COPING with IOWCE Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium
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COPING WITH IOWCE essays from the Copenhagen Symposium edited by Morris Beja & Shari Benstock COPING WITH JOYCE Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium EDITED BY Morris Beja and Shari Benstock Coping with Joyce brings together eighteen scholars who contributed to making the 1986 International Joyce Symposium a land mark in Joycean studies. Their diverse ap proaches to the intricate Joyce corpus, from Dubliners and Exiles to Ulysses and Fin negans Wake, reflect the important changes that have taken place in the scholarly world during recent years, as traditional and post- traditional theorists and critics have found in James Joyce a major area of investigation and interpretation. Five major addresses of fer a litany of perspectives: historical, bio graphical, cultural, thematic, linguistic, textual, and sexual. These perspectives are further developed in the subsequent critical studies. Coping with Joyce provides a cross-section of the latest in James Joyce studies, the most recent views of several well-established Joyce scholars and the work of some newer critics in the field. Morris Beja is Professor of English at the Ohio State University and author of several works of literary criticism, including Epi phany in the Modern Novel. Shari Benstock is Professor of English at the University of Miami (Florida) and author of several books, including Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940. COPING WITH JOYCE Woodcut by Sid Chafetz, 1978. COPING WITH JOYCE Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium Edited by MORRIS BEJA and SHARI BENSTOCK Ohio State University Press Columbus ACKNOWLEDGMENT The editors wish to thank Dennis Bingham for his help before the Copenhagen Symposium, and in the preparation of this volume. Copyright© 1989 by the Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coping with Joyce: essays from the Copenhagen symposium / edited by Morris Beja and Shari Benstock. p. cm. Essays from the Tenth International James Joyce Symposium held in Copenhagen in 1986. Includes index. ISBN 0-8142-0467-8 1. Joyce, James, 1882-1941—Criticism and interpretation—Congresses. I. Beja, Morris. II. Benstock, Shari, 1944- III. International James Joyce Symposium (10th 1986 Copenhagen, Denmark) PR6019.O9Z52734 1989 88-21843 823'.912—dcl9 CIP Printed in the U.S.A. For Ellen and for Berni CONTENTS Introduction ix Abbreviations xvii MAJOR ADDRESS 1. Joyce's Heliotrope Margot Norris 3 2. Joyce the Verb Fritz Senn 25 3. The Joycead Colbert Kearney 55 4. Inscribing James Joyce's Tombstone Bernard Bens took 73 5. Joyce and Modernist Ideology Robert Scholes 91 CRITICAL STUDIES 6. Farrington the Scrivener: A Story of Dame Street Morris Beja 111 7. The Language of Exiles Give Hart 123 8. And the Music Goes Round and Round: A Couple of New Approaches to Joyce's Uses of Music in Ulysses Zack Bowen 137 9. "Roll Away the Reel World, the Reel World": "Circe" and Cinema Austin Briggs 145 10. Images of the Lacanian Gaze in Ulysses Sheldon Brivic 157 11. Jellyfish and Treacle: Lewis, Joyce, Gender, and Modernism Bonnie Kime Scott 168 VII viii Contents 12. The Letter Selfpenned to One's Other: Joyce's Writing, Deconstruction, Feminism Ellen Carol Jones 180 13. Simulation, Pluralism, and the Politics of Everyday Life Jules David Law 195 14. Joyce's Pedagogy: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as Theory Patrick McGee 206 15. From Catechism to Catachresis: Aspects of Joycean Pedagogy in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Lorraine Weir 220 16. ALP's Final Monologue in Finnegans Wake: The Dialectical Logic of Joyce's Dream Text Kimberly Devlin 232 17. Shahrazade, Turko the Terrible, and Shem: The Reader as Voyeur in Finnegans Wake Henriette Lazaridis Power 248 18. The Wakes Confounded Language Derek Attridge 262 Contributors 269 Index 273 INTRODUCTION A couple of decades ago, some scholars and critics had the idea of gathering people together in one spot, for a few days, to talk about a writer whom many people regard as either the greatest writer of the twentieth century, or the most influential, or both. With a touch of veneration (more on that later), they wanted for James Joyce what Simon Dedalus calls in Ulysses "a symposium all his own"—and, as he also puts it, the devil wouldn't stop them. They went to Dublin that first year, and for a long time the James Joyce Foundation, which sponsors and runs what came to be called the International James Joyce Symposia, kept to the tradition of holding them only in cities in which Joyce himself had lived for an extended period of time. Given Joyce's comparatively nomadic life, that would seem to provide a goodly number of choices. Even so, it obviously became unnecessarily or even pedantically limiting. So the tradition was broken; and when the invitation to hold a Symposium in Copenhaghen in 1986 was issued, it was eagerly accepted. Certainly the timing was right: for the conference, always held around Bloomsday, came within a few weeks, as well, of the fiftieth anniversary of Joyce's own visit to Copenhagen. There was also a more general appropriateness in the conference being held in the capital city of the Danes who founded the capital city of Ireland in the first place: for to Joyce, Ireland itself seemed a sort of offshoot of Scandinavia. As he wrote in "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages" in 1907, the original Scandinavians did not leave Ireland, "but were gradually assimilated into the community, a fact we must keep in mind if we want to understand the curious character of the modern Irishman." At the very start of his literary career, Joyce made clear the importance to him of Scandinavian literature—and especially of Henrik Ibsen. His first notable publication was, after all, on "Ibsen's New Drama," When We Dead Awaken. But even before that he had written about Ibsen in his "epiphanies," in one of which Ibsen is called "the greatest man in the world." Later, in 1907, Stanislaus Joyce recorded in his diary that "Jim told me that he is going to expand his story 'Ulysses' into a short book and make a Dublin Introduction 'Peer Gynt' of it." And in Finnegans Wake we have numerous "peers and gints, quaysirs and gallyliers, fresk letties from the say and stale headygabblers, gaingangers and dudder wagoners, pullars off societies and pushers on rothmere's homes." So Joyce's connection with what the "Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" calls "Scandiknavery" has long been acknowledged. For decades, scholars—especially, of course, Scandinavian scholars, displaying what the Wake more positively calls "domfine norsemanship"—have also chronicled the influence of Joyce on later Nordic writers. All that kept coming up, again and again, during the week-long gathering in the city the Wake calls "the cope of heaven." To have reached the milestone of a Tenth International James Joyce Symposium also means that we have passed through a succession of James Joyces along the way. As Fritz Senn implies in his provocative address "named" "Joyce the Verb," there are as many meanings to the word Joyce, the name Joyce, as there are to that strange word "Joycean." As a community of Joyceans (scholars and readers, teachers and students, translators and enthusiasts) have redefined themselves in various ways over the past two decades of coming together internationally, "coping" with Joyce has come to have a meaning beyond the wordplay that associates it with Copenhagen. Three distinct approaches have previously been apparent to many who have attended these Symposia and the many other Joyce conferences and seminars that have proliferated across the world during the 1970s and 1980s. "Venerating" Joyce has long been in evidence, and can still be noticed on occasion: it has made Joyce an insurmountable obstacle, a totem for adulation, which if it has not actually impeded interpretation has at least set the first and forming condition, that Joyce was a genius and in such full control of his material and techniques that his intentions could only be surmised. Veneration has met with skepticism by the younger generation of Joyceans, some of whom have even avoided the name Joycean for fear that it implies unquestioning adulation. In addition, recent theoretical assumptions that all authors lack the authority that resides either in the text or with the reader have made veneration—even of Joyce—uncomfortable. Nonetheless, all of those who approach the Joyce texts find themselves having to contend with the redoubtable presence of James Joyce. Joyceans have also had to face charges of "exploiting" Joyce, a concern recently brought forward (at the Symposia and in the media) Introduction by Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce. The institutionalization of what has been called The Joyce Industry has been responsible for the vast amount of scholarship and criticism filling library shelves, the organ izational self-propagation through a series of periodicals—two or three seem always to be in circulation—and the self-identification of a Joycean community made most noticeable by the biannual Interna tional Symposia. Stephen Joyce has been particularly offended by the selling of blue-and-white neckties and other such paraphernalia at the Joyce Museum in Sandycove, a "commercialization" of James Joyce that after all was intended to help keep a small and unique museum in operation. That James Joyce was in danger of becoming a commodity in which speculative shares were being bought and sold has bothered Joyceans and others not immediately related to Joyce himself. Yet, since most Joyceans work in the academic marketplace— whose companies rarely appear in the Blue Chips board and where the stakes are usually embarrassingly low—the idea of Joycean aca demics getting rich on their investments is easily dismissed.