Showing papers in "James Joyce Quarterly in 2009"

Current JJ Checklist (106)

Abstract: Thanks this time to Marco Camerani, Kazuhiro Doki, Vincent Golden, Susan Graf, K. P. S. Jochum, Eric Novotny, Friedhelm Rathjen, Federico Sabatini, Emily Sharp?, and Andreas Weigel. Please send contributions to your bibliographer at W329 Pattee, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, or via e-mail to uxb5@ psu.edu. The Checklists are cumulated online in The James Joyce Checklist : .

Current JJ Checklist (103)

Abstract: W note especially the inaugural issue of the Dublin James Joyce Journal, whose contents are given below, and the long-awaited website describing Buffalo’s Joyce materials, The James Joyce Collection. Thanks this time to Marco Camerani, M. Teresa Caneda Cabrera, Jeff Edmunds, Steven Herb and Sara Willoughby-Herb, K. P. S. Jochum, Friedhelm Rathjen, Anne Fogarty, F. K. Stanzel, and especially to our Indonesian specialist Sarah Ross. Please send contributions to your bibliographer at W329 Pattee, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, or via e-mail to uxb5@psu.edu. The Checklists are cumulated online in The James Joyce Checklist: .

How Joyce Acquired the "Stale Smut of Clubmen": Photo Bits in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract: This article contends that Joyce endowed middlebrow hero Leopold Bloom with avant-garde tastes in his pornographic reading and that this portrayal offers an unusual glimpse of the earliest British mass-market fetish publications and their middle-class audience. It argues that Joyce relied on anachronistic, explicit versions of Photo Bits , a comic newspaper considered to be the first pin-up magazine, to contextualize Bloom’s sexual interests. The article compares Photo Bits in 1904 and 1909 and provides correspondences in Ulysses for details in the advertisements and language in 1909, conjecturing that Joyce may have seen the magazine during his trip to Dublin that year. It also offers a potential source for a still-undiscovered novel, Sweets of Sin , that plays a recurring role in Ulysses .

Chaplin and Joyce: A Mutual Understanding of Gesture

Abstract: In the ninety years since James Joyce was feverishly massaging Ulysses and Charlie Chaplin was banging out his twelve Mutual film masterpieces, the possible connection between the two remains tenuous and uncharted. At the time, both artists had made a quantum leap in creative control, consciousness of purpose, and a deepening and ripening of what might best be called the unique genius of each from their previous work. Just as Ulysses engulfs the donnies of Dubliners and A Portrait with voluminous and detailed experimentation and exponential implication, Chaplin's doughty dozen refine, reconstitute, and redefine the early Keystone and Essanay films under his own newly attained creative direction and mark for the first time in his career the precedence and preeminence of comic gesture over physical conflict. That said, the richest vein for mining comic insight into both artists may lie in the mother-lode years of 1916-1917, when Joyce was entering the thick of his period of composition and when his antennae for new ideas and influences were still extended, and when Chaplin was capping off the first segment of his career with the Janus-faced series that looked back to the freshest and most iconic moments of the prior two years and onward to the United Artist masterpieces of the 1920s. At the turn of the last century, before the advent of silent film, both artists were groping their way to greatness-Joyce formulating theories of rhythmic gesture gleaned from Aristotle and Quintilian and Chaplin learning pantomime, pratfall, and physical humor from Fred Karno and Max Linder. As early as Stephen Hero, which in its blundering ingenuousness provides astonishing insights into the depth and breadth of his early training in philosophy, Joyce was signaling some future artistic context that would accommodate both the gestures of action and of language: "There should be an art of gesture, said Stephen one night to Cranly-Yes?-Of course I don't mean art of gesture in the sense that the elocution professor understands the word. For him a gesture is an emphasis. I mean a rhythm" (SH 184). From the comic gesture can be deduced the cosmic rhythm-from the psychological fact, the mythological truth. That the last term of his thesis becomes an equal and inextricable partner with the first is

"The Esthetic Instinct in Action": Charles Darwin and Mental Science in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract: Many critics have investigated Joyce's use of classical, medieval, philosophical, and literary sources in creating Stephen's theory of aesthetics in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.1 What is missing is a consideration of the theories of art and beauty articulated by contemporary scientists. No one has yet pursued the clue offered when Stephen refers to On the Origin of Species in his discussion with Lynch about aesthetics (P 209).2 It may surprise some to discover that scientists such as Charles Darwin actually thought about and worked to create theories of beauty, but, in fact, at least two mental scientists of the period theorized beauty and art, linking the aesthetics of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and others to contemporary understandings of biology and physiology.3 Given that Joyce's "method of composition was very like T. S. Eliot's, the imaginative absorption of stray material" (JJII 250), it is not, then, surprising to discover that Joyce used these to create a scientifically plausible conception of universal beauty and the evolution of genre in art. The three texts relevant to this study are The Descent of Man by Darwin, Mental and Moral Science by Alexander Bain (1818-1903), and Physiological Aesthetics by Grant Allen (1848-1899). Bain, the founder of the prestigious journal Mind in 1876, was a prominent philosopher and psychologist. Described on its title page as "A Text-Book For HighSchools and Colleges," his publication was the kind that Stephen and his peers would have studied at University College, Dublin, under the guidance of their "young professor of mental science" (P 192). In fact, in Stephen Hero, O'Neill works towards a "degree in Mental and Moral Science" (SH 106). Bain's text was, no doubt, particularly

Current JJ Checklist (108)

Abstract: We call your attention to the updated catalog of the Buffalo James Joyce collection: . Thanks for this Checklist’s contributions go to Luca Crispi, Jeff Edmunds, K. P. S. Jochum, Terence Killeen, Adrien Le Bihan, Emily Sharpe, and Andreas Weigel. Please send contributions to your bibliographer at W329 Pattee, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, or via e-mail to uxb5@psu.edu. The Checklists are cumulated online in The James Joyce Checklist .

Crossing folkloric bridges: the cat, the Devil and Joyce

Abstract: oyce's interest in children's rhymes and riddles, particularly as they are played out in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is well known, but his own children's story, The Cat and the Devil, has received little scholarly attention. Its posthumous book publication put the story that began as a private letter to Stephen James Joyce into a new, illustrated context, but even in its "original" epistolary form, the tale already had its antecedents. This essay traces the story's development from its roots in folklore to Joyce's 1936 letter and 1964 children's book, showing how he not only provides his grandson with an amusing tale but also enriches our understanding of folkloric tradition even as he modifies that tradition to create a subtle yet penetrating critique of modernity.1 As folklorists note, The Cat and the Devil falls under the AarneThompson tale type 1191, stories known as "Devil's Bridge" variants.2 In these narratives, a devil agrees to build a bridge in exchange for the first soul to cross it and is then cheated out of this soul when a clever human sends an animal across instead. Sometimes this animal is a

Hearing Joyce Speak: The Phonograph Recordings of "Aeolus" and "Anna Livia Plurabelle" as Audiotexts

Abstract: Joyce’s phonograph recordings, made in 1924 and 1929 of excerpts from “Aeolus” and “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” have not received detailed critical attention. Literary scholars have noted the circumstances of the recordings but have not analyzed them as recordings. In this essay, I propose that Joyce’s phonograph recordings have more than a novelty or historical value and are instead important audio documents that merit careful analysis and “close listening.” In considering Joyce’s recordings as audiotexts—a term borrowed from the analysis of recorded poetry—the linguistic profusion of Joyce’s writing meets the sonic profusion of oral delivery, and this intersection of the verbal and the vocable opens up new possibilities of critical interpretation, relating to Joyce’s performance of self, to his relationship to the Irish tradition of seanchas (lore), and to the voluptuous pleasure—what Roland Barthes calls signifiance —of reading, writing, and listening.

Current JJ Checklist (105)

Abstract: Thanks this time to Edward Burns, Michael Cunningham, Elisabetta D’Erme, Rafael I. García-León, Vincent Golden, K. P. S. Jochum, Ilaria Natali, Andreas Weigel, and Erik Zitser. Please send contributions to your bibliographer at W329 Pattee, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, or via e-mail to uxb5@psu.edu. The Checklists are cumulated online in The James Joyce Checklist .

"Circe" and the Genesis of Multiple Personality

Abstract: In this article, I propose a correlation between James Joyce's composition techniques that required multiple revisions and his interest in multiple personality, which eventually blossomed into that comedy of multiplicity, Finnegans Wake. The Wake's relation to the multiple-personality phenomenon is well known through the figure of Christine Beauchamp, who is associated with Issy,1 but the theme of multiplicity and multiple personality emerges in early drafts of the Wake independently of her character.2 Rather than provide the details of this emergence or consider its meanings within Finnegans Wake, I will make the case that it grew out of reflections on the composition of Ulysses, in particular "Circe," and the experience of its composition. Such a thesis picks up on Michael Groden's suggestion that "the processes by which [Joyce] wrote the book cannot be separated from other aspects of its meaning."3 The result is an exercise in a form of biography that seeks to illustrate how, as Ford Madox Ford's biographer Max Saunders says, "[t]he simultaneous processes of living and writing shape each other in complex and often surprising ways."4 While Joyce's characteristic methods of drafting, notetaking, redrafting, and revision had already been established before the composition of Ulysses,5 one aspect of it-the revisions-intensified during the composition of "Circe." Through a genetic account of the progress of "Circe," it is possible to see that Joyce, even before he began its drafting, required a new intensification of the method of multiple revisions he had already crafted. As he conceived, wrote, and rewrote the book, and "Circe" in particular, events around him affected his method. These occurrences included the strong responses of readers: the enthusiasm of the Little Review editors, the refusal of the United States Post Office to carry installments, the burning of certain issues, the action brought against the Little Review in September 1920, and its trial in February 1921. Joyce's growing celebrity (or notoriety) and the circumstances of the writing itself affected his methods. Together these events intensified the escalation of what can be called a strati-

Britain's wild West: Joyce's encounter with the 'Apache chief'

Abstract: This essay reconsiders “An Encounter” in light of a newly discovered source text for “The Apache Chief,” the only issue of the popular, contemporary juvenile papers named in Joyce’s story. It argues that “An Encounter” can be read as a subversive parody of the same so-called penny-dreadful publication it references, establishing an ironic distance between the young narrator’s misadventure in the Dublin streets and the idealized heroism of Joe Dillon’s library of Wild-West tales. With “The Apache Chief” as meaningful pre-text, “An Encounter” functions as Joyce’s critique of the discourse of race, gender, and nation in the boys’ magazines of Dublin-born media magnate Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe. Paralleling the subject positions of native Irish and Native-American, the story reveals and responds to the ways in which The Halfpenny Marvel and other periodicals intended for a younger readership exported imperialist ideologies from center to periphery and narrates an attempt to resist this colonizing influence.

"The Most Precious Victim": Joyce's "Cyclops" and the Politics of Persecution

Abstract: Recent criticism has complicated the conventional view of James Joyce as a politically disinterested pacifist by restoring Ulysses to the Irish colonial context from which it originally emerged. Despite significant contributions, these critics have struggled to reconcile an "Irish Joyce" with a Leopold Bloom who was once seen as the mouthpiece for the author's pacifism. By reading the "Cyclops" episode through the lens of Rene Girard's theory of the scapegoat, this essay claims that the Jewish Bloom elucidates, rather than complicates, these postcolonial interpretations. Girard's theory exposes the violence connecting the disparate notions of history, mythology, and community that underlie "Cyclops" and the particular form of colonialism it represents. The essay concludes that Joyce reveals and disrupts the scapegoating process. In so doing, he undermines the civilization that both nationalism and colonialism insist upon and challenges the very nature of community.

Travesties: Tom Stoppard's Joyce and Other Dadaist Fantasies, Or History in a Hat

Abstract: The original impulse for this essay was to examine the gaps between biographical fact and character in Travesties.1 I was then going to expose the historical incongruities within the play and argue that Tom Stoppard's redaction of lives and events was demanded by the conditions of dramatic performance. Such an explanation would not ease the anxieties of those who are literally minded, but then I remembered Oscar Wilde. In Stoppard's The Invention of Love, Wilde remarks that biography is "the mesh through which our real life escapes. I was said to have walked down Piccadilly with a lily in my hand. There was no need. To do it is nothing, to be said to have done it is everything."2 A few lines earlier, Wilde corrects A. E. Housman's belief that a newspaper report of an inquest is truthful: "On the contrary," Wilde replies, "it's only fact. Truth is quite another thing and is the work of the imagination" (Love 93). Imagination's link to the truth makes acceptable the fissures and disruptions found in Travesties. In this context, Stoppard's realignment of the habits and characteristics of James Joyce or Tristan Tzara or Vladimir Lenin, found in Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Hans Richter's Dada: Art and Anti-Art, or Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, bothers us less.3 Stoppard has never hidden his sources and, in fact, takes pride in listing his reading and the origins of his ideas. But much remains out of sync in the play that still nags audiences, alternately increasing their pleasure and calling into question the play's success. The treatment of time is a starting point. The calendar of the play and that of history do not match, and many have amused themselves by working out the discrepancies. But facts and dates always mislead, and Stoppard himself dispenses with them in his work as well as in his life. He prefers to juggle history so that historical characters meet, although no actual record of such encounters exists. He thinks nothing of putting Lord Byron into a mysterious situation in Arcadia or depicting gatherings among a host of early Russian revolutionaries that may or may not have happened in The Coast of Utopia.4

The Jew's Text: "Shem The Penman" and "Shaun The Post"

Abstract: A similar dynamic operates in the sections of Finnegans Wake in which Shem is attacked by his twin brother Shaun. In Book I, Chapter 7, and Book III, Chapter 1, readers sympathize with the victimized and pathetic Shem, who, though he is not a Jew in any strict sense (neither, of course, is Bloom), can claim Jewishness as one among his myriad identities. While Joyce critics have traced in detail how Joyce’s contact with and attitudes about Jews shaped the portrayal of Leopold Bloom,2 we have yet fully to explore Joyce’s subsequent imagination of himself as a “semisemitic” Shem (FW 191.02-03).3 This essay, though certainly not a full account of such an imagining, traces one strand of the Wake in which, as in Ulysses, Joyce uses the figure of the Jew to conjure his enduring sense of persecution as a writer. The ways Joyce enlists Jewishness in the Wake to muster sympathy for his writerly predicaments are far from static. Over the seventeen years he worked on Finnegans Wake, the status of Jews in western European cultures changed dramatically. In the early 1920s, they were largely assimilated into their national communities, and their contribution to western culture was mostly downplayed or denied. By the middle 1930s, the Nuremberg laws had shorn German Jews

"Thought-Tormented Music": Joyce and the Music of the Irish Revival

Abstract: Mother," one of three "stories of public life" in Dubliners, draws richly from and reflects the situation of music in the Irish literrevival ry revival at the beginning of the last century.1 Joyce's entry into the musical and literary public life of Dublin followed closely on the post-Parnellite "cultural turn" in Irish politics. This created a milieu in which, as Terry Eagleton writes, "[c]ulture in Ireland may occasionally displace politics, but it is just as much its continuation by other means."2 When Joyce finished his formal education and began to explore his options in life, the political field was so oriented that the pursuit of the cultural practices of writing and performing music might be considered political careers. For many of the post-Parnellite generation, the slow work of "improving, by re-nationalizing, artistic life" had supplanted the need for "decisive campaigns" in the political field, as one commentator wrote in 1900.3 Though this cultural moment of politics was short-lived,4 it was intensely productive. Its apex occurred in the, for Joyce, auspicious year of 1904. Though he had already begun to intervene in public literary and musical life in Dublin, 1904 was also the year following the death of his mother and decline of the Joyce household, of listless dissipation, of meeting and falling in love with Nora Barnacle, of flirtation with careers as a singer and as a literary critic, ending with the decision to leave Ireland for Trieste. The departure marked a significant transition in Joyce's engagement with the public performance of music, both as a performer and a storyteller. My argument is that, in fiction and in life, Joyce articulated a distinctive approach to musical performance that resonates with a positive notion of authenticity deriving from practices of "traditional" music, song, and dance that were themselves being developed in Ireland after the Famine.

Joycean Constellations: "Eveline" and the Critique of Naturalist Totality

Abstract: At first glance, Joyce's "Eveline" seems to share a great deal with naturalist works such as Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets . A careful comparison of the two texts, however, reveals Joyce's emphasis on ambiguity whereas Crane presents determinism, thus crafting an aesthetic form that preserves the agency of its working-class subjects. Through "Eveline," we can see Joyce developing his own work out of a critique of naturalism's totalizing form, a realization that helps further our understanding of Joyce's developing aesthetic practices.

The Religion of Art: A Modernist Theme in British Literature, 1885–1925 (review)

Abstract: J by its brevity and the size of its typeface, The Religion of Art appears to be aimed at undergraduates and non-specialists. It is handily organized with selected bibliographies at the end of each of the six chapters on Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence. Karl E. Beckson—who has previously published on Wilde, Arthur Symons, Henry Harland, and the fin de siècle culture of the 1890s1—approaches his theme with a pithy and densely packed introduction that outlines the origins and development of the “Religion of Art,” which emerges when art forges an independence from both Church and State. The result is “not only a convention but an identity relying on sacred imagery and rhetoric for aesthetic purposes ‘to evoke the transcendent’: hence, the artist was seen as priest, saint, or visionary” (1). The Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, are identified as “precursors” on account of their “quest for idealization” (1) and proclamation of the poet as priest and “unacknowledged legislator of the World.”2 John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold typify the widespread currency of the Religion of Art in the late nineteenth century. In “The Study of Poetry,” for example, Arnold prophesies that “[t]he future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. . . . most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”3 Walter Pater is cited as an example of the “widespread acceptance” of the Religion of Art in the Aesthetic Movement “by those who had either abandoned their faith or had suffered from unsettling doubt” (2-3). The “Modernist” label in Beckson’s title is therefore justified by this genealogy beginning with German and English Romanticism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and passing on to French Symbolism and the Aesthetic Movement of the late nineteenth century. These are the roots of the Religion of Art in twentieth-century modernism, which, according to Beckson, presented “the challenge of a new visionary culture”: “Many artists sought retreats in private worlds of the imagination, the result of which was an increasingly difficult and obscure art: they hoped for means of transcendence and salvation, a deliverance from both mechanized society and nature’s annihilating effect” (5). The impact of Beckson’s prologue is diminished somewhat by its compression. On a first reading, his streak through two hundred years of literary history is too quick to absorb fully. He does not give himself the space to tease out the equivocal potential of the “Religion

Gaslight, Ghostlight, Golliwog, Gaslight

Abstract: The gaslight that illuminates the settings of "The Dead" is an antiquated technology on the verge of being replaced by electricity. For that reason, among others, it brings with it associations of nostalgia, foregone romance, and ghosts—in other words, the emotional landscape of "The Dead." These associations converge on the figure of Michael Furey, the "boy in the gasworks," who, in "The Dead," is re-presented by the gas that highlights and burnishes Gretta's hair, that, through its buried pipes, tracks her and Gabriel to the Gresham Hotel, and that literally rises from underground to throw a "shaft" between them, thus extinguishing the feelings of renewed passion that it had helped kindle. Coming from underground to confront a self-conscious member of the "Ascendancy," the gas also reinforces the political theme, running throughout the story, of disenfranchisement—of the Irish by the English, of women by men, of blacks by whites.

"They Like it Because No-one Can Hear": A Derridean Reading of Joyce's Floral Language in "Lotus Eaters"

Abstract: A A. Walton Litz and a number of more recent critics have pointed out, Joyce heavily elaborated the “[l]anguage of flowers” in his manuscript additions to “Lotus Eaters” (U 5.261).1 Ramón Saldívar argues that Joyce uses floral metaphors to express Bloom’s unspeakable thoughts, which “emerge into the light of language . . . for it is precisely the work of metaphor to disguise the impropriety of the literal signified behind the transforming mask of the figural signifier.”2 Jacqueline F. Eastman also explains a number of floral metaphors, tracing them back to popular Victorian floral dictionaries.3 In this way, according to Saldívar, “Bloom’s expressions of sexual desire, of love for a departed son, of nostalgia for a past time of sensual wholeness can only be spoken through an indirection which names something else as a preoccupation of the mind” (400). While discussing floral imagery in Joyce’s works, Claudine Raynaud notes that the process of letter-exchange, conducted in the language of flowers, also should not be overlooked.4 This essay considers the floral topos at the center of the psychological interaction between Leopold Bloom and Martha Clifford that occurs in their correspondence. This interaction, however, cannot adequately be explored without asking “[w]ho are the letters for?” (U 4.249)—the sender or the receiver? To answer this question, I invoke the Derridean “postal principle” of envois.5 For Jacques Derrida, the word envois—“to dispatch” or “to send off”— describes the way senders express their desire under the stamp of the pleasure principle. Postality remains open in order to keep the desire in circulation, with the result that no letter ever truly arrives at its destination. Shuttling “between postes, or relay stations, along a psychosexual trajectory of desire that creates ‘correspondences’ between its subject of address (an absent beloved) and the form of address (a postcard),”6 envois describes two systems joined by writing: the “system of desire” and the “system of the postal service.” An engagement with Derrida’s text helps us understand the role of the sender (Martha) and the receiver (Bloom) in “Lotus Eaters,” as well as the relationship between the author (Joyce) and the reader. Though Joyce was hardly unusual in identifying flowers with women or erotic love, he is one of the few writers to condense the consecrated and the blasphemous in such floral imagery. The title “Lotus Eaters,” for instance, conveys both divine and secular signiJames Joyce Quarterly 45.2 2008

An Obsession with Plenitude: The Aesthetics of Hoarding in Finnegans Wake

Abstract: Reading recent psychological discourse on compulsive hoarding in relation to Shem the Penman’s dangerously cluttered inkbottle house, this essay reopens critical questions about Joyce’s stylistic engagement with waste, excess, and obsessive cataloguing. Hoarders and readers of Finnegans Wake are alike prone to anxieties concerning the potential value of items. Whether encountering a piece of trash or a seemingly valueless portmanteau word, both the hoarder and the Joycean create cognitively rich associative networks for accumulated material or linguistic objects. The hermeneutics of such a practice calls for a reconsideration of Joyce’s later aesthetics and a productive critique of the literary genre of Wake criticism.

The Nora Letters as a Source of Joyce's Performativity

Abstract: n A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen points out that his recourse to the aesthetics of St. Thomas of Aquinas has a restriction: "When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal experience" (P 209). The notorious letters Joyce wrote to Nora in December 1909 record that new, intersubjective experience, linking the act of writing to the drive, while marking a significant event in Joyce's aesthetic development.' If we understand an "event" as a moment indicating an irreversible change, we may see these letters as the beginning of the incremental movement in Joyce's fiction away from mimesis to an ever more performative and rhythmic style in which the act of writing overrides the desire to create a transparent copy of real life. Samuel Beckett notes, "[Joyce's] writing is not about something; it is that something itself."2 The movement towards enactment instead of representation, which Beckett sees as characteristic of Joyce's writing in Finnegans Wake, had its beginnings in Joyce's correspondence with Nora. That the Nora letters are highly performative is obvious. Written to sustain the "onanistic complicity" between husband and wife (SL xxiv), they feature the characteristics of performative speech. They use the present tense, and they comment on the activity of reading and writing, as well as on the relationship between reading and masturbating: "Darling, I came off just now in my trousers so that I am utterly played out. I cannot go to the G.P.O. though I have three letters to post" (SL 190); "[Y]our letter was lying in front of me and my eyes were fixed, as they are even now, on a certain word in it. There is something obscene and lecherous in the very look of the letters. The sound of it too is like the act itself, brief, brutal, irresistible and devilish" (SL 180). Representing a process of increasing fetishization, the letters stand in for the absent body of the beloved. The tangibility of the paper,

Idling the Engine: Linguistic Skepticism In and Around Cortázar, Kafka, and Joyce (review)

Abstract: I Idling the Engine: Linguistic Skepticism in and Around Cortázar, Kafka, and Joyce, E. Joseph Sharkey presents a highly original and compelling discussion of “linguistic skepticism” manifest in the works of the modernist writers he examines. Among the precursors to twentiethcentury linguistic skepticism, Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, and Tristram Shandy stand as great literary examples.1 But whereas in Miguel de Cervantes human limitations are confronted through mockery, and in Laurence Sterne through the comic mode, in John Milton, the “orientation to human finitude” is tragic (1). Sharkey argues that the “tragic orientation” of Milton’s characters prefigures their twentieth-century counterparts, and he borrows Paradise Lost “as a kind of primer” for his chapters on Julio Cortázar, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce (10). In chapter 1, “Introduction: Paradise Lost as an Allegory of Finitude,” Sharkey first analyzes Milton’s Satan “who exhibits two qualities characteristic of the skeptical protagonists of Cortázar, Kafka, and Joyce: an unjustified and insatiable pride, and . . . a specious logic used to justify a preexisting emotional bent” (4). Second, he looks at the perpetual “cycle of self-destruction” through the choice of one’s own will over God’s and the suffering and self-pitying that such a choice engenders (4). Finally, the author takes up Raphael’s moment of doubt and his role “as the epic’s internal literary theorist,” a figure also seen in Cortázar, Kafka, and Joyce: “faced with a challenge to the story he tells, Raphael must offer a solution both for himself and for Milton, and do so without dragging his author into the skeptical confusion of his characters” (4). Sharkey reads Paradise Lost in the light of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose “common role in the twentieth century as dissidents from the faith of linguistic skepticism” is of particular value to the book (22). For Sharkey, Gadamer and Wittgenstein are “united by a profound appreciation for the efficacy of language” (22) and by recognition of epistemological limitations it imposes. Gadamer’s observation that we become conscious of language when it fails to work and Wittgenstein’s metaphor for this phenomenon, “idling the engine,” point to the dissatisfaction with language’s distancing effect.2 Sharkey employs this metaphor to describe “all habits of thought that ignore the historicity of our being and understanding, all attempts to arrest the self in order to get a good look at it” (24). In the three chapters that follow, Cortázar’s Horacio Oliveira, Kafka’s Land-Surveyor K., and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus are presented as the skeptics par excellence of modernist literature.3

The 1969 Edition of Ulysses: The Making of a Penguin Classic

Abstract: The status of Ulysses as a classic in the United Kingdom, and, more specifically, its adoption within the academic canon, resulted from its first publication as a paperback by the Penguin Press in 1969. The decisions that Penguin made about price, size, design, additional matter, and marketing were directed towards enhancing that status. This represented an abandonment of the previous markets for the novel: the avant-garde (and its two subsidiaries—the aspirant high-culture consumer and the fine-book collector) and the pornographic. A discussion of the nature of these markets is integrated with evidence drawn from archival sources.

"The Index Nothing Affirmeth": The Semiotic Formation of a Literary Mandate in James Joyce's "The Sisters"

Abstract: My purpose in this essay is to consider certain aspects of the way James Joyce discovers and deploys the central semiotic resource of literary language, indexicality, to stage in "The Sisters" the-to adapt a Hollywoodism to Giambattista Vico's writing-precorso of his literary mandate.' "The Sisters," of course, was Joyce's first publication, published under the name Stephen Daedalus in the Irish Homestead on 13 August 1904 and much revised by Joyce in the summer of 1906 to be the first of the then fourteenpart story cycle of Dubliners. These revisions involved primarily the addition of multiple micro-indices that shaped "The Sisters" as the macro-index or riddle that stands as first text or opening frame of the Joycean canon. The history and particular textuality of "The Sisters" have always given it pride of place in the inauguration of Joyce's literary mandate, a primacy asserted by Fritz Senn, Thomas Staley, and many others in the rich and complex critical reception of this story.2 I am using mandate in the general sense of Slavoj .i2ek's well-known adaptation of Jacques Lacan's fourth order of "symptom as sinthome [as] a certain signifying formation penetrated with enjoyment: it is a signifier as a bearer of jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense."3 Specifically, I am interested in that "certain signifying formation" as it manifests itself in the disposition of the index in Joyce's opening frame. To focus on this disposition, I want to examine closely three scenes: the first from Stephen Hero that represents directly the "certain signifying formation" of the artistic mandate and the second and third from

'Our day at triv and quad' : John Ruskin and the Liberal Arts in Finnegans Wake II.2

Abstract: This article offers a detailed reading of chapter II.2 of Finnegans Wake , the “Night Lessons” section in which three children (Shem, Shaun, and Isabel) practice their grammar and arithmetic. It begins by tracing the history of the medieval Trivium/Quadrivium system on which Joyce models the children’s lessons. Joyce was first made aware of the pedagogical and iconographic history of the “triv and quad” in 1898, through his reading of John Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence . As is demonstrated, Ruskin’s influence on Joyce persisted from Joyce’s early college essay “The Study of Languages” to FW II.2 written forty years later. Joyce’s longstanding interest in “triv and quad” reflects his sense of a profound union between grammar and arithmetic. In Finnegans Wake , this results in a primitive language based on the archaic sense of “de-nomination” in which numbering and naming are still thought of as a single practice. Ultimately, Joyce’s re-coupling of grammar and arithmetic helps us better to comprehend his own sense of the new language of “wakese” as both verbally suggestive (or polysemous) and arithmetically precise.

Stephen's Handles

Abstract: Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell appears in Ulysses carrying a stick and an umbrella. Richard Ellmann reports that his character is based on James Boyle Tisdell Burke Stewart Fitzsimmons Farrell, a Dublin eccentric widely known as “Endymion,” and reputed to have always on his person a fishing rod, an umbrella, and two swords (JJII 365). Farrell, in other words, is a man of many handles, both in the sense of having several given names or nicknames and in his habit of continually clinging to “part[s] of . . . thing[s] . . . made to be grasped by the hand.”1 In “Lestrygonians,” Josie Breen and Bloom look on as Farrell insistently skirts lampposts: “Is he dotty?” asks Mrs. Breen, an adjective suggesting feebleness of gait or mind, and an apt description of Farrell, who cannot travel any distance without support and who has distinctly eccentric mannerisms (U 8.301). Though in possession of an inordinate number of objects designed to be readily grasped, Farrell, it seems, cannot “get a handle on” the world around him. As the expression “get a handle on” implies, handles are the means by which something—or in the case of names, someone—can be controlled, approached, or known; the saying strives to make palpable the unquantifiable grapplings of the human mind. By extension, “flying off the handle” implies a lack of command through excitement or lost temper; it is this sense of getting carried away that Joyce portrays in the excessively handled Farrell.2 In an extension of these hysterical associations, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the utterance “to go off the handle” was used throughout the nineteenth century in reference to death, the event over which human beings exert no authority whatsoever. Within the etymology of “handle,” then, lies an intertwining of knowledge and mortality, themes inextricable since Genesis, and ones also fundamental to Joyce’s depiction of Stephen Dedalus’s continually grasping intellect. Indeed, Joyce’s work regularly intertwines naming, knowledge, handling, and death in a way that brings the concrete profoundly, and sometimes painfully, to bear

Finnegans Wake for Dummies

Abstract: " Finnegans Wake for Dummies" is an answer to a perennial problem: how to begin reading the Wake . The Finnegans Wake paradox states that Finnegans Wake cannot be read except by someone who has already read it; what this article proposes is a new way of reading the book, not from front to back, but in order of difficulty. This "ski-slope" method of reading, beginning with the easiest sections, turning to the intermediate sections, and ending with the really fiendish bits, allows the text to afford the reader a sense of achievement as each level is passed, a sense it otherwise withholds until the final page. The three rounds, beginning with the Mamafesta and ending with the farewell in the pub ("Goodbark, goodbye!"), roughly correspond to the order of composition, so that the reader moves chronologically through Joyce's writing process.

Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company (review)

Abstract: W Joyce a Catholic? Did he believe in God or in any metaphysical system compatible with orthodox Catholicism? It is surprisingly difficult to give firm answers to these questions. Indeed, dispute about such basic issues seems to have stymied rather than stimulated critical investigation of religion in Joyce. Although now a more frequently addressed topic, one might have expected some livelier new treatments of it than we have had to date. After all, modern secularism has yet to deliver a world free from religion or religious conflict. Religion is still bound up with key cultural and political issues, including inter-communal violence and the resistance to imperialism. In such a context, Mary Lowe-Evans’s engaging and original study of what she refers to as Joyce’s “Catholic nostalgia” is a welcome indication that new kinds of critical engagement with the question of Joyce and religion are on their way. Similarly, her earlier book, Crimes Against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control, represented a remarkable anticipation of some of the concerns of postcolonial criticism of Joyce.1 Crimes Against Fecundity investigated the impact of the Great Famine on Joyce’s culture and his writing. Given the lack of any explicit or extended treatment by Joyce of the Famine in his works, this was a bold, counterintuitive, and highly productive move. Here, Lowe-Evans looks for evidence of Joyce’s imaginative involvement not (as we might usually assume) with the more liberal or “modernist” strands of Catholicism but with the dogmas and rituals promoted by the “anti-modernist” Vatican in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth century (“modernist” being the church’s own label for its perceived enemies). She examines Joyce’s influence as the seminal figure for a century of Catholic writing in the United States, rather than, for example, the model for generations of dissident Irish artists protesting in the routine way against a repressive institution. She analyzes the significance of Joyce for such Irish-American Catholic writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Flannery O’Connor and suggests that Joyce contributed to the conversion of the best-selling American Catholic writer, Thomas Merton—and that reading Joyce also played a role in bringing Hugh Kenner into the Catholic fold (6). So the book deals not only with what Catholicism did for Joyce, in providing him with an education in Catholic theology and philosophy that he later appropriated for his own brand of heretic aestheticism, but also

Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy in Finnegans Wake: An Annotated List

Abstract: We have long known that theosophy was of interest to Joyce, in part because of a well-known local connection—its practice by key figures of the Irish Literary Revival. Charles Johnson, under W. B. Yeats’s influence, met A. P. Sinnett and formed the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society in 1885, an organization that, according to Ernest Augustus Boyd, one of the earliest historians of Irish revivalism, was "as vital a factor in the evolution of Anglo-Irish literature as the publication of Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland, the two events being complementary to any complete understanding of the literature of the revival. The Theosophical Movement provided a literary, artistic and intellectual centre from which radiated influences whose effect was felt even by those that did not belong to it." Yeats, George Russell, and John Eglinton, all key figures in the Irish Literary Revival, joined the Society at various times. Both Russell and Yeats knew Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky personally, and both were deeply influenced by her. For seven years, Russell remained a member of the “Household,” a group of theosophists who lived together and formed the nucleus staff of The Irish Theosophist begun in 1892. This influential journal remained in publication until 1897 when it was replaced by The Internationalist, for which Eglinton wrote a great deal. Thereafter, the Irish theosophy movement, in parallel with the wider international organization, went through a number of breaks and schisms. Russell in particular, despite the upheavals, remained committed and active, especially in the later years as head of the Hermetic Society, until he left Ireland in 1933, just two years before his death.

'Unfallable encyclicing': Finnegans Wake and the Encyclopedia Britannica

Abstract: This essay aims to develop our knowledge about why the 'Encyclopedia Britannica' ('EB') is of such importance to 'Finnegans Wake' and to establish the general nature of what is an extraordinary example of literary intertextuality. While it incorporates 'EB' articles in various ways, the 'Wake' also sets up a specific riposte to the encyclopedic idea. Engaging at a fundamental level with the principles that underline the 'EB', the 'Wake' swallows or 'digests' vast amounts of conventional reason and reasoning. Thus, in the the 'Wake, the 'EB's' universalist attempt to present 'all extant knowledge', as it is discovered by 'the civilized world', fractures, not just against the shifting paradigms that epistemological tradtion always has to accommodate but, more substantially, against what appears to be a complete collapse of an epistemological confidence that once shaped the Enlightenment.