is that one cannot be sure, and this results in particular diffi culties for the reader, as the verbal gymnastics of many deft critics attest.

Cézanne Is to Diebenkorn as Joyce Is to Joyce: Realizing the Modernist Imagination

Abstract: In 1879, Paul C?zanne began a portrait of his wife, showing her full face, seated and to her waist but not including her hands. For some reason that we can now merely guess at, he abandoned the portrait. But he did not abandon the canvas. When he completed his work on it four years afterwards, it had become a portrait of nature? of the human within nature?of the Bay of l'Estaque, outside Marseilles. Now heavily industrialized, the then still lovely bay sub sumed within its embrace the small, ancient town pictured beside it. It also subsumed Mme C?zanne, for there she is still, her face clearly seen through the water, her head and hair forming the outlines of the bay and town, her arms and shoulders providing the foundation for the wooded hills above them. Mysteriously, the painter made no effort to erase his wife's image, but instead he molded the bay to fit her proportions:1 molded nature to the human form. Our first sense of Cezanne's 1883 painting, the Bay of l'Estaque,2 is of its beauty and rich verisimilitude. In the midst of the Age of Realism, we recognize the familiar scene: the water, the cliffs, the shapes of houses and headland. And beyond all that, we experience a sense of mystery, not in the colors or the brushstrokes or the conven tional images, not even in that unique vision and representation of reality that the painter worked so hard and long to realize but in that face in the water and the torso that makes up the bay and its environs: beyond physical reality, as if she were the literal spirit of the place. There she resides, just beneath the surface of the bay, disembodied, as if her true home were there and not in one of the houses of the town,

Silence, MIgration, and Cunning: Joyce and Rushdie in Flight

Abstract: There are several Joycean allusions in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses: Finn MacCool and Finnegans Wake are named explicitly; once a Martello Tower occurs in the text; and a police inspector is called Stephen Kinch.1 The most vital of these allusions, however, is to be found in the description of the Imam at the beginning of chap ter 4: "Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all the other words that people throw around: ?migr?, expatriate, refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning" (205). At first glance, Rushdie here seems to link Joyce with the Imam, but if we read on we should see that Joyce and the Imam are rather opposed to each other. The exile, Rushdie tells us, dreams of a glorious return home; his vision is that of a revolution: Elba instead of St. Helena. He never stops looking back, hoping for some kind of restoration. The state of exile in the narrower sense of the word is always involuntary and never accepted; this is not the kind of exile that Joyce experi enced. On 28 February 1905, he wrote to his brother Stanislaus: "I have come to accept my present situation as a voluntary exile?is it not so?" (Lettersll 83-84). Rushdie, as he sees himself, is not an exile but rather a migrant. Migration means that there is no return: paradise is lost, and this is accepted as a matter of fact, albeit painfully. Migrants are uprooted and injured, but they take this as a starting point for exploring new worlds and for freeing themselves from the bonds of repression and dogmatism. This, of course, is what Stephen Dedalus is talking about when he names "silence, exile, and cunning" (P 247) as being his only weapons, and if we are to follow Rushdie's distinction between exile and migration, we should rephrase Stephen's words as "silence, migration, and cunning." Rushdie, a migrant from two countries (India and Pakistan), holds that the migrant's major advantage is that he "is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human."2 He notes, "Migrants may well become mutants, but it is out of such hybridiza tion that newness can emerge" ("John Berger" 210). Newness can emerge, because migrants have left behind not only cities and coun tries but also the notion that reality and truth are static concepts: "The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have

James Joyce in London: Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor

Abstract: (New York: Viking Press, 1958), pp. 74-75. Further references will be cited par enthetically in the text. 4 "Jude the Obscene," The Pall Mall Gazette (12 November 1895), and reprinted in Laurence Lemer and John Holmstrom, eds., Thomas Hardy and His Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), pp. 109-11; Reginald Gordon Cox, ed., Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), pp. 249-52; and Graham Clarke, ed., Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments (The Banks, Mountfield: Helm Information, 1993), 1:232-34. 5 See The Guardian (13 November 1895), reprinted in Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments (1:235-36), and P., "A Novel of Lubricity," The Bookman (January 1896), reprinted in Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments (1:267-68). 6 Margaret Oliphant, "The Anti-Marriage League," Blackwood's Magazine January 1896), 135-49. 7 The Saturday Review (8 February 1896), 153-54. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 8 See R. Y. Tyrrell, The Fortnightly Review, 54 (June 1896), 857-64. 9 See A. J. Butler, The National Review, 27 (May 1896), 384-90. 10 W. W. How, "Letter to the Yorkshire Post, June 9th, 1896," Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments (1:293). Though How does not explicitly state that the novel he burned was Jude the Obscure, good reasons can be adduced for the prevalent assumption that it was this book that provoked the Bishop's dras tic reaction.

Anguis in Urbe: Snakes and Goddesses in the 'Wandering Rocks' Episode of Ulysses

Abstract: there have been no snakes in Ireland.1 In Finnegans Wake, Joyce celebrates St. Patrick's achievement in a Biblical leap backwards when he tells us "by the might of moses, the very water was eviparat ed" (FW 4.23-24). This seems to be anachronistic, but what it actually does is remind us that, according to some religious archaeologists, the effort to eradicate the serpent in religious imagery was already long underway in Moses's time. The Wake itself resists St. Patrick's charms and provides us with a number of serpents of various stripes, includ ing some associated with goddesses and some associated with Celtic imagery, such as "this serpe with ramshead" (FW 486.21), one of the common Celtic forms of the serpent. In the Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailgne, the great hero Cuchulainn slays, or tries to slay, serpents, usually in the form of eels (metamorphosed forms of the war goddess Morigu). In later times in England, St. George dispatched the dragon, leaving the snakes to St. Patrick: "the two-toothed dragon worms with allsort serpents, has compolitely seceded from this landleague of many nations and open and notorious naughty livers are found not on our rolls" (FW 539.36-540.03). Maria Tymocszko links Joyce's knowledge of "goddess figures" in Irish mythology to a number of popular and scholarly sources such as H. d'Arbois de Jubainville's Irish Mytholog ical Cycle and Celtic Mythology and Lady Gregory's Cuchulainn ofMuir themne.2 The connection between the serpent and the goddess figures of the early Irish is made by Mary Condren in The Serpent and the Goddess, in which she asserts that the development of monotheism resulted in the suppression of the mother goddess, associated with the serpent in "matricentered Ireland," and the production of a patri archal religion.3 I mention these points as a preparation for examining the uses of the serpent in an episode in Ulysses that, at first, seems to have little to do with goddesses, St. Patrick, or snakes. My discussion will have three prongs (in keeping with the Celtic tradition of triplism). First, I wish to discuss the political uses of the serpent, centering on the 477

The 'Twitterlitter' of Nonsense: Askesis at Finnegans Wake

Abstract: Finnegans Wake is not a work of art but a work of theology By a work of theology, I mean that the Wake demands to be read as what Pierre Hadot calls, in describing ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, a spiritual exercise (askesis)} In ancient philosophy, according to Hadot, these spiritual exercises "have as their goal the transformation of our vision of the world, and the metamorphosis of our being" (127) While Socrates remains the exemplar of such spiri tual midwifery, as he calls it in the Theaetetus, PMlo of Alexandria gives a more formal description of what these exercises entail: research (zetesis), investigation (skepsis), reading (anagnosis), listening (akroasis), self-attention (prosoche), self-mastery (enkrateia), and "indif ference to indifferent things"2 Hadot demonstrates that Christian askesis develops from this philosophical askesis, which, under the increasing authority of the Bible, takes the form of exegesis Reading oneself in relation to the words of God became the primary way in which the self-attention (prosoche) prescribed by Philo could be expressed through the disciplines o? sacra doctrina (holy or sacred doc trine) Reading, as Saint Augustine claims at the end of his discussion of Genesis in the Confessions, becomes a form of prayer: "the exercise of that joyful charity which comes of at last finding God and seeks to find him in his works"3 Similarly, St John Cassian, a contemporary of Augustine, in his Conferences, a collection of dialogues attributed to fifteen Egyptian church fathers, imagines that reading scripture, like loneliness, fasts, vigils, work, and nakedness, is part of a monastic combat that strives to win a purity of heart (puritas cordis)4 The sub sequent history of Christian exegesis retains this sense of reading as a form of self-reflection