Showing papers in "James Joyce Quarterly in 2004"

Justice for the ''Illstarred Punster'': Samuel Beckett and Alfred Péron Revisions of "Anna Lyvia Pluraself"

Abstract: Samuel Beckett's habitual employment in the summer of 1930? the same summer he declared in Proust, "Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit//2?was translating Joyce's "Anna Livia Plurabelle" into French. Though Proust is still considered a critical milestone, it obviously dissatisfied Beckett?"'Too abstract7 indeed/' he wrote in the margins of his copy, "the use of mainly con crete nouns and active verbs instead of all this abstract jargon would have gone a long way to 'clarifying' the argument"; Beckett capped off his frustration with the words: "Dog Vomit" (103).3 If one spent all day translating phrases such as "Suchcaughtawan!" (FW 197.36) into "Ca c'est crach? v'lan!" or "duddurty devil!" (FW 196.15) into "le mymyserable!" one could understand how the use of concrete nouns would fall out of habit.4 Beckett, however, found similar dissatisfac tion in his translation of ALP. Called "Anna Lyvia Pluratself," the translation was written in conjunction with Alfred P?ron for publica tion in the avant-garde French review, Bifur. On the page proofs, in only one of numerous changes, Beckett's pen cancels the draft title, reverting ALP to its English counterpart: "Anna Livia Plurabelle" Current scholarship, following the lead of Joyce himself, as well as the testimonials of the French collaborators Joyce later chose to trans late ALP, dismisses the Beckett-P?ron translation.5 Furthermore, since its reprinting in France in 1985, "Anna Lyvia Pluratself" has served as the scapegoat to contrast the presumed genius of Joyce's method with the plodding literal translation that might have occurred had hacks like Beckett and P?ron been permitted to finish the job. With the benefit of not only the page proofs o? Bifur but also P?ron's subse quent typescripts at hand, I argue that the same writer who famously elucidated the means for approaching Finnegans Wake?"Here form

"How Do You Sniff?": Havelock Ellis and Olfactory representation in 'Nausicaa'

Abstract: Although James Joyce identified both the eyes and the nose as the organs corresponding to the "Nausicaa" episode in Ulysses,1 critics have focused almost entirely on the former, apparently considering the latter worthy of only a passing glance. Articles with titles such as "Joyce and Feminism Encore: Gazing at Gerty MacDowell," "Twilight in Dublin: A Look at Joyce's 'Nausicaa,'" and "'Pity They Can't See Themselves': Assessing the 'Subject' of Pornography in 'Nausicaa'" demonstrate the critical ten dency to privilege the sense of vision,2 but no one has yet landed on "A Fragrant Bloom." The nose has not been totally ignored, however: in "A Metaphysics of Coitus in 'Nausicaa,'" John Bishop devotes three pages (out of twenty-four) to "the anti-idealizing function that Bloom's nose exercises," as Gerty becomes "an object of scent rather than vision"; in "Joyce's Heliotrope," Margot Norris includes "Nausicaa" in her discussion of the heliotrope as the ultimate trope of desire "that transforms Bloom into a kind of bee following the lure of women's fragrance from flower to flower, from Gerty's cheap perfume, to Martha Clifford's 'no smell flower' pinned to her letter, and on to Molly's scent that he knows 'in a thousand'"; and Suzette Henke, in her "Gazing at Gerty MacDowell," critiques Sigmund Freud's having "puritanically expunged" odors from the "'civilized' sexual economy of modern man," but only as an afterthought to her main argument (123) .3 More typical (and more telling) is Patrick McGee's definition, in "Joyce's Nausea: Style and Representation in 'Nausicaa,'" of Joyce's style as "an image of writing . . . an essence without essence, a scent, like a perfume (for the nose is the other organ of this chapter)"?a parenthetical acknowledgment and dis missal of a central idea that surely deserves more than the two sen tences he allows it.4 Only Bernard Benstock, in "James Joyce: The Olfactory Factor," roughly a third of which is devoted to "Nausicaa," makes the sense of smell primary in his discussion of Joyce's work as a whole, but he does so exclusively in relation to Patrick Suskind's

How a Great Daily Organ is Turned Out: "Aeolus", 'Techne', and the Recording of 'Ulysses'

Abstract: In 1924, James Joyce gave his only reading from Ulysses, not before a select congregation of Parisian literati or close friends and supporters but alone, in the His Master's Voice studio, before a phonographic recording device. Joyce chose for the reading a pas sage from "Aeolus," claiming that it was the only part that could be successfully lifted from the novel and the only passage "declama tory" enough to be recited.1 According to an account by Sylvia Beach, Joyce, troubled with his eyes and nervous about the recording pro cess, was nevertheless very anxious to make the record, deciding just prior to the recording that it would, in fact, be his only reading from Ulysses (171). An awareness of Joyce's penchant for such intuitive and grand declarations leads one to speculate about this decision: does it complement in any way the work done in the novel or was Joyce merely being grandiloquent and superstitious? This essay will interrogate the recording of "Aeolus" in the contexts of both Platonic and post-Heideggeriarl notions of technology. Specifically, I sug gest that Ulysses self-consciously foregrounds the ways in which the question of authority intersects with that of modern technology in a manner that both anticipates and clears imaginative space for Jacques Derrida's critical engagement with Martin Heidegger. Joyce was not the only novelist in the early part of the twentieth century to record himself reading a text; writers had been doing so in England and France for a decade, though the recordings were little more than novelties and not sold commercially. As Piero Coppola (who supervised Joyce's session) told Beach, there was no demand for anything except music in 1924 (171). Thus, Shakespeare and Company had to pay for the session as well as the thirty copies produced/mean ing the act was motivated neither by profit nor by a desire for wider exposure through the new medium. To understand the motivations for and the impact of Joyce's decision to record his only reading of Ulysses, one must approximate some understanding of Joyce's rela tionship to the question of modern technology in general. As Derrida argues in "Plato's Pharmacy," the western philosophi cal tradition has consigned the practice of writing (and by extension

Who "Curls Up" with 'Ulysses'? A Study of Non-Conscripted Readers of Joyces

Abstract: This article presents a study of non-conscripted readers of the journal "James Joyce Quarterly". In Who Reads "Ulysses," Julie Sloan Brannon demonstrates the mobilization of academic opinions disempowering the common reader. From a survey conducted in 2003-2004, the respondents had read Joyce's works for a long time since they were considered modern classics and because of Joyce's iconoclasm and reputation for obscenity. Some considers its texts as cultural capital which is independent of its literariness.

"Dividends and Divisors Ever Diminishing": Joyce's Use of Mathematics in "Ithaca"

Abstract: In his letters, James Joyce refers to the "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses as "a mathematical catechism" and "a mathematico-astronomico physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen ... to prepare for the final amplitudinously curvilinear episode Penelope" (LettersI 159,164).1 Ever practical/he even contends that "Ithaca" is best "read by some person who is a physicist, mathe matician and astronomer and a number of other things," while allow ing that such readers might be rare (LettersI 178). Joyce was quite right to be unsure how many of his readers would qualify as such experts,2 yet recent decades have seen an increasing number of investigations into his use of mathematics in both "Ithaca" and Ulysses as a whole.3 Though I cannot claim the special knowledge necessary to fulfill Joyce's requirements, I would like to join this discussion not only by elucidating the benefits of what has gone before but also by address ing a fallacy often entertained among Joyce scholars: in effect, that Joyce is smarter than he really is, The mathematical and scientific errors in "Ithaca," as well as the evidence in Joyce's notebooks, must lead us to reexamine some of our preconceived notions of Joyce's abilities and purposes regarding his use of mathematics. This conclusion goes against the feelings of many previous critics who have followed the line of reasoning espoused by Stephen Dedalus in his famous retort to the accusation that William Shakespeare made a mistake: "?Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery" (Li 9,228-29). As this essay will show, however, it is perilous to assume that Joyce is a "man of genius" when it comes to mathematics. Yet it is also clear that Joyce is a man of certain virtuosity in crafting his literary works and that he is keenly aware of his own limitations, including his own lack of skill in computation. Thus we can follow Stephen's advice and use these errors which act as "portals of discov ery" that allow us deeper insight into Ulysses. While this effort must begin by correcting past observations, it is not my intention merely to point out where others have gone wrong. As we will see, the very

'What the Thunder Says': Primitivism, Vico, Molly Bloom

Abstract: Recent scholarship on modernism's complex entanglement with the primitive emphasizes the often-conflicting ideological implications embedded in the interest that writers and artists took in indigenous cultures during the high-water mark of western imperialism in the years leading up to World War I. Valuable as these studies are in revealing the ambiguities of modernist primitivism, they nevertheless tend to round up the usual suspects: Pablo Picasso, Roger Fry, Michel Leiris, Joseph Conrad, D, H. Lawrence, and T. S, Eliot.1 And while some critics have added unlikely writers to this list like Virginia Woolf or curiously neglected authors like Gertrude Stein, none have mentioned the possible connections between an author so often associated with modernism?James Joyce?and the western intellectual obsession so central to modernism's unique cultural sta tus?primitivism.2 This article intends to show that Joyce can indeed be added to the ranks of modern primitivists and to address the ques tion of why critics may have ignored his interest in the "primitive." Both the question of Joyce's primitivism and of the lack of critical attention it has received, I argue, can be addressed by r??valua ting his engagement with the thought of Giambattista Vico. While many pre vious scholars have carefully documented and discussed Joyce's use of Vico's theories of history, they have failed to examine his appro priation of the philosopher's primitivist tendencies, particularly in the way it informs his careful construction of Molly Bloom. In fact, most discussions of Vico's philosophical innovations strangely ignore his primitivism and his significance in the development of primitivist thought.3 In any case, these oversights suggest the need for a recon sideration of Joyce's employment of Vichian thought, an exploration of Vico's particular modulation of primitivism, and a reassessment of Joyce's place in the resurgence of primitivism in the modernist era. When scholars first began to explore the relationship of modern ism to primitivism, a trend ranging back at least as early as 1930, they often uncritically accepted the distinction between the "primitive" cultures of the indigenous societies of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific and the "civilized" cultures of the modern, industrialized West.4 As recent studies have made clear, modernist writers and

‘Circe’ and the Uncanny, or Joyce from Freud to Marx

Abstract: As Leopold Bloom half staggers through the more than merely hallucinatory milieu of ‘Circe’, his imaginatively prosaic sensibility is confounded by the sheer variety — and garish spectacle — of the apparitions rising to confront him. Joyce, not content merely to render a milieu emblematic of unconscious forces, limns a Nighttown that — fraught with overdetermination — is rather a place in the psyche, the constitutive nexus, determinant centre, of a true host of unheimlich spectres. These uncanny spectres comprise, in swirling aggregate, a necessary counterweight to the psychically-vitiated Dublin portrayed so poignantly throughout Joyce’s work, the everyday Dublin demonstrably sapped by a certain ‘haemiplegia of the will’.1

'Ulysses' and the Value of Literary Value: Verbal Art and Colonial Resistance

Abstract: The discourse of literary value is general all over Ulysses.1 The book's characters regularly pass aesthetic judgments and sup port them with varying degrees of logic and success. The span of verbal figures that are aesthetically assessed is extremely wide, ranging from lines of Symbolist poetry to public oratory to vigorous conversational expressions by ordinary inhabitants of this extraor dinary city. The preeminent aesthetic arbiter is obviously Stephen, though such evaluation is much more prevalent in Bloom's thoughts than is generally recognized. Other characters are equally eager to add their two-penny bit. For Blazes Boylan's secretary, Miss Dunne, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White has "[t]oo much mystery busi ness in it" (U 10.371);2 elsewhere in "Wandering Rocks/' Tom Kernan observes of John Kells Ingram's "The Memory of the Dead": "Fine poem that is" (U 10.790).3 For the sailor who calls himself Murphy, "The Arabian Nights Entertainment was my favourite" (U 16,1680),4 One sign of the narrator's unreliability in "Eumaeus" is the praise afforded John Keegan's "Gaoch the Piper," "a bit of perfect poetry in its own small way" (U 16.428).5 In "Circe," a list of the "World's Twelve Worst Books" is produced, and the bookseller in "Wandering Rocks" directs Bloom to a copy of the sadomasochistic Sweets of Sin as he states confidently, "That's a good one" (U 15.1577-84,10.641). The very unobtrusiveness of such value statements suggests the ubiquity of aesthetic judgment, even as these varied claims point to their often genuine incommensurability. The words "good" and "per fect" mean different things when applied to an epic as opposed to a limerick or a book of pornography. One must always be prepared to ask, "good in regard to what?" A good sonnet, after all, must have a brevity that a good novel must eschew. Although Joyce seems to sug gest that aesthetic values must always be understood contextually (as Bloom likewise affirms in "Aeolus"6), this does not mean that all evaluation is relative or each equally as valid as any other. After all, a

Joyce, Lyotard and Art as Damnation

Abstract: Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard's theories help us to explain why Joyce was so revolutionary and how he used the languages of the Church and the British Empire to attack both institutions. His pre-post structural awareness of the contradictions in language helped him to criticize the establishment, but it was a parallel between damnation and art that charged him with the ability to overthrow the system. One key to Joyce's perception of art as damnation may be found through Lyotard's ideas about how alternative phrases are excluded. I will begin by explaining Lyotard's theory of the diff?rend. Then I will show how Stephen uses a similar theory in A Portrait and how this theory helped me to see the importance to the Joycean artist of the inseparability of art from damnation. The value in Lyotard's elaborate analysis of what can be expressed in language is suggested by mentioning some of his forebears. Jacques Lacan laid the basis for poststructuralism by arguing that the structure of the unconscious is the structure of language?that is, that the subject is constituted in words by the interaction of modes of language that extend into culture and society.1 Mikhail M. Bakhtin argued that novelistic discourse consists of a constant dialogue between different levels of language.2 For example, if I describe my relationship with my wife realistically in one paragraph, it might involve legal language, erotic language, humorous language, psy chological language, and so forth. Each of these languages, however, clashes with the others, so that for Bakhtin the novel is revolutionary because it uses dialogism to overthrow the claim of any particular language to encompass reality. In The Diff?rend: Phrases in Dispute, Lyotard analyzes the complexity of the competition involved in framing discourse and does so with such precision as to afford us many advantages in understanding the moral and epistemological claims to validity that language makes.3 Lyotard contends that different genres of discourse?such as the cognitive, the ethical, and the descriptive?involve different rules for connecting words (Diff?rend 28,30). The opposed structures of differ ent genres make it true that a phrase in one genre cannot be translated

The Ass and the Four: Oppositional Figures for the Reader in 'Finnegan's Wake'

Abstract: Joyce critics exhibit a persistent fondness for citing "that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" (FW 120.13-14) as a figure demanded by Joyce's difficult texts.1 Citations of this kind otten support arguments that Finnegans Wake's challenge to its read ers is deliberately hostile, frustrating, or disorienting.2 Such critical privileging of the insomniac reader must be challenged, however, by the fact that this figure appears in a passage narrated by a voice evok ing the Four Old Men or Mamalujo,3 Consistently throughout the Wake, the Four are associated with space, with a desire for order and fixity, and with a talent for obfuscating interpretation. They patheti cally seek to fix the meaning of texts, often assigning ridiculous allegorical interpretations to banal events; for example, they begin an exegesis of a letter that appears in the text, only to be distracted by the qualities of the handwriting and a tea stain on the writing paper, from which they attempt to derive meaning.4 As tourists, they never actually get anywhere, instead circling obsessively around a single object, "as their convoy wheeled encirculingly abound the gigantig's lifetree" (FW 55.26-27), which is simultaneously the pillar in Dublin's Phoenix Park, the penis of the sleeping giant, and a synecdoche for the text at which they stare ineffectually. The impatience, unsavory voyeurism, and endless search for ori gins that characterize Mamalujo's style of reading are countered by the possibility of a different variety of reading practice. In chapter 1, the characters Jute and Mutt have a dialogue that ends with the latter commenting on the cyclical nature of history: "This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being humus the same roturns. He who runes may rede it on all fours" (FW 18.04-06). John Bishop identifies the final sentence as a reference to a child who crawls on all fours, and, indeed, the childlike state of dreaming and the playful, sound-based language of the Wake do turn its readers into "babes awondering in a wold made fresh" (FW 33616-17).5 But there is another reader inside the Wake standing on all fours: the female ass who pulls the cart of the Four and who stands in opposition to their failed hermeneutic. While the Four do exhibit perseverance in the face of adversity, the

The Plurabilities of "Parole". Giordano Bruno and the Cyclical Trope of Language in Finnegan's Wake

Abstract: Arguments about category pervade contemporary discussio of Finnegans Wake, yet controversies over its modernity 01 postmodernity, coherence or incoherence, only emphasize the ways in which Joyce's fiction reveals the constraints implicit in the notion of boundary itself. In its unprecedented mode of rendering literary narrative, Finnegans Wake traces multiple layers of digression in an effort to portray human perception as similarly protean and circular. Yet this seemingly incoherent circuitry coheres as fragments of the narrative recombine into a syncretic network of relations in which the fluidity of language becomes a trope for continuity. David Sidorsky argues that Finnegans Wake offers a postmodern rejection of historical subjectivity in its resistance to narrative linearity, asserting that the Wake challenges not only the notion of teleology in history through the Vichian pattern of counteraction but the "reality" of his torical understanding itself:

Joyce, Irish Paralysis, and Cultural Nationalist Anticlericalism

Abstract: Six years ago," James Joyce confessed to Nora Barnacle on 29 August 1904, "I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fer vently I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me By doing this I made myself a beggar but I retained my pride Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond" (LettersII 48) Joyce's terse state ment neatly captured his alienation from the Catholic Church and the confessional Irish culture He maintained this sense of estrange ment all his life, nurturing it in exile and expressing it in his fiction But this self-portrait of a persecuted and isolated young anticlerical, though it contained enough truth to be convincing, misrepresented Joyce's actual position within Irish culture Between 1890 and 1916, a number of advanced nationalists abandoned strictly political agita tion and reassessed nearly every aspect of their culture in an effort to create a distinctive national community Most eventually came to champion a sectarian ideal known as Irish Ireland, which identified the Catholic faith and the Gaelic heritage as the twin pillars of Irish identity1 Many cultural revivalists, however, initially articulated an inclusive definition of nationality, and they secured a hearing before the polarization of Irish politics began about 19122 Some of them pro pounded a secular ethic that was explicitly anticlerical, challenging the privileged political, social, and cultural position of the Catholic Church in Irish life3 Joyce's own early critique of the Church was conditioned by their analysis to an extent that has seldom been recog nized The connection between the young James Joyce and this strain of Irish nationalist anticlericalism is well illustrated by their shared ascription of "paralysis" to an Irish culture and society permeated by Catholicism

Solar Patriot: Oliver St. John Gogarty in Ulysses

Abstract: The role of Oliver St. John Gogarty (1878-1957) as the inspira tion for Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses is well known. In this article, we assemble a series of factual sources for details of Mulligan's characterization, drawing for the most part on documen tary evidence from Gogarty's life and works. In, some cases, these matters have been noted by prior Joyce scholarship (see, for example, the references in Joyce's "Trieste Notebook"1). In such instances, items are listed here simply for convenience of reference. In most cases, however, the matters below are believed to have been previously unnoted. Principal sources for this material include a collection of letters between Gogarty and his friend G. K. A. Bell,2 Gogarty's biography by Ulick O'Connor,3 Gogarty's letters to Joyce (housed at Cornell University),4 and Gogarty's autobiographies.5 In particular, Gogarty's autobiographical writings and his letters to Bell (many of which were written from Sandycove Tower) have received too little attention. Other relevant writings include Gogarty's articles in the Saturday Review of Literature and the Dallas Times Herald and Surpassing Wit, James E Carens's study of Gogarty's works.6 In a few cases below, the notes are simply new observations pertaining to Buck Mulligan, with no particular reference to Gogarty. As this article neared completion, A. Norman Jeffares's outstand ing volume The Poems and Plays of Oliver St. John Gogarty?-by far the most comprehensive collection of Gogarty's poetic and dramatic work?was published.7 We have attempted to account for material in this 800+-page tome that is of direct relevance to Ulysses, but it undoubtedly represents virgin territory for Joyce scholars; too many of whom have paid but little attention to Gogarty's work. It is fair to say that much work remains to be done in this area, and we hope that

‘Proteus’ and Prose: Paternity or Workmanship?

Abstract: Unlike Menelaus in the Odyssey, Stephen Dedalus, in the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses, does not ask why he has been held up for so long on his island. He knows the banal financial answer to that. Rather, he is seeking the answer to another question from a Proteus of his own who takes on the form of the ‘Old Men’ of his island, most of them dead — Columbanus, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Oscar Wilde — one figure after another, ‘nacheinander’, his literary fathers, and of some elders still very much alive, ‘nebeneinander’ (p. 37)1 — AE, W. B. Yeats, Douglas Hyde, even Bram Stoker. Each of these men has made a name for himself, and Stephen is wrestling with them to obtain an answer to his question: what must I do to be memorable like you, my fellow Dubliners? Or, as the catechism question might have been put at Clongowes: what must I do to gain eternal life? — on earth, of course, not in heaven.

Selling 'Work in Progress'

Abstract: Twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate in Scotland, the standard definition of literary modernism, and the general understanding of James Joyce's contribution to this movement, was habitually defined in terms of what Andreas Huyssen calls "the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture."1 In the book chosen by Thomas Dunn, A. Norman Jeffares, and Felicity Riddy to guide us through a three-semester introduction to English studies at Stirling University, A Glossary of Literary Terms, M. H. Abrams describes how this distinction plays out in literary form: "Major works of modernist fiction, following Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and his even more radical Finnegans Wake (1939), subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, depart ing from the standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language."2 Joyce was integral to my undergraduate career in English studies because he embodied modernist aestheticism. He was the exemplar of high art that only addressed mass culture so as to subvert it, to break it up, to depart from it, to violate it. Joyce's disruption of literary conven tions, standards, and traditions is, in this representation of his work, part and parcel of his status as a revolutionary writer who produced avant-garde art for an esoteric audience, proud to be distinct from the hoi-polloi. "Revolution" and anticommercialism were key to this audience's sense of its modernity, and they were key to the marketing strategies adopted by the new class of literary entrepreneurs?agents, editors, booksellers, and publishers?who made their living turning avant-garde magazines and books into sellable goods. A number of these people were willing to go to bat for Joyce, and, without excep tion, they were practical business people: Sylvia Beach, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Eugene Jolas, Elliott Paul, and Robert Sage understood Joyce's revolution not as a rejection of the marketplace but as a shift away from late Victorian and Edwardian aestheticism (which had reached its culmination in Joyce's DubUners and A Portrait) towards a pragmatic, modernist appreciation of economic forces. This apprecia tion is signaled by Joyce's decision to make an advertising canvasser