Against Joyce: Ulysses, Authorship, and the Authority of the Reader Sophie Catherine Corser Goldsmiths, University of London PhD in English 2 Declaration of Authorship I, Sophie Corser, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 3 To David and Alice 4 Acknowledgements I wish to first thank Isobel Hurst and Stephanie Nelson, my classicist guides: to the former for an invaluable tip and fantastic early guidance, and the latter for her encouragement and understanding shared over my Homeric research, over email, and over excellent food and wine. I am grateful to numerous excellent Joycean friends met at symposia, conferences, and summer schools – particularly several Joycean women who have offered encouragement and inspiration in both work and life. Victoria Leveque, Stephanie Boland, Katie Mischler and many others whose thesis writing coincided with my own: thank you for providing space for laughter in intense environments. Thanks go also to those who so generously read some of what follows: especially to Katie Mischler, Jacob McGuinn, Stephanie Boland, Annabel Corser, and Stephanie Nelson. Many other friends and colleagues helped in some way (whether knowingly or not) – but I’d like to single out Richard Bolley in the English and Comparative Literature department at Goldsmiths, for providing the essential: places in which to write. And to the Joycean woman who started it all: Lucia Boldrini, in whose Ulysses lectures I first sat and marvelled many years ago. I do not quite know how to thank you for supervising my work from BA to PhD, for the support you have given, and endless understanding you have shown. It means a very great deal to me. I must give big, sloppy thank yous and love to the people who had relatively little to do with the content of this work, but so much to do with its getting done. To my closest friends Phoebe and Mindy, who know they have supported me through more than the challenges of hard work. And to my family: my parents, to whose memories this thesis is dedicated, and to Annabel, Elisabeth, and Ben. Burak Cetindag deserves, finally, a special thank you – for our home, and for not letting me give up. 5 Abstract This thesis considers James Joyce’s Ulysses as a text that plays with its own relationships to the author and the reader. It draws out the complexities and contradictions of a Joycean – and Barthesian – sense of ‘play’, by exploring the activity of reading prompted by the novel’s intertextuality and narrative. Alongside such investigation, I trace the history of approaches to the author within and without Joyce studies – to unravel how reading Ulysses interacts with such shifting sand. Through a methodology of ‘reading reading’, I analyse overlooked layers of Homeric orality and scholarship in ‘Eumaeus’, the development of Joyce studies from the 1920s to the present, modern understandings of the concept of the author, irreverent approaches to biography, and how reading ‘Calypso’ and ‘Wandering Rocks’ enacts a clash of readerly and authorial authority. This results in an unusual, looping structure, alternating analysis of Ulysses, Joyce studies, and other texts: exhibiting the impossibility of separately discussing author, reader, text, or – as chapters progress – critic. The thesis asks how one can place limits on where readings of Ulysses take us; how to discuss anti-authorialism in a field as author-centric as Joyce studies; and how the oft-asserted idea that opposites can be simultaneously true in Ulysses offers a valuable way to approach and query critical and theoretical understandings of how authors, readers, and texts interact. Writing ‘against Joyce’ (resisting, preparing for, leaning on) responds to theoretical and critical approaches and habits that pitch reader against author: that declare the birth of the reader must come at the cost of the author, or give greater currency – however veiled – to an author’s understanding of their text, over a reader’s. Above all else, this thesis proposes that to unpick the author question we should focus our attention on the activity of reading: self-aware, self-interrogative reading. 6 Contents Abbreviations and a note on editions ………………………………………………………...7 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………8 Part One 1. Rewriting the Author I: The Life and Death of the Author ……………………….23 1. A Brief History of the Author ……………………………………………………..25 2. The Death of the Author …………………………………………………………..32 3. Long Live the Author! …………………………………………………………….41 2. Reading Joyce I: Early Criticism …………………………………………………..50 1. ‘Critical propaganda’ ……………………………………………………………..52 2. ‘The mind that informs Ulysses …………………………………………………..59 3. ‘The half-erased writing of our predecessors’ ……………………………………66 3. Reading Homer: ‘Eumaeus’ and the Homeric Question ………………………….76 1. ‘My Experiences, let us say, in a Cabman’s Shelter’ ……………………………...79 2. A ‘printed matter’ …………………………………………………………………85 3. ‘Assuming he was he’ …………………………………………………………….89 4. ‘give us a squint at that literature’ …………………………………………………96 Part Two 4. Reading Joyce II: Late Criticism ………………………………………………….108 1. The forerunners ………………………………………………………………….110 2. Two readings of Ulysses: 1984 …………………………………………………..114 3. Joyce and theory …………………………………………………………………118 4. The author in Joyce studies ………………………………………………………122 5. Two readers of Ulysses: Senn and Attridge ……………………………………...130 6. How to read Joyce ……………………………………………………………….135 5. Reading Ulysses: ‘Calypso’, ‘Wandering Rocks’, and the Role of the Reader ……………………………………………………………..142 1. ‘Thumbed pages. Read and read’ ………………………………………………..145 2. ‘Very large and wonderful and keeps famous time’ …………………………….152 3. ‘James Joyce was an artist. He has said so himself’ ……………………………...161 4. ‘Victory to the critic’? …………………………………………………………...165 6. Rewriting the Author II: Legacies and Travesties ………………………………..174 1. ‘so does the artist weave and unweave his image’ ……………………………….177 2. ‘My memories, is it, then? Life and times, friend of the famous. Memories of James Joyce. James Joyce As I Knew Him. The James Joyce I Knew’ …………………………………………………………….182 3. ‘if the whole thing wasn’t a complete fabrication from start to finish’……………189 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………...195 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………...203 7 Abbreviations Abbreviations refer to the following editions of texts by James Joyce: FW Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1975) P Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1984) U Ulysses: the 1922 text, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Texts by Roland Barthes: ‘DA’ ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 142-8 ‘FWT’ ‘From Work to Text’, in Image-Music-Text, 155-64 ‘OR’ ‘On Reading’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989) 33-43 S/Z S/Z, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) ‘WR’ ‘Writing Reading’, in The Rustle of Language, 29-32 Zero ‘From Writing Degree Zero’, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Vintage, 2000) Texts by Hugh Kenner: D’sJ Dublin’s Joyce, Morningside Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) J’sV Joyce’s Voices (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978) Pound The Pound Era (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971) Stoic Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (London: Dalkey Archive Press and Normal, 2005) ‘U’ ‘Ulysses’ (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980) The James Joyce Quarterly will be abbreviated as JJQ. Further abbreviations introduced within specific chapters will be indicated in footnotes. A note on editions I refer throughout to the Oxford World’s Classics facsimile of the 1922 Ulysses, except where later corrections are relevant. Where this occurs, later editions will be referenced in full. 8 Introduction Ulysses is infamously unread. Yet this reputation, each reference to it, and every time it persuades a potential reader to take down instead another book from the shelf, constitute indirect readings of James Joyce’s 1922 novel. The text is read as elitist, excessive, difficult, or silly; not for everyone, needlessly complicated, or over-hyped; and all before one glances at its first page. In his short, irreverent 2007 work How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard notes that not only has he not read Joyce, he furthermore can allude to both Joyce’s texts and his not-reading of them and feel neither shame nor anxiety.1 Bayard perpetuates a reading of Joyce: a reading of his texts via reputation and therefore of what Joyce signifies. Complicated texts, rarely read. Responses such as these – the prerogative of any reader (direct or indirect) – also rely on and perform readings of Joyce as an author. As an author of such a difficult, complicated, ‘important’ text as Ulysses Joyce must be extraordinary. Or is it that as a novel by a famous, canonical genius, Ulysses must be remarkable, complex, and out of reach? How does one separate the author’s infamy from that of the text? This same quandary is enacted by actual readings of Joyce’s texts: to what extent is our reading of Ulysses informed by how we view Joyce, and how much is our idea of Joyce dictated by what we find in the novel? In order to respond to this, and ask why it matters, we must pull at the relationships between author, reader, and text – an endeavour which has fallen out of fashion in both Joyce studies and the wider literary world. It has been fifty years since theorist and critic Roland Barthes proclaimed ‘The Death of the Author’ and ‘the birth of the reader’ (‘DA’, 148); the complex response to and influence of his provocative 1967 essay continues, though interest in it has somewhat waned. Though it is, for example, now difficult to completely escape the idea that the author no longer controls the correct interpretation of a text, literary culture continues to be the author-centric world Barthes describes and decries in his essay.