JJAMES OYCE

LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BERNARD BENSTOCK, FOUNDING EDITOR

PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI VOLUME 34, NUMBER 1, SPRING 2020, ISSN: 0899-3114

Contents

ŸŸŸŸTeaching James Joyce in the Secondary Classroom

for the Twenty-First Century: As One Generation Tells AnotherBy DYLAN EMERICK-BROWN ................... (2-3)

# Michael Groden. The Necessary Fiction:

Life with James Joyce’s Ulysses.Reviewed by HANS WALTER GABLER ...... (3-4)

# Chris Forster. Filthy Material: Modernism &

The Media of Obscenity.

Reviewed by VICTOR LUFTIG ................... (4-5)

# Patrick O’Neill. Trilingual Joyce:

The Anna Livia Variations.Reviewed by E. PAIGE MILLER ................. (5-7)

ŸArt of the Wake, by CAROL WADE ......................... (8)

# Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson,

Editors. Modernist Communities across

Cultures and Media.

Reviewed by MARGOT BACKUS

and GRETE NORQUIST ............................. (9-10)

# Tim Wenzell. Woven Shades of Green:

An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature.

Reviewed by CHRISTIN M. MULLIGAN . (10-11)

# Jessica Martell, Adam Fajardo,

and Philip Keel Geheber, Editors.

Modernism and Food Studies:

Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde.

Reviewed by JUDITH PALTIN ............... (11-12)

# Catherine Flynn. James Joyce and the

Matter of Paris.

Reviewed by Marian Eide .................... (12-13)

Ÿ DAVID NORRIS Reads from Finnegans Wake

Reviewed by PATRICK REILLY .............. (13-14)

# Brian Fox. James Joyce’s America.

Reviewed by JONATHAN MC CREEDY .. (14-16)

James Joyce's America

The illustrations featured in this issue (see page8) were done by Carol Wade as part of her

“Art of the Wake” series. As her website for theproject explains, “Joyce has created a

wonderful tapestry of historical, social, andcultural references in Finnegans Wake. The Art of

the Wake seeks to weave some of thesereferences into illustrations with the same playful

witticism that Joyce was renowned for.” Moreinformation about Wade’s project can be found

at artofthewake.com.

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020PAGE 2

What about Finnegans Wake?

Teaching James Joyce in the Secondary Classroom for the Twenty-First Century

As One Generation Tells AnotherBy Dylan Emerick-Brown

WHENEVER HIGH SCHOOL English teachersmention that they teach a Shakespearean playto fourteen-year-olds, everyone shrugs their

shoulders knowingly, recallin-g their own experiencesfor better or worse reading Romeo and Juliet. However,when I tell people that I teach James Joyce to fifteen-year-olds, people look aghast as though I’m a whip-cracking lunatic who derives a sick pleasure fromtorturing my students. As a Western society we havewholeheartedly accepted the works of William Shakes-peare as unquestioningly and critically valuable to anindividual’s education, so much so that the typicalAmerican student is taught four of his plays over thecourse of their time in high school (and often a handfulof his sonnets). James Joyce, on the other hand, has thereputation for being esoteric and elitist, reserved solelyfor the masochists in English literature graduate pro-grams. Joyce is seen as inaccessible while Shakespeareis seen as necessary. The great irony is that the Bardwrote his plays on royal commission and Joyce wrotehis stories and novels for the average person. And Ihave found that the benefit of teaching Joyce’s works tostudents is both academically and developmentallyadvantageous with students mastering the same stan-dards taught regarding Shakespeare, but with moreengagement and student success.

I teach English II Honors and AICE/CambridgeGeneral Paper, both English courses for tenth gradersaveraging in age between fifteen and sixteen years old.Deltona High School, where I teach, is a secondary,grade nine through twelve, school situated in centralFlorida within Volusia County. On paper Deltona Highis not necessarily the type of magnet or private schoolin which one might expect an entire James Joyce unit tobe taught. We have a majority minority population ofaround 1,800 students and the faculty and administra-tive body are always striving to improve our students’academic achievements. And in a school where thereading and writing proficiency level has been belowthe state average, the idea of teaching Joyce was daunt-ing to me. It was certainly in my wheelhouse. I havepresented at multiple international conferences and havebeen published in various scholarly journals regardingJoyce studies. But it is a different scenario altogetherteaching teenagers Joyce.

I began with “The Dead.” My rationale was that itwas shorter than a novel, so it could be read in a fewdays, and it was more accessible than, say, FinnegansWake. The unit begins with a PowerPoint presentationon the story’s context, handouts on the Catholic/Protes-tant divide in Ireland, and even a Google Map of theroute Gabriel and Gretta take between the Morkanresidence and the Gresham Hotel. The unit continueswith a reading interspersed with discussion prompts.The print-out of the text includes various vocabularywords and phrases defined for students to help with theunfamiliar context. During the readings, I was intriguedby how engaged the students were in the discussions.They were curious and interested in the symbolism,characters, and backstories fueling the drama. This unitquickly evolves to include historical resources aboutCharles Stewart Parnell and the Irish/English colonialconflicts; discussion questions, which turn into 76analysis questions, that are answered in groups andshared with the class as a whole; worksheets comparingcharacters and events in the story to Joyce’s actual life;an assignment thematically comparing excerpts fromJoyce’s play, Exiles, to “The Dead”; another assignmentthematically comparing excerpts from Joyce’s letters toNora to Gabriel and Gretta in the story; and even anassessment in which students pair off, one playing amarriage counselor, the other first Gabriel and thenGretta, and analyze the issues plaguing the marriage.The students then assess what their conclusions revealabout early twentieth century Dublin and what theirproposed solutions reveal about twenty-first centuryAmerican students. Over the three years of teaching thisunit on “The Dead,” the lessons became more engaging,more differentiated, and more rigorous, and tackleddifferent learning strengths for students.

There is a growing trend in education that nonfictionhas an increasingly stronger role in literature than in thepast. Some English teachers, who got into the profess-ion because of their passion for fiction, drama, or

poetry, find this to be a difficult transition. However,“The Dead” offers the best of both worlds. “I enjoyedthe analysis of the references in Joyce’s writing like theIrish nationalism and the Charles Stewart Parnell con-

troversy,” writes Charles Simms, a tenth grader whowent through “The Dead” unit. Because the fiction is sorealistic and based so heavily in the actual world, teach-ers can pull in nonfiction readings and resources thataccompany and enhance the literature. This allows themto seamlessly tackle literary and nonfiction state stan-dards in a single text, making their lives easier thanhaving to put together separate and unrelated texts forstudents to study.

The extra credit or remediation assignment for thisunit became one of two assessments of political car-toons illustrated by Sir John Tenniel and published byPunch magazine in the nineteenth century. The first,“The Irish Frankenstein,” which portrays the Irishpeople as a brute monster who threatens an Englishgentleman, is interpreted by the student in terms of whatTenniel’s message was to the British people. This isfollowed by an analysis of a little-known editorial of thesame title that accompanied the cartoon in the publica-tion. In it, the unknown author plagiarized MaryShelley’s Frankenstein while editing various phrasesand words to make the politically and ethnicallycharged editorial appear as though it was comingstraight from a popular contemporary novel. The stu-dents break this down, noting the differences betweenShelley’s original text and the editorial’s edits to deci-pher the true intent of this publication. The other car-toon is Tenniel’s “The Irish ‘Tempest,’” an illustrationportraying the Irish as a Shakespearean Caliban harass-ing an innocent Hibernian woman who is being protect-ed by British Prime Minister Gladstone. Students haveto look closely and interpret from the drawing and text-ual elements within it what Punch’s purpose was inpublishing this image. This takes the form of an analyti-cal essay. Many students with passing or even goodgrades voluntarily do this assignment because theythink it’s fun.

After the success of the unit on “The Dead,” Irealized that I could use the flexibility of curriculum inthe AICE/Cambridge General Paper course to expandfurther and deeper into Joyce studies with the students.This led to the development of our unit on A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man. Due to time constraints, thisunit focused on two main assessments for the novel.The primary assessment was a summative paper writtenon the novel from a specific literary-critical perspective.As a class, we reviewed various literary perspectivessuch as moral, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and gendertheory, to name a few. This gives the students aparticular purpose from which to read the novel. As wewent through the novel in class, there were many classdiscussions accompanying the reading. These includedallusions to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, allusions tothe Icarus and Daedalus myth, as well as historicalcontext over the political and religious turmoil of Ire-land during this time period. In addition to gradedparticipation in these discussions, routine paper checkswere assessed to ensure that as we read through thenovel, students were taking adequate notes for theirpapers and doing outside research through JSTOR,Google Scholar, or other valid means. The lack oftraditional quizzes and tests made the reading morecomfortable, almost like a reading group environment.And with that sense of comfort came more openness inthe class discussions and willingness to explore deeperinto their chosen topics.

After experimenting with teaching “The Dead,” itmade sense that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manwould really connect with my students. The protagonist,Stephen Dedalus, is around their age for most of thenovel. The students even referred to him as “a less

whiny Holden Caulfield with an Irish accent.” Ste-phen’s journey through puberty, family poverty, troublein school, anxiety over social awkwardness, sense offear and guilt as a motivator of behavior bestowed byauthority figures, slow development of confidencethrough age and experience, inadequacies in romance,and a yearning to break free from parental bonds—bothnationalistic as well as familial—-were all incrediblyrelatable for fifteen-year-olds. “I think Joyce is worthbeing taught in high school because his work istherapeutic and can help students understand theimportance of writing and storytelling,” writes SarahBarrett, a student in my class. “I usually like to keep myissues to myself, so to see someone as successful asJoyce sharing a version of himself and his life withothers makes me feel more open to the idea of writingas a form of therapy.” By analyzing Stephen, thestudents found that they were also analyzing them-selves. And the realism Joyce uses to bring thesecharacters and situations to life resonated and allowedthem to believe in the struggles of Stephen as though hewere one of them, a fellow student.

It only made sense, given the success of the readinggroup format of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manand the students’ interest in Stephen Dedalus, that Ipropose to them a Ulysses Reading Group. “I joined theUlysses Reading Group because I wanted to find outhow Joyce portrays Stephen Dedalus now that he isolder and back from Paris,” writes Jennifer Fuentes, atenth grader in my class. Of course, there is no time toteach the entirety of Ulysses in class with the remainingthree quarters of the school year, roughly eight months.Also, it would be unfair to put all of the studentsthrough such a lengthy and challenging novel giventhey had just spent about ten weeks with Joyce. Thereading group takes the form of a voluntary weeklyafter-school meeting that lasts for an hour, thoughstudents can pop in during lunch any day. The episodesare divided throughout the remaining eight months ofthe school year week by week with most being coveredin a single week while some of the longer episodes aresplit over two. The entire AICE/Cambridge GeneralPaper class is given a presentation on Ulysses with theJudge Woolsey court decision, a planning calendar forthe reading group, a layout of the meeting format, and,most importantly, a legal guardian permission form. It isimportant that the student and the legal guardian knowwhat they are getting into. They are given two weeks tothink this over, ask me any clarifying questions, andreturn the permission forms signed. Students areexpected to purchase their own copies of the novel—preferably the Hans Walter Gabler edition—but I have afew extra loaner copies and there is always the freeProject Gutenberg version online. The controversialreputation of the novel over its obscenity which origi-nally forced its banning in the United States—and wassubsequently proven to be an inaccurate label—has thesame effect on my twenty-first century teenage readersas it did on potential readers in the early twentiethcentury. The taboo aura surrounding Ulysses makes italmost irresistible to the students.

There are also academic benefits to being in thereading group. It would only be fair to reward suchacademic exploration. Students in the group areencouraged to write a paper on Joyce studies due by theend of the school year. These papers are designed to beacademic in nature without a word count or page limit.They can be extensions of their original papers from APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man or entirely new.They can focus on literary criticism or be morestructuralist in style. The one requirement is that thetopic be something the student finds fascinating. Thisthesis-style paper would be planned, researched,written, and revised over the remaining course of theschool year. Students can swap parts of their work onthese papers for specific class assignments as eitherremediation or substitution. Some of the topics thisyear’s students have chosen are: 1) Whereas StephenDedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manreflects James Joyce socially, Stephen Dedalus inUlysses reflects James Joyce economically, 2) How didJames Joyce use literature to explore his feelings andfears regarding Nora? 3) How is Leopold Bloom’s lackof intimacy with Molly psychosomatic in relation to

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Rudy’s death as opposed to emotional or physicalissues? 4) Could the Bloom marriage in 1904 beconsidered more appropriate—if not less shocking—ina twenty-first century environment? By the end of theschool year, all of the papers which have been reviewedby me will get published on a website I created. Also,one of these papers will be published in a forthcomingissue of Qorpus, a scholarly journal put out by the Uni-versity of Santa Maria in Brazil. Enrico Terrinoni,professor and president of the James Joyce ItalianFoundation, will write students a letter of support andcongratulation, as will other Joycean academics. Theintent of these accolades is to set these students apart intheir college applications.

The weekly meetings are designed to help with thestudents’ understanding of the individual episodes ofUlysses and also provide them time to work on theirpapers with me acting as a faculty advisor. I provide afew snacks and we review the episode through Power-Point slides I created that had been printed out from thelast meeting and students’ own notes and questions.Then we watch on YouTube the Dublin James JoyceCentre’s short clip on the next episode. The second halfof the meeting is reserved for their thesis papers; duringthis time, they can write, research, edit, or consult withme. I have a mobile book cart in the classroom I affec-tionately named “The Fearful Jesuit” which contains asmall portion of my personal Joyce library from home. Iconsider what the students are writing and what booksand journal issues could be helpful for them to read andquote from. The cart also includes some Ulysses ephem-era the students can inspect, such as a genuine ceramiccup of Plumtree’s Potted Meats, a hundred-year-oldJacob’s biscuit tin, a bar of lemon soap from Sweny’sPharmacy, and my prized possession: the exact postcarddescribed in perfect detail from the novel that Murphy,the sailor, passes around in the “Eumaeus” episode. Itcontains a group of indigenous women caring forinfants—some asleep and others breastfeeding—in frontof osier huts with the words “Choza de Indios. Beni,Bolivia” written at the bottom. It is an authenticcentury-old postcard just as Joyce describes in the noveland the students love inspecting it and passing it aroundlike the characters in the cabman’s shelter.

It is worth mentioning that it took me a couple ofyears to figure out the strange and unique dynamic ofthe Ulysses Reading Group. Students seemed unrespon-sive, yet engaged; I couldn’t tell if they had done thereading or understood what was happening because theywere so quiet and yet they kept showing up each week.I realized that there were a couple of factors I hadn’tconsidered that were influencing the group. The firstwas that most of the students in the group were intro-verts, which makes sense, given that it is a group forstudents who are passionate readers, but also makes foran odd group dynamic. The other factor was that where-as a classroom environment is familiar and has a disci-plined structure, a reading group is unfamiliar and morecasual, creating a learning curve for everyone. “What Ienjoy about the Ulysses Reading Group is that we aren’tforced to talk about the book and if we have questions,we can ask separately,” says Jennifer Fuentes. “We areallowed to do our own thing when it comes to thegroup.” This freedom, while unnerving for a traditionalteacher, is what gives the group its room to grow. SarahBarrett, another student, writes, “I find joy in knowingthat everyone who comes to the reading group comesfor a reason. Whether they just want to read and havethe experience or if they want to get credentials undertheir belt to make them more appealing to colleges,everyone comes out of their own free will.” With that

said, any teacher should be flexible and routinely spotcheck the students to ensure that they are getting whatthey want out of the group. It can be a lot of fun, but Ilearned that I needed to relax and let the students informme what they wanted out of the experience.

To further pull the students into Ulysses, I alsoemploy a more culinary tactic. When we are reviewingthe “Calypso” episode introducing Leopold Bloom, Iwant to show the students how “other” he is as a Dub-liner. Everyone around him perceives him as eitherJewish or immigrant, both of which he is not. Andwhile Bloom makes many conscious efforts to portrayhimself as the quintessential Dubliner, even convertingto Catholicism, one of the facets of his life whichreveals him as “other” is his diet. While a gorgonzolasandwich with mustard and a glass of burgundy iscertainly not your typical Irish pub fare, it is hisbreakfast that makes readers cringe. And so, I fry up inbutter and pepper—just the way Bloom does—somepork kidneys obtained from a specialty butcher wholooks at me quizzically when ordering them. Afterestablishing that free Tic-Tacs are on the table, I openthe lid to the plastic box, provide paper plates and forks,and let the students dig in—though “dig in” wouldn’t bethe most accurate description. They sniff cautiously,wince, bring their forks up to their lips, hesitate, glancearound at each other, then using only their teeth take asmall bite to chew, swallow, and claim that it wasn’t asbad as it smelled. My wife disagrees; it takes fans,scented candles, eucalyptus essence in water sprayedthroughout the house, and a good 24 hours for the odorof fried kidneys to dissipate from our home. However,my annual burnt offering to the literature gods pays offbecause my students never forget the experience and ittruly makes tangible the otherness of Bloom’s characterin the very first chapter we read of him.

One may be wondering at this point, “What aboutFinnegans Wake?” Well, I certainly don’t tackle Joyce’snever-ending history of the world written in Wakesewith teenagers. But I do offer them opportunities to diptheir toes into the deep end of literature. The title of thisessay comes from Book III, Chapter 4 of FinnegansWake and it is one of my favorite quotes as it remindsme that teaching is always a matter of what one genera-tion tells another. In the Ulysses Reading Group, fromtime to time, we explore an excerpt and have fun de-ciphering the references and puns. Roland McHugh’sAnnotations to Finnegans Wake is helpful, as is thewebsite, FinWake.com. After reading Macbeth in class,I offer my reading group students the chance to decrypta couple of references to the play in Finnegans Wake.My favorite, from Book III, Chapter 2 goes: “Lead on,Macadam, and danked be he who first sights HaltLinduff!” It’s essentially boasting that whoever firstsights Dublin as they go down the road will be the firstto get inebriated. We look closely at the first page of theAnna Livia Plurabelle chapter and interpret everything,from the delta shape of the first lines to the riverreferences and many alliterative “ll” sounds. I eventyped up the first paragraph of the ALP chapter in scriptformat so that a couple of female students could readfrom either side of a flowing river projected onto thescreen in my classroom, reenacting the dialogue of thetwo washerwomen. Plus, there are fun word and syntaxgames I created from the novel that the students like toplay with to test their analytical skills and creativity.

In order to not only align my teaching of Joyce tothe Florida State Standards I must teach my students,but also to help any other teachers who want to engageJoyce in their own classrooms, I created the websiteTeachingJoyce.com. On this single website, I have all

of the lessons, assessments, handouts, links, resources,pictures, and Ulysses episode slides I use to teach Joyce.Also included are the Florida State Standards andestimated time frames for each lesson and assessment.There’s a link to how I used my teaching of Joyce in myown professional development, which was used for myannual evaluation. And there is also a link to a Face-book group called Teaching Joyce Discussion Group inorder to engage Joyce scholars, enthusiasts, and teach-ers from around the world. On the site are not onlytestimonials from students to encourage other teachersto give Joyce a try, but also testimonials from professorsand education advocates. My own school district linkedthe website on their intranet hub for Volusia Countyeducators as a resource for AICE/Cambridge GeneralPaper teachers. TeachingJoyce.com allows me toconstantly update lessons and assessments, stay incontact with teachers, and help make it easier and moreenriching of an experience to teach Joyce’s works inhigh school. And it’s worth it! My General Paperstudents from the previous year had a passing rate of 93percent and performed very well on the Florida StateAssessment for English Language Arts.

Using Joyce in the classroom allows me to focus ondepth over breadth when teaching the state standards.Instead of roaming from one short story to another orone speech here by this person and a nonfiction sampleof writing from that person, I can keep a sense ofcontinuity in the curriculum, allowing students to buildup momentum as they explore. This teaches them thatnonfiction is not isolated from fiction, speeches are notwritten and spoken without context, satire is always aresponse to something emotional in all of us, and thatthe world is far more interwoven than we might see atfirst glance. In “The Dead” alone, the students see howthe English colonization of Ireland impacted economics,fashion, racism, religion, language, and politics asrevealed in letters, editorials, political cartoons, andspeeches. This becomes reflected in the characters ofJoyce’s story, such as the Morkan sisters and Grettacommenting about Gabriel’s insistence on his wifewearing galoshes, an English fashion statement madefrom rubber obtained from the far reaches of the Britishempire in India. This reflects Gabriel’s lack of interestin Home Rule, the English’s influence on the Irish, andthe complexity of national pride under colonial rule.This can lead to a discussion about how today’s fashioncan be used to not only identify an individual withintheir preferred social strata, but also be weaponizedagainst others as a form of oppression. Joyce is truly aone-stop shop for everything an English teacher needsto teach.

And so, with that I encourage all teachers out thereto try their hand at introducing not only their students,but themselves, to Joyce and see where it takes them.His works hold up well in the twenty-first century, hischaracters are relatable, his command and manipulationof English is worth studying, the complexity of hisallusions and uses of symbolism provide an endlessdepth of investigation, and lest we forget, James Joyceis a very funny writer. His sense of humor and wit canbe seen and enjoyed in every story and novel. While theeducation system increasingly places more focus onstandardized testing, new pedagogical methods andtechnologies, and the bottom line of graduation rates, Ihave found that Joyce allows me to bridge the dividebetween those ever-expanding initiatives and the reasonI got into teaching English in the first place: a love ofliterature. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game withJoyce. We can have our kidneys and eat them too! #

—Deltona High School

A Life's Necessity: UlyssesMichael Groden

The Necessary Fiction: Life with James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Brighton: Edward Everett Root,Publishers, 2019.

£65.00

Reviewed by HANS WALTER GABLER

WHERE, IN THE WIDE and varie-gated ranges of our in-group’s

analyzing, interpreting, writing aboutJames Joyce have we ever encountered acontribution from a seasoned Joycean in

comprehensive professional command,where yet the professional narrativegained its deepest authority from beingcompellingly generated out of privacy andunabashed autobiographical intimacy—asit is in Michael Groden’s The NecessaryFiction? Insistently, the book confrontsus—every one individually—with issuesand questions of necessary reality, thatyet are commonly evaded, if not unac-knowledged, or unrecognized altogether:who are we—who do we become—whenwe engage with the challenges that JamesJoyce's writing poses? What does it dowith us? Who do we become asJoyceans—even if we “mind our hats

goan in,” let alone “our boots goan out”(if go out we ever do)?

On the horizon of present-day literarycriticism and scholarship may be dis-cerned a movement away from pur-portedly “objective” text analysis andinterpretation and towards a concern withwriting and reading as experience: whatdo texts do with us in the reading, evenwhat did texting in progress do withauthors, and how did the process of theirauthoring feed into their shaping what inwriting creatively emerged from theirminds and emotions? And how doeswriting and reading experience soacknowledged at the same time recur-

sively feed ever into shaping afresh everyreading experience? Michael’s con-fessional (as it might in truth be labelled)opens up, for our (perhaps) better under-standing, the necessary hermeneuticcircle of life, self-awareness, andprofession.

Michael and I have been transatlanticfriends for pretty close to half a century.An autobiographic admixture to thisreview may thus, I trust, be allowed. Wemet under the professional umbrella of hisPrinceton doctoral mentor Walton Litz.Michael was at the time immersed in theanalytic exploration of the manuscriptsand pre-publication materials for James

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Joyce’s Ulysses. His endeavor issuedsoon in his doctoral thesis and bookUlysses in Progress. The account that TheNecessary Fiction gives of “Groden inProgress” during this phase signals richlythe deepening of intellectual potential andself-awareness that the scholarly taskbrought with it. The telling is memory-guided and so directly personal. Yet it issimultaneously a focused rendering of thediscovery and exploration of the new-found land of Joycean manuscript study.From observing James Joyce’s manu-script writing and ever-active re-composition in proofs, Michael gainedprogressive insight into the creativityguiding the emergence of Joyce’s art-in-progress. The skill lavished on the per-sonal telling, retrospective as it is, at thesame time renders the account fully read-able as personal discovery. It invites us toa sharing with our personal experienceand so to reaping gains in understandingJames Joyce.

Exemplary here is Michael’s anato-mizing of the relationship he personallybuilt up from early on with Joyce’s maincharacters, Stephen Dedalus, LeopoldBloom, and Molly Bloom. It commencedas intensely subjective, progressedthrough phases of self-encounter, evolvedfrom early immersions in Ulysses incollege, and eventually merged withMichael’s professionally guided, ever-growing awareness of how the characterswere conceived, differentiated andfocused through ever-recursive obser-vation of the processes of Joyce’s writingthem. Through all this Michael’s sensebecame increasingly conditioned towardsthe double-natured necessity inborn inUlysses: that of the characters and narra-tive springing from fictional consistency,as equally that of experiencing life andthe self through reading. As for StephenDedalus and Leopold Bloom: we movewith Michael through his shifts ofidentification, somewhat uneasy alwaysin relation to Stephen, but increasinglyemphatic towards Leopold. What is more:Michael works out for us how necessary,indeed essential it is to recognize “Leo-pold Bloom” constituted in, and as,fiction, and so categorically not as amirror blueprint of the author. He makesthe distinction of author and author-created character a lived insight forhimself, and thereby insightful, too, for usas sharers in the experience so re-

doubled. What is established and what webecome conscious of is that author andcharacter are fundamentally distinct: theyare mutually each other’s “other.” Toappreciate this is an essential step, in itsturn, towards recognizing, and for our-selves to experience, the categorical,indeed ontological, distinction betweenauthor and work. More specifically still,our encounter through his book withGroden’s intensely autobiographic render-ing of his comprehensive James Joyceexperience lays open that the conditionsthrough which it was gained, andthroughout an adult lifetime renewed andintensified, lie importantly in the immer-sion in the writing processes and resultingtext stages through which the experienceof the work is constituted. Such closeengagement on the part of the researcherand analyst reveals concomitantly theauthor’s always critical and so potentiallyalways revisional engagement with whatunder his pen emerges as written—whichinsight consequently can only reinforcefor us the sense of the “otherness” oftext/work and author to one another.

With respect to Molly, moreover,Michael’s personal relationship to theUlysses characters is raised to secondpower. In his self-narrative, Ulysses is the“Book with two Mollys.” With Mollyforemost, Michael experiences the“necessary fiction” through reading itdeeply, too, from life reality. Molly—Molly Peacock, whose husband Michaeltoday is—and Michael grew increasinglyaware of each other when still schoolyouths. Their paths and lives parted forsome twenty years. These were yearsthrough which Michael gained hisprofessional stature as an in-depthJoycean, such as he progressively recog-nizes and re-recognizes himself throughhis book and the writing of it over theyears; and such as we, too, know him.The story of Molly and Michael, the storyof a deep partnership re-found and re-gained, has all the air of “fiction” in amode to which the precious Italian adagemay be bent: “Were it not true, it werewell invented.” The narrative strand ofthe “two Mollys” in Michael’s TheNecessary Fiction is perhaps the strongestjustification of the book’s title, as of theautobiographical mode through which itconveys scholarship and the criticalstance of a professional Joycean.

In the late 1970s, Michael’s grand

project that followed upon his PhD thesisand book was to serve as general editorfor the 63-volume James Joyce Archiveand as volume editor of its Ulyssesmaterials. The Archive was at its originthe brainchild of Gavin Borden,publisher-owner of Garland Publishing inNew York. Michael and I continued ourtransatlantic friendship and collaborationthrough exchanges over the realization ofthe Archive and my being enlisted tooversee its group of early-work volumes.As it happens, the two volumes dedicatedto the fair copy of A Portrait of the Artistas a Young Man (housed in the NationalLibrary of Ireland in Dublin) were thefirst Archive volumes to be published.Gavin and I ceremoniously presentedthem at the International James JoyceSymposium held in Dublin in 1977.Michael recounts the working processesat Garland for the James Joyce Archiveand conveys a sense of how he and Gavinbecame friends over it. Such friendshipbecame my good fortune, too, as I movedtowards establishing the Critical andSynoptic Edition of Ulysses which Gar-land published in 1984. I have a vividmemory still of Gavin’s deep concernover the melanoma that Michael hadthreateningly developed. In TheNecessary Fiction, Michael shares with usthe scare of its initial manifestation, therelief at its first healing, and the periodicrecurrences that he has had to learn to livewith. Michael recounts that Gavin died atan early age. As today his long-time sur-vivors, we are joined in sorrow for him.

It is, as will have become sufficientlyclear, a main feature of The NecessaryFiction to be personally cast. Its intimateprivacy extends unflinchingly back tochildhood, youth, family relations. Yet itis also true that—owing no doubt to theextended and variegated periods ofwriting the book—the successive chap-ters’ immersion in the privately personalis gradually reduced. Later book sectionstend to stand out distinctly more stronglythrough the immediacy of their respectivesubject areas. They will likely in thismode prove of particular interest to fellowJoyceans. This is true of the account anddiscussion, in two book chapters, of theway in which Michael’s impressively andthoroughly conceived “Ulysses Hyper-media” project—wholly avant-gardewhen envisaged—became impossibilized

by the James Joyce Estate. The personal,as said, is distinctly reined in in theaccount, and so it is merely as almost anaside that from one (ultimately abortive)negotiation with a publisher cited welearn that Stephen Joyce, representing theJames Joyce Estate, specified thatpermission would not be out of thequestion, provided that “the likes of HansWalter Gabler and Michael Groden, etc.not be contacted.” What makes thissubject area in The Necessary Fictionsuch instructive reading for Joyceans isthe insistence with which it highlights thedecades of stymying Joyce scholarshipand criticism through the James JoyceEstate.

In contrast to this depressing accountof the adversities that Joyce researchfaced, especially through two decadesaround the onset of the twenty-firstcentury, the chapter “One Day in theNational Library,” in which the bookculminates, opens up pastures new forJoyce studies through the library’s acqui-sition of a rich cache of original docu-ments that had lain hidden unrecognizedin a Paris basement for half a century. Forclose to twenty years now, intense studyof these materials has proceeded,unfettered by Estate restrictions. Michaelis rightly proud that he was approachedby the National Library of Ireland toadvise them on their purchase and askedfrom his thorough knowledge to give theaddress at the presentation of thecollection to the public, with an HonoraryDoctorate for himself to follow.

Yet at the same time: taking the keyrole that Michael has played in Joycestudies of recent times down to thepersonal level, we appreciate what isalways closest, since simply natural tohim: “Learn a lot teaching others. Thepersonal note,” as Michael quotesLeopold Bloom. And adds: “Bloom gotthat completely right.” This is how we all,in all our encounters with Michael—intensely, for instance, in our lunch-timeclose-reading broodings over the Ulyssestext under his direction at James Joycemeetings and symposia, and now again inThe Necessary Fiction—so richly enjoyhis knowledge, experience and his—well,yes: Bloomian—humanity. •

—Honorable TrusteeInternational James Joyce Foundation

Joyce and Others in Ecologies of SmutChris Forster

Filthy Material: Modernism & The Media of Obscenity.

New York: Oxford University Press,2019.

$99.00 hardcover/$35.00 paperback

Reviewed by VICTOR LUFTIG

IFINISHED READING Chris Forster’sexcellent book on the same day that

Ross Douthat published in The New YorkTimes his “The Academic Apocalypse,” atiresome attack on English professorsmuch like many others. Having just seenDouthat single out, and misrepresent, anessay by G. Gabrielle Starr and KevinDettmar, I was struck by Forster’s honor-ing Dettmar for doing in relation to Joycejust what Starr and Dettmar say humanistsought to be doing: analyzing andcontextualizing “disciplinary proceduresand habits of mind.” Dettmar, as Forstersays, “helpfully identifies” two criticaltraditions of response to the style ofUlysses, one that treats “‘form’ and ‘con-

tent’” as intertwined and another in whichthe two are “decouple[d]” (166). Thiskind of observation is how Starr andDettmar say we should deploy our“disciplinary procedures and habits ofmind”:

We can’t enforce them, ensure thatthey’re followed (Enjoy Shakespeare!And James Baldwin! And Zora NealeHurston! And James Joyce! NOW).We can show you new pleasures andnew ways of valuing things—we canembody them—but we can’t makeyou feel them. We model a style ofengagement, of critical thought: wedon’t transmit value.

Such modeling seems to me what FilthyMaterial is best at, both in the way itpositions modernist books as vehicles andin the way it works as a book itself.Forster, who teaches at Syracuse Univer-sity, doesn’t offer a lot of readings ofparticular texts, though the readings heoffers are very good, and while heengages works that have tended to elicit

passionate condemnations and defenses,he’s not a moralist. He calls FilthyMaterial “a study of modernist obscenityas an expression of twentieth-centurymedia history” (181). In its most mem-orable passages, Forster highlights inter-sections between modernist literary booksas books and other media but alsobetween modernist creators (in respectivechapters on works by Wyndham Lewisand Walter Sickert, D.H. Lawrence,Norah James and Radclyffe Hall, T. S.Eliot, and James Joyce) and theirantagonists, to whom he often ascribes,within stages of “media ecology” (6),quite unexpected roles.

That’s especially true of the Joyce ofUlysses, the subject of Forster’s finalchapter, in relation to censors. Afterdiscussing how early twentieth centuryworks by Djuna Barnes, Richard Alding-ton and others deploy the asterisk, tomark censored passages and in this wayto protest or to mock censorship itself (inthe way of Tristram Shandy), Forsterargues that Ulysses, in its “insistence onits own materiality … offers a kind of

self-censorship by interrupting the imme-diacy of obscenity” (164). The experienceof obscenity as necessarily im-mediateForster associates with Supreme CourtJustice Potter Stewart’s famous claimabout pornography: “‘I know it when Isee it’ means ‘I know it by seeing it,’”Forster says. “I know it, in short,immediately” (153)—thus, seeing it bothinstantaneously and without any con-scious engagement with the medium ofthe work.1 In contrast, asterisks andsimilar devices “thoroughly mediate”(154). Though lacking asterisks other thanto separate the sections of “WanderingRocks,” Ulysses “forcefully insist[s] onits own materiality,” repeatedly “makingits mediating presence, its medial identity,recognizable”; the effect throughout thetwentieth century, Forster argues, was to“mitigate [Ulysses’] obscenity” (172). Hesays, “If Ulysses was legally publishablea quarter century before Lady Chatter-ley’s Lover, it is, in part, because theformer foregrounded its materiality and soundermined its obscenity” (173). Heelaborates on this point by ending the

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020 PAGE 5

chapter (and, aside from a brief coda, thebook) by showing how differently Ulys-ses was censored when it appeared inanother material form, that of JosephStrick’s 1967 film adaptation. Anotherextended consideration of Joyce appearsin Forster’s opening chapter, “The MediaHistory of Obscenity,” where he interest-ingly positions the “foetus” sequence inPortrait in relation to “a print culturewhere the uses of medical texts [were]pornographic” (36).

Filthy Material frequently pairsUlysses and Lady Chatterley as occasionsfor famous obscenity cases, but it isequally interested in the further pairingsfostered by such occasions: when Forstersays that the concluding dot in “Ithaca” is“like the censor’s asterisk” (172), thatlikeness may remind his reader of the oneForster has earlier asserted between“Lawrence the controversial writer and[William] Joynson-Hicks … the prudishhome secretary” (71). Forster in factcredits his namesake, E. M. Forster, asnoticing that reading essays by Lawrenceand Joynson-Hicks “together highlightsthe deeper similarities between [those]apparent antagonists” (72). Filthy Mater-ial brings such pairs together not for thesake of compromise or synthesis but togive a sense of the media ecology ofwhich they were a part. The discussion ofLawrence (in brief connection with Joyce)here has mainly to do with piracy andcopyright. This context, as presented byChris (rather than E. M.) Forster, showsthat “Lawrence is able to express hiscritique of … pirate editions [of hiswritings] in a language that is consistentwith the rest of his work” (71), whereasJoyce’s comparable critique illustrates the“antimony” described by Paul Saint-Amour “between a collectivist model ofintertextuality and a possessive individ-ualist, natural-rights model of authorialproperty” (65).

Forster is necessarily more interestedin the latter aspect of this “antimony,” butI found suggestions of collectivity in anumber of places in Filthy Material. T.S.Eliot is the one poet who gets sustainedattention here, the focus being on the waymusic hall obscenity as processed by Eliot“reflects and creates a space of sharedcommunal meaning between artist andaudience” (142) of a kind that, Forsterinsists, is nevertheless “alien” to Eliot’sown writings. More hopeful in a way is

the conclusion of Forster’s pivotal fourthchapter, my favorite, which cleverlydiscusses Norah James’s SleevelessErrand and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well ofLoneliness in reverse chronological orderto show the impact of the reception of thelatter on the reception of the former—abit of critical sleight of hand I would havebet against working but that insteadmakes the chapter a tour de force. Itsconclusion contrasts the place of Hall’sStephen Gordon with that of StephenDedalus in their respective books: where-as Dedalus is typical of Kunstleroman“protagonists [who] reach a position towrite the novel we are reading, and soclose the gap between narrative andnarration” (122), the “social acceptance”Hall desires cannot be achieved byGordon and so “requires ratification fromthe readers to whom [Well] is addressed”(123). Forster attributes a similar reader-dependent dynamic to Bob Brown’scomically self-censoring Gems: A Cen-sored Anthology, which “return[s] ob-scenity…completely to the reader” (164).It is perhaps inevitable that a focus on theintertwining fates of media wouldimplicitly affirm, as they seem to me butmight not seem to Forster to do, modelsof collectivity; in any case it is oftencollectives of readers and sometimes writ-ers whose authority seems most ratifiedby the approach of this book, in ways thatin turn highlight the material significanceof books that prompted those fleetingcollectives.

Forster’s study is exemplary in itscritical generosity, respectful and atten-tive to the scholars who have proceededhim—Joyceans like Dettmar and KarenLawrence and previous materialist ana-lysts of modernism and others. He has, Ithink, not a single nasty word to say aboutany, which seems in keeping with the wayhe treats apparent antagonists from thepast as constituent parts of interestingenvironments. Filthy Material works byinclusion rather than antagonism, markingnew shared space but not seeking todisplace others. Moreover, Forster haswritten a splendid work of criticism that,in the model of his materialist prede-cessors, negotiates adeptly the mass ofinterpretations of the great modernists’central texts: subordinating readings oftexts to material analysis of books is agreat way of staying clear of that mass.

That Forster asks us to think about the

materiality of the books he studies inrelation to changing media environmentsmight make inevitable our thinking aboutthe materiality of his book: OxfordUniversity Press has further invited suchconsideration by providing for FilthyMaterial a literally striking cover (onwhich the author’s name, half the book’stitle, and a number of the books andauthors discussed by Forster are crossedout) and a lot of illustrations. But theillustrations are not very striking inappearance—it’s not just that none are incolor (which undermines, for instance,Forster’s discussion in his coda of theimportantly identifying green cover of theOlympia Press edition of Lolita); they’renot really even in vivid black and white,since the important images of printpassages appear against an obscuring graybackground. Forster hasn’t been well-served editorially, either: he is capable ofproducing wonderfully wrought senten-ces, so the fact that so many repeat nearbymaterial—with the end of a sentencerepeated as the beginning of the next, orthe same quotation often appearing twiceverbatim and once paraphrased in a singleparagraph—seems an infelicity he couldhave been helped to avoid.

I mention these not to fault OUP,which has clearly invested in the book’sappearance, or Forster, but to make note,in the spirit of Forster’s analysis, of anelement of the media ecology that nowsurrounds published literary criticism.Filthy Material is conceptually a productof the digital age, repeatedly invokingcontemporary notions of text and dis-tinctly 21st-century media, and approach-ing modernist writing through a lensinflected by hypertext and digital images.But everything from its expensive hard-cover price to the shortcomings of itsimages highlights the pressure on earlycareer faculty in our field to continue topublish in print forms in spite of theenormous advantages—especially in rela-tion to access to communities of ratifyingreaders of the kind Forster describes inrelation to Hall, but also in terms of therelative inexpensiveness and efficacy intransmitting images—of digital publi-cation.

It would be stirring to see Forsterwork in another medium.2 We should allof us be trying to do what we can tocontribute or at least to respond to currentacademic media ecology in such a way so

as to give terrific scholars in Forster’sgeneration—of whom there are manymore than there are good academic jobsand the possibility of hard copy universitypress publications for—the fullest oppor-tunities to model for as diverse reader-ships as possible their splendid “habits ofmind.” (Such encouragement would beespecially welcome from commentatorslike Douthat, whose employer on the onehand has responded to market pressuresby finding new means for publishingdiverse voices and reaching new reader-ships but on the other hand has continuedto publish cynical dismissals like his ofthe work of young humanists.) FilthyMaterial should be read for its criticalmerits but should also be recognized as amaterial marker of what is being mostbrutally censored in contemporary criti-cism, i.e., the capacities of a generation oftalented scholars who are having to fitthemselves to material conditions asoppressive as those encountered by Joyce.

—University of Virginia

WORKS CITED

Douthat, Ross. “The AcademicApocalypse.” The New York Times, 11Jan, 2020.

www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/opinion / S und a y/ a c a d e mi c s -h u ma n i t i e s -literature-canon.html

Starr, G. Gabrielle and Kevin Dett-mar. “Who Decides What’s Good andWhat’s Bad in the Humanities?” TheChronicle Review, 17 Sept., 2019.

www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190917-who-decides-in-the-humanities

NOTES

1. Starr and Dettmar also mention “Iknow it when I see it,” by the way, as anear analogue for Arnoldian invocationsof “taste.” Asking someone to respondinterestingly to the phrase “I know itwhen I see it” would make a pretty reli-able test of critical ability at almost anylevel; Forster’s thinking about the phrasein terms of media might be one of the bestyet and epitomizes what’s insightfulabout his book.

2. Full disclosure: I have. Forster usedto be a graduate student where I work,and a class of his I saw him teach once,on Faulkner’s “The Bear,” was the verybest I’ve ever observed. #

Anna Livia Plura-lingualPatrick O’NeillTrilingual Joyce:

The Anna Livia Variations.University of Toronto Press, 2018.

$57.00

Reviewed by E. PAIGE MILLER

AQUESTION OFTEN RAISED regarding Joyce’sFinnegans Wake is whether or not it can be

translated. Yet, as more and more translators have takenon this challenge, the translation of Joyce’s Wakeselanguage has proven not only a possibility but a fruitfulsite for literary criticism. In Trilingual Joyce: The AnnaLivia Variations, Patrick O’Neill makes translators of usall with his comparative study of the interrelatedtranslation processes across three versions of Anna LiviaPlurabelle (hereafter referred to as ALP). Dedicated toone of Joyce’s most celebrated characters, ALP wouldbecome the infamous Book I, Chapter 8 of FinnegansWake, and Joyce was involved with the translation of ALP

into French, Italian, and Basic English—the threetranslations that comprise O’Neill’s examination.

Author of works such as Polyglot Joyce (2005) andImpossible Joyce (2013), O’Neill offers a fascinatingmicroanalysis of what he calls the “Annalivian

macrotext.” I think Dieter Fuchs in his review ofImpossible Joyce described O’Neill’s methodology best:“[O’Neill] fuses some of the best insights of old-schooland cutting-edge criticism” (393). In Trilingual Joyce, hedraws upon such expertise to provide engaging closetextual analysis for readers of various familiarities withnot only ALP but also translation theory.

Translations of Finnegans Wake have been thesubject of much recent scholarly inquiry, but O’Neill’s isthe first comparative examination of the three trans-lations of ALP with which Joyce was immediatelyinvolved. Although he focuses on only these threetranslations, O’Neill notes that as of 2017 there were 31complete or substantially completed translations of ALP insixteen languages (205). What is unique about O’Neill’sapproach is his emphasis on trilingualism, whichpositions the three translations as one “macrotext” inwhich the texts interact with and influence each other. AsO’Neill states, his central concern in Trilingual Joyce isto demonstrate “the range and relationship of Joyce’stranslatorial responses—and their contribution to anAnnalivian macrotext” (39). Such an approach parallelscurrent research in translation studies and is a welcomecontribution to Joyce criticism.

Situating expert and novice readers of Joyce’s workalike within the publication history of ALP, O’Neillprovides an informative introduction that lays a sturdyfoundation for the detailed close readings that follow. He

also raises a number of questions regarding some of thetheoretical issues in the field of translation studies suchas untranslatability, self-translation, the role ofcollaboration in these projects, and translation as an actof rewriting or re-creation—or, as he describes it,“whether these renderings even qualify in the first placeto be considered translations properly so called” (182).Despite such critical engagement, this is not a work oftranslation criticism; instead, in Trilingual Joyce, O’Neillfocuses on close textual analysis of the nuances betweentranslations, or, “the very frequently subtle and some-times drastic new shades of meaning and implicationintroduced by the linguistic and cultural transposition ofindividual words and phrases” (182).

Although his focus in Trilingual Joyce is not onlarger questions of translation theory, O’Neill fore-grounds two key issues pertaining to the field particularlyrelevant to the ALP translations. First, he profiles theindividuals behind these translations, such as SamuelBeckett, Alfred Perón, Nino Frank, and Ettore Settanni.This background information is helpful for readers whomight not be as familiar with Joyce’s inner circles, but italso emphasizes the creative work done by translatorsthat, unfortunately, often goes overlooked. O’Neill alsohighlights the enormous effort and commitment thattranslation projects like those of ALP require:

In addition to the 1,600 hours he spent on the original

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020PAGE 6

English text of ALP, it reportedly took Joyce overseventeen three-hour meetings to translate the lessthan seven pages of the French ALP; it reportedly tookJoyce and Nino Frank another fifty or so hours over afurther twenty-four meetings to render the same linesinto Italian (5).

In doing so, O’Neill follows current directions intranslation studies that seek to shed more light ontranslators’ work. As translation theorist Steven G. Yaoclaims, “translation as a mode of cultural, and especiallyliterary, production has been incorrectly considered asecond-order or ancillary activity, and hence unfairlyoverlooked as subordinate and even inferior to ‘original’composition in both creative and cultural significance”(209). By underscoring the translators’ roles in thecreation of these works and by demonstrating that thereis no “perfect” translation, even when the author isinvolved, O’Neill effectively shifts the hierarchy of howwe understand the source text in relation to itstranslations.

Within his primary focus on Joyce’s “translatorialresponses,” O’Neill accords special importance to thosetranslation choices related to meter and rhythm inparticular. In his characteristically detailed closedreadings of the text, he argues that syllabic measurementsand the prosodic rules of each language motivate certaintranslation choices. As is often noted, the musicallanguage of Finnegans Wake is one of Joyce’s greatestachievements, and he paid considerable attention toperfecting the “soundsense” of the text (FW 121.15). Itwould only make sense that Joyce would also prioritizethe sound of the translations over any other sort oflinguistic fidelity to the source text. In Trilingual Joyce,by “attempting to examine every word and resonance,and, at least in principle, every letter in a limited range ofexemplary passages in all three languages,” O’Neillmakes a strong case for translational choices motivatedby sound and rhythm rather than meaning.

O’Neill relates the long history of ALP’s developmentspanning seventeen years, from the first words Joycepenned as early as 1923, just one year after thepublication of Ulysses, to its publication in book form in1928 to its final incorporation as the eighth chapter ofFinnegans Wake in 1939. Joyce described the premise ofthe chapter as “a chattering dialogue across the river bytwo washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and astone. The river is named Anna Liffey” (qtd. in O’Neill5). The fluvial theme is the “most widely-knowneccentricity” of ALP and Joyce incorporated hundreds ofriver names from places all over the world into the text.As he once expressed it, Joyce “liked to think how someday, way off in Tibet or Somaliland, some boy or girl inreading that little book would be pleased to come uponthe name of his or her river” (qtd. in O’Neill 10). As withmost of the references throughout the Wake, the rivernames follow certain patterns for entering the text, andO’Neill categorizes them in three main ways:“undisguised mention,” in which the river is more or lesseasily identifiable, “overt linguistic distortion,” and thecrowd-favorite “linguistic serendipity” (9). The extent towhich any reader reacts to the river references dependson the interpretative priorities of the individual, and thesame goes for translators of ALP. As O’Neill identifies,the river names, apart from their role in supporting thechapter’s fluvial theme, can also serve as a method oftracking the choices of different translators. In the Frenchand Italian translations, for example, Joyce apparentlyseized every opportunity to add another river namewhenever possible.

French ALP

Of the three translations examined in TrilingualJoyce, the French ALP is by far the version surrounded bythe most controversy. O’Neill describes how Joyce hadbegun thinking about the possibility of translating ALP

shortly after its appearance in book form in 1928 and,soon after, the author invited Beckett to undertake “anexperimental French translation” of the opening pages(13). Beckett, who had only recently arrived in Paris,recruited Alfred Perón to collaborate on the project, andthe two set off on their task in 1930. After months ofassiduous labor, Beckett and Perón presented themanuscript to Joyce, which he ultimately rejected. Joyceworked on his own translation with a new team thatincluded neither Beckett nor Perón; however, when thefinal version of the French translation was eventuallypublished, the list of translators read “traduit de l’anglaispar Samuel Beckett, Alfred Perron [sic], Ivan Goll,

Eugène Jolas, Paul L. Léon, Adrienne Monnier etPhillippe Soupault, en collaboration avec l’auteur” (qtd.in O’Neill 20). Though several possibilities have beensuggested, it remains unclear what left Joyce unsatisfiedwith Beckett’s translation, and the extent to which thattranslation influenced Joyce’s remains a source ofcontention.

“however basically English” ALP (FW 116.26)

Though it maintains an English lexical structure, thelanguage of the Wake, as anyone who has even onceopened the book can attest, is very much written in itsown Wakese. This begs the question of whether or notthe Wake could be translated into English. One attempt atan “English” translation is C.K. Ogden’s Basic Englishrendering of ALP. Ogden’s Basic English was meant to bea simplified, auxiliary language, consisting of around 850words and a scarce eighteen verbs. Immediately follow-ing the publication of the French ALP in 1931, Joycebegan his collaboration with Ogden on translating theclosing pages of the book into the pared-down language.Ogden’s sparse Basic English and Joyce’s abundant andcomplex Wakese represent two extremes of experi-mentation with the English language. Although the BasicEnglish translation, unsurprisingly, left much to bedesired, Joyce did not seem entirely unsatisfied with it.O’Neill’s brief readings of the Basic English translationsseem to suggest more common ground between Joyceand Ogden than has been previously recognized.

Italian ALP

The Italian ALP is widely considered to be the best ofthe three translations with which Joyce was involved, andfor that reason it has attracted the most critical attention.Scholars such as Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli,Umberto Eco, Jacqueline Risset and Serenella Zanottihave suggested that Joyce’s Italian ALP is less atranslation than a parallel text, an authorial rewriting ofthe original. Like the earlier French translation, theItalian translation is also mired in translatorial lore. Joycecollaborated on the translation with Nino Frank; yet,when the first part was published in 1940, it made nomention of Frank’s involvement, and instead read“traduzione italiana di James Joyce e Ettore Settanni”(30-31), a reversal that seems to have arisen due to thenecessity for censorship in Mussolini’s Italy. O’Neilldescribes Settanni’s role in the translation as “decidedlyshadowy” (31), only offering scattered emendations tothe completed translation rather than any significantcreative input.

These three translations—French, Basic English, andItalian—are closely analyzed in the ten meticulously-structured chapters of Trilingual Joyce. O’Neill examinesroughly fifty excerpts from ALP and their correspondingtranslations. The excerpts, ranging between five andfifteen lines of text, are quoted at the beginning of thechapter from the 1930 Faber edition of ALP (1997reprint). The sequence is then broken down into smallerunits consisting of two or three lines in order to comparethe translations side-by-side. This structure, though fairlysegmented, successfully guides readers through theWakese, French, Italian, and Basic English and allowsO’Neill to highlight the nuances between translations.Each chapter ends with a “Comments and Contexts”section, in which O’Neill draws conclusions based on thesignificant translation features of the selected excerpts.Instead of providing a summary of every chapter, theremainder of this review focuses on just four of thosechapters, ones that simultaneously illuminate O’Neill’smethodology as well as some of his more noteworthyarguments related to translation theory.

In Chapter One, “All about Anna,” O’Neillconcentrates on the famous opening lines of ALP in whichJoyce sets the scene of the two washerwomen beginningto gossip about Anna Livia Plurabelle:

Otell me all about

Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell meall. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear.

(O’Neill 40; ALP 3; FW 196.1-6)1

The most immediately striking aspect of the openingsequence is not its linguistic innovation but rather thetext’s triangular form, which Joyce designed to mirror his

symbol for ALP. Indeed, as O’Neill rightly argues inthis first chapter, these lines are more or less in “plainEnglish” and, though memorable and quite poetic, thepassage lacks some of the translatorial complexity thatarises later in ALP. Even so, O’Neill identifies someimportant nuances found in the French and Italianversions. Take, for example, Beckett’s2 and Joyce’sFrench renderings of the first three lines:

Beckett: Ô dis-moi tout d’Anna Livia! Je veux toutsavoir d’Anna Livia!Joyce: O, dis-moi tout d’Anna Livie! Je veux toutsavoir d’Anna Livie!

Only minor differences exist between the twotranslations as O’Neill observes—most notably, theadded circumflex in Beckett’s translation and Joyce’srendering of “Livie,” with its added play on the French“vie.” Both Beckett and Joyce translate the final “hear”as “savoir” (to know), which O’Neill interprets as their“willingness as translators to abandon literal fidelity in agood cause” (51); in this case, the “good cause” acts infavor of the prosodic rules of the language.

More interesting is the comparison of Joyce’s ownrenderings in French and Italian. Even in these earlylines, the author/self-translator demonstrates a certainflamboyant “translational freedom” in Italian, asevidenced by the final line of this sequence, “You’ll diewhen you hear,” which he renders as “Roba di chiodi.”This “vigorous and idiomatic” exclamation, as O’Neilldescribes it, translates roughly to “incredible!” or“unbelievable!” and not only slightly alters the tone ofthe original but also draws directly on Joyce’s years inTrieste, as “roba di chiodi” is a characteristicallyTriestine idiomatic expression (48). In fact, Settanni lateremended the translation to read “Roba d’altro mondo!”,likely in an effort to make the lines more accessible to ageneral Italian readership while still maintaining itsidiomaticity. Such choices demonstrate Joyce’s earlyexpressions of the flamboyance of his Italian renderingsthat his earlier French translation lacks.

As the translations progress, so too does Joyce’stranslatorial freedom as author/self-translator, O’Neillargues. The Italian ALP continues to blossom in waysindependent from the source text. O’Neill highlights thisdeparture particularly in Chapter 3, “Steeping andStuping,” a sequence that is also notable for its“idiomatic Irish flavor of Joyce’s English” (76). In theselines, the washerwomen have now turned their attentionaway from ALP and instead towards her husband, HCE,whom they describe as “an awful old reppe,” and filthyboth inside and out. Ever the faithful translator, Beckettcontinues to provide a solid foundation for Joyce toemend. O’Neill elucidates this point expertly in threelines in particular:

ALP: I know by heart the places he likes to saale,duddurty devil!Beckett’s French: Je sais par coeur les endroits qu’ilaime à saalir, le misérable.Joyce’s French: Je sais paroker les endroits qu’il aimeà seillir, le mymyserable.

(O’Neill 70; ALP 3; FW 196.13–15)

While Beckett translates cautiously (with his exactrenderings of “Je sais par coeur” and “le misérable”),Joyce makes a humorous move (“paroker”), injects HCE’scharacteristic stutter (“mymyserable”), and, as always,packs in a few more river names. This same line inJoyce’s Italian translation exposes even more culturalspecificity.

Joyce’s Italian: So ben io cosa quell macchiavuol.Lordo balordo!

With a significant additional reference toMachiavelli, Joyce departs from his original in a way thatdemonstrates his aims, “not at translatorial reproductionbut at authorial re-production, still continuingobsessively to extend unrestrainedly, creatively, if viaItalian rather than English, his still continuing ‘work inprogress’” (77). In other words, this sequence representsa characteristic Joycean departure from the original thatextends the Italian rendering in unexpected and creativeways and embodies the sense that Finnegans Wake, bynature, is a cyclical text that invites re-creation.

Until this point, the nuances between translationshave been the focus of this review; but, as O’Neillexpertly identifies throughout Trilingual Joyce, the

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020 PAGE 7

network of influence and interaction is the most notablefeature of these three translations when readcomparatively. One moment in which O’Neill makesevident the mutually beneficial nature of this trans-lational network occurs in Chapter 6, “Phenician Rover.”The extent of Beckett’s influence on Joyce’s translationhas been debated, and O’Neill consistently characterizesBeckett as the more hesitant translator who providesreliable translations from which Joyce later digresses;however, this hierarchy is not always the case. Forinstance, the Italian rendering “il gran fenicio lope demara” seems to arise more from Beckett’s French “legrand loup de mer Phénician” than either the source textor Joyce’s French, in which he does not adopt Beckett’srendering (109-112). Through this example, O’Neillidentifies how the translations function as a macro-textual network. Joyce sometimes clearly referencedBeckett’s French when translating into Italian, ratherthan relying on the ALP source text, as if to say in hind-sight that Beckett had improved the language through histranslation.

The issue of influence across these texts receivessignificant attention not only in Chapter 6 but alsothroughout Trilingual Joyce. O’Neill recognizes that theorder in which the translations were produced might haveinfluenced Joyce as both an author and translator. WhileJoyce was working with his team on the Frenchtranslation, he was also in the midst of composing Workin Progress, which would later become Finnegans Wake;furthermore, he was becoming increasingly interested inforeign languages as well as translation practice asO’Neill reminds us, citing Daniel Ferrer and JacquesAubert (17). By the time he began the Italian translationproject with Nino Frank, however, Joyce had alreadycompleted Finnegans Wake, which might have given himthe distance necessary for more authorial freedom thanhe had had in the French translation. Also, the extent ofBeckett’s influence on Joyce’s translation is a point ofcontention. O’Neill takes a moderate standpoint on theissue, arguing neither that Joyce entirely disregardedBeckett’s translation nor that Beckett was a primeinfluence. Instead, through this microanalysis, O’Neillidentifies significant moments in the text where Joyceretained Beckett’s translation choices and others wherehe extended them. Unlike his French rendering, Joyce’sItalian translation in collaboration with Nino Frank wasthe first of its kind. It was only later that Settanni pro-vided the emendations, most of which tone down andcensor Joyce’s often-extravagant translations. In anargument reductio ad absurdum, if Joyce hadn’t hadBeckett’s translation, maybe his French translation wouldhave turned out differently, or perhaps if the order hadbeen reversed, with the Italian translation before theFrench, his French would be more flamboyant. It isimpossible to tell, and an argument that O’Neill does notpurport to make, but one that this reviewer findswelcome to discussions about Finnegans Wake not onlyamongst Joyceans but also in the wider field of

translation studies.In Chapters 9 and 10, O’Neill shifts the focus away

from the French translations, as Beckett and Perón onlytranslated the first 193 lines of ALP, which equalsapproximately 22 per cent of the text. Instead, we havethe addition of Ogden’s Basic English, which comprisesthe final pages and 130 lines, as well as the continuedanalysis of the Italian translation. Organized similarly toChapters 1-8, both Chapters 9 and 10 lead with theexcerpted lines from the 1930 ALP, followed by Ogden’sBasic English, Joyce’s French, and Joyce’s Italian. Inthese two chapters, O’Neill has less to comment uponOgden’s Basic English than he had about Beckett’sFrench translation, and understandably so considering theintentional flattening effect of Ogden’s linguisticexperimentation. O’Neill still manages to identify andexplicate a few of the more missed absences in the BasicEnglish translation. In particular, he describes the finallines of the ALP as “marked by a strongly dactylicunderlying rhythm, introduced already in its openingwords, by striking effects of rhyme and assonance, andby a sense of growing darkness, blurred outlines,inability to hear or see or communication properly, andgeneral confusion and disintegration” (170). For ex-ample, take the final powerful lines of ALP:

Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Tell metale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of,hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

(O’Neill 178; ALP 35; cf. FW 216.03-5 “Telmetale”)

The “striking effects of rhyme and assonance”evaporate entirely in Basic English, which Ogden rendersas:

Say it, say it, say it, tree! Night night! The story sayof stem or stone. By the side of the river waters of,this way and that way waters of. Night!

Much of the richness of these final lines is lost inOgden’s translation. First, one of the more interestingtranslational choices is Ogden’s rendering of “tell me” to“say it,” which follows the restrictive list of the onlyeighteen permitted verbs in Basic English. “Elm” is alsoreplaced by the more general “tree.” These two choicescombined lose the original alliteration “tell me, elm.”Furthermore, the “rivering” and “hitherandthithering”rhyme of the final line, which O’Neill points out is “oneof the most musical in the original,” is also lost whensubstituted by the rather lackluster “this way and thatway” (178). And, of course, not only in this particularpassage but also throughout the Basic English trans-lation, Ogden sacrifices most if not all of the riverreferences.

The Basic English translation does not receive asmuch attention in O’Neill’s analysis, and if one piece ofcriticism had to be lodged at this work, it would be that

the Basic English sequences do not add to a reading of an“Annalivian macrotext” as much as the other twotranslations do; nevertheless, O’Neill invites readers tothink through possible connections between theseemingly diametrically opposed languages of Wakeseand Basic English. What’s more, his analysis of theBasic English translation provides space in a way thatleaves readers to consider how the two linguistic projectsare more related than they would at first appear.Somehow the dissonance between the richly musicallanguage of the final sequence in ALP and the stripped-down “simple sense” of its Basic English renderingreflects the two washerwomen—two extremes of “Eng-lish”— who become further separated and can only shoutat each other from opposite banks of a widening river.

In conclusion, O’Neill carefully guides readers acrossthe banks of these three translations through his deftclose textual analysis. His trilingual study of ALP is adelightfully serendipitous reading of Joyce’s symbol,with the French, Italian, and Basic English translations asintersecting waterways whose delta simultaneously opensto invite further interpretations and translations. AsO’Neill expertly claims, “there are as many FinnegansWake and ALPs as there are readings of Finnegans Wakeand ALP—most obviously so in the case of those readerswho are also translators” (200). Any translation is afountain of intertextual richness that extends the sourcetext and alters how readers might understand it; likewise,Trilingual Joyce revises our approach to ALP. O’Neill’sstudy is an exemplary model of Joyce criticism that is aspleasurable to read as it is challenging and thought-provoking. #

—University of Miami

NOTES

1. For ease of reference, in-text parenthetical citationsfollowing ALP passages include the page numbers forO’Neill as well as the corresponding pages in ALP (citedfrom the 1997 reprint of the 1930 Faber edition of AnnaLivia Plurabelle) and Finnegans Wake.

2. O’Neill refers to Beckett and Perón’s translationsimply as “Beckett’s French.” I have maintained hischoice here for consistency.

WORKS CITED

Fuchs, Dieter. “Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakesby Patrick O'Neill (Review).” Partial Answers, vol. 15,no. 2, 2017, pp. 391-393.

Joyce, James. Anna Livia Plurabelle. 1930. Faber andFaber, 1997.

——. Finnegans Wake. Viking Press: PenguinBooks, 1976.

O'Neill, Patrick. Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes.University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Yao, Steven G.. “Translation Studies andModernism.” A Handbook of Modernism Studies, JohnWiley and Sons, 2013, pp. 209-223.

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

VOLUME 34, NUMBER 1, SPRING 2020

EditorsPATRICK A. MCCARTHY 1999-present

ZACK BOWEN 1994-2010BERNARD BENSTOCK 1986-1994

Managing Editor RUTH TREGO

Assistant EditorALEXANDRIA MORGAN

Cooperating EditorsMORRIS BEJA # CLAIRE CULLETON # MICHAEL PATRICK GILLESPIE # FRITZ SENN

The James Joyce Literary Supplement is an international scholarly journal dedicated toreviewing all books about or related to James Joyce and Joyce-related subjects, such as Irishliterature and Modernism. JJLS began publication in May 1987, under the late BernardBenstock. Published twice a year, in May and December, JJLS is currently edited by Patrick A.McCarthy; managing editor, Ruth Trego; assistant editor, Alexandria Morgan; with aid fromCooperating Editors Morris Beja, Claire Culleton, Michael Patrick Gillespie, and Fritz Senn.Mountains of credit also go to our production designer, Robert Lowery, of the Irish LiterarySupplement, who planted the JJLS seed in Berni's head long, long ago.

You may contact the JJLS offices at:The James Joyce Literary Supplement

PO Box 248145Coral Gables, FL 33124

305-284-3140jjls.english@miami.edu

Advertising rate card available. Yearly subscriptions are: $16.00 individual(U.S.), $18.00institutional inside the U.S.; $18 individual and $20 institutional outside the U.S. E-mailaddress: jjls.english@miami.edu ISSN: 0899-3114 http://www.as.miami.edu/english/jjls/jjls.htm

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SUBSCRIPTIONS:Yearly: $16.00 individuals (U.S. only), $18.00 individuals outside U.S. and all libraries. Mail toJames Joyce Literary Supplement, Department of English, PO Box 248145, Coral Gables FL33124. Subscriptions may also be purchased or renewed online athttp://www.as.miami.edu/english/jjls/order

NAME

ADDRESS

CITY/STATE/ZIP

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020PAGE 8

TITLE:

Pool the begg and pass the kish for

crawsake

Oil on canvas

“Tilling a teel of a tum, telling a tollof a teary turty Taubling. Gracebefore Glutton. For what we are,gifs a gross if we are, about tobelieve. So pool the begg and passthe kish for crawsake. Omen.”

(FW 7: 5-8)

Dear dirty Dublin, Joyce physically left her, but tookher with him in his heart. He had this love-haterelationship with her. The Dublin of his time wassuffocating, like an austere parent who frowned on hiscreativity. Poolbeg and Kish, two lighthouses that Joycewould have passed leaving Dublin, are now dwarfedby the Poolbeg chimneys.In 2014, when the ESB proposed demolishing theobsolete chimneys, there was public outcry. The much-loved landmarks had to stay.

Title:

O Tell me All

Oil on canvas

“O tell me all about Anna Livia! I wantto hear all about Anna Livia. Well, youknow Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we allknow Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell menow. You’ll die when you hear.”

(FW 196: 1-6)

Chapter eight of Finnegans Wake begins with twowasherwomen gossiping about Anna Livia and her husbandHCE. They tantalizingly refer to his crime, but still leave usunsure of its nature. The text of the chapter is made up ofmany river names from all over the world woven into thedialogue of the two women and of Anna Livia herself. Thechapter opens with “O tell me all about Anna Livia!”, with thetype set in the form of a delta. Reading it aloud, one can hearechoes of the young babbling river at its source, slowing downas the chapter progresses until it flows out to the sea as an oldwoman. The painting is inspired by the Anna Livia keystone head onthe façade of the Tropical Fruit Company warehouse on SirJohn Rogerson’s Quay in Dublin. She is witness to the history ofDublin City from its inception, and with a look of defiance sheknows that she will be reborn following the end of her journeyat the Alexander Basin. The large O is the opening word ofthe chapter and a symbol of the circular life of the Liffey. Ifappears in the form of a tree ring to represent howdendrochronology marks time. Within the circle, text from theopening of the chapter spirals into a vortex.

TITLE:

The Porters are very nice people, are they

not?

Oil on canvas

“Tell me something. The Porters, soto speak, after their shadowstealersin the newsbaggers, are very nicepeople, are theynot? Very, allfourlike tellt. And on this wise, MrPorter (Bartholomew, heavy man,astern, mackerel shirt, hayamattperuke) is an excellent forefatherand Mrs Porter (leading lady, apoopahead, gaffneysaffronnightdress, iszoppy chepelure) is amost kindhearted messmother. A sounited family pateramater is notmore existing on papel or off of it.”

(FW 560: 22-28)

The Porters are HCE, Anna Livia, and their family.Here, they are modelled on the Romanesque sculptures of Gislebertus from theCathedral of Saint Lazarus (continuing the Wakean theme of resurrection) of Autun.Gislebertus’ sculptures for the Cathedral linkOld and New Testament in much the sameway that Joyce links various moments in historyand mythology throughout the wake. AnnaLivia is redolent of Eve as temptress; Joycefrequently associates ALP with apples in thetext. HCE, who bears a remarkable visualsimilarity in this painting to Joyce himself, maybe sneaking a letter into Shaun’s bag, or hemay be removing it.

These illustrations were done by Carol Wade as part of her

“Art of the Wake” series. As her website for the project

explains, “Joyce has created a wonderful tapestry of

historical, social, and cultural references in Finnegans Wake.

The Art of the Wake seeks to weave some of these references

into illustrations with the same playful witticism that Joyce

was renowned for.” More information about Carol’s project

can be found at artofthewake.com.

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020 PAGE 9

Modernist Reinventions of CommunityCaroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson, Editors.

Modernist Communities across Cultures and Media.

Gainesville: University Press of Florida,2019. $90.00

Reviewed by MARGOT BACKUS

and GRETE NORQUIST

OWING TO THE WAYS in whichcommunity, as a category, touches

on a vast range of variables, each ofwhich, depending on their placement withrespect to a given community, may besubject to rupture or instead remainsecured in their cohesion, CarolinePollentier and Sarah Wilson have chosenan unusually fertile subject in their editedcollection of essays on modernist commu-nities. The editors and their contributorshave made outstanding use of commu-nity’s multivalence as it intersects withmodernism, particularly as a close inspec-tion of this intersection allows for a seriesof detailed and theoretically provocativediscussions of the purported and manifestruptures from which definitions ofmodernism have sprung.

Starting with Virginia Woolf andJean-Luc Nancy’s invocation of “theidiosyncratic space of the train carriage asa . . . metonymy for the modernistperiod,” defined in contrast to the nine-teenth-century’s chosen, utopian“communitarianisms,” Pollentier and Wil-son set out, in their capacious, denselywoven introduction, to complicate inmyriad ways the purported “total rupture”between modernism and prior Victorianperspectives (1–2). In so doing, theyproduce new ruptures while disputing thesignificance of others, beginning with theargument that modernism, “if conceivedof as a historical period, . . . entails”something more like a shift than arupture, occurring at “the end of thenineteenth century” (2).

Implicit in the twentieth-century dis-cussions and debates about communitythat Pollentier and Wilson deem to havethe greatest bearing on conceptions ofmodernist community is the distinctionthey posit between “modernist employ-ments of community,” which are fre-quently “diffuse and evanescent,” and the“sometimes totalizing, repressive . . .forms of community (national, ethnic,religious, military) that were so robust inVictorian, and later, fascistic renderings”(2). Thus in the introduction the editorsare exploring modes of community that,through their very contingency, affordedmodes of “protection” against, or insu-lation from, the nineteenth century’shighly structured, boundaried national,racial and sectarian communities, and theexpansionist imperial nation-states towhich they gave rise (2). In this approachto modernism, in terms of community, itmight be said that the rupture that definesglobal modernism both preceded andprecipitated modernism, which here re-sponds to Victorian absolutism repara-tively, to employ Eve Sedgwick’s term,through a variety of momentary or trans-actional webs and networks (xx).1 Thispositioning of modernist communities asemploying ephemeral patterns of culturalexchange to hold open spaces outside ofmodernity’s destructive, totalizing narra-tives is particularly explicit in Pollentierand Wilson’s discussion of HannahArendt’s writing on “imperialism in . . .The Origins of Totalitarianism, [in which]Arendt tracks the plight of what she calls

the ‘rightless’ in the first half of thetwentieth century: people sundered fromtheir homes [who], … ‘thrown out of oneof these tightly organized closed commu-nities,’ find themselves ‘thrown out of thefamily of nations altogether’” (5–6).Modernism’s provisional, experiential,and transitory modes of communityappear, in these essays, as “plural formsof participation—that is, as performativepositions and ecosystems of multiplicity,”allowing for diverse collective sites ofbelonging (15). In them, the reader isafforded opportunities to see the “perfor-mativity of games, discourse, music,dance, and new media” as productive andresourceful responses to the absolute andexpansionist conceptions of communitythat precipitated the First World War (15).

Divided into four post-Introductionsections, the volume opens with threeessays under the rubric “CollectiveExperiments.” The first of these, JeremyBraddock’s “The Scandal of a BlackUlysses: Wallace Thurmon, RichardBruce Nugent, and the Harlem Receptionof Joyce,” explores fascinating new vistasin an area that saw its first surge incritical popularity in the early nineties,when comparative studies of the IrishRevival and the Harlem Renaissance pro-liferated in an expanding moderniststudies. Braddock’s essay brings to thiscomparative optic the benefit of decadesof comparative and global moderniststudies, and a more granular understand-ing of the Harlem Renaissance itself thanwas available in the first heyday ofRevival/Renaissance research projects.Braddock’s essay superbly explicates, byway of allusions to and incorporation ofUlysses in two romans a clef of theHarlem Renaissance, the nuanced dis-tinctions that existed between two genera-tions of Harlem Renaissance writers andartists, who “express allegiances fordifferent phases of the [Irish Revival]”(42). As Braddock argues, the youngergeneration associated with Wallace Thur-mon and Richard Bruce Nugent “prizedJoyce’s successful autonomization,”while the more established authorsanthologized in the New Negro, includingthe anthology’s influential editor, AlainLocke, “identified with the productivedissensions organized around the exampleof Synge” (42). Braddock’s essay shedslight on the complex interrelations amongdefining writers and editors of the HarlemRenaissance. It should also be of interestto Joyceans, as Braddock’s readings ofThurmon’s and Nugent’s writing demon-strate that these authors understoodJoyce’s novel in ways that differ from andalso excel the understanding evinced byUlysses’ greatest modernist champions,Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

The other two essays in this sectionshare an interest in modes of performancethat allow for simultaneous collectivetransgression and bonding. Irene Gamel’s“Avant-Garde Play: Building RadicalCommunity through Games,” starts with aMan Ray photograph of the Dada groupin front of Le Jockey recording a 1923visit to Paris by The Little Review’seditors, Margaret Anderson and JaneHeap. Gamel examines numerous detailsof individuals’ facial expressions, ges-tures, and direction of gaze whereby thephotograph “performatively and playfullystages the dynamics of the group as acommunal assertion of the avant-gardeperiodical’s international Dada phase”(46). Gamel examines a series of similarinstances of Dadaist play, including aseries of Dada group portraits, andPicabia’s collectively produced L’Oeil

cacodylate, in light of network theory.Dadaist conceptions of “avant-gardepraxis as a ludic and radical communityformation,” Gamel concludes, extend theimpact of Dadaist practice. Dadaist play,as Gamel elucidates it, bespeaks “a desireto compel community to action: to laugh,respond, engage, and reunite” (66).Owing to their playful praxis, Gamelargues, “Dada group pictures … have thepower to connect and create radicalcommunities across boundaries of gender,race, and nation” (66).

The final essay in this section isHélène Aji’s “The Common Pedagogy ofthe Uncommon: Building AestheticCommunity from the Ezuniversity toBlack Mountain College and Beyond,”which traces the lineage of modernistpedagogy that extended from Ezra Poundthrough his disciple Charles Olson andothers affiliated with Black MountainCollege. Aji argues that these members ofthe avant-garde increasingly linked teach-ing with the forging of community inorder to foster innovation, “energizingindividual audacity with collective enter-prise,” a strategy that Aji calls “commonexperiments of the uncommon” (69). Thiscontinuity of practice, however, is under-laid by widely diverging political moti-vations: Pound’s pedagogy reflected hisfascist valuing of “the absolute genius ofa unique leader,” in which the teacherserves as the textbook (72; 74), while theeducators at Black Mountain College, bycontrast, favored a “participatory, pro-cessual, and provisional” model of learn-ing, freely crossing the boundaries be-tween the arts (85).

The collection’s second section,“Communal Identities,” turns fromcollective experimentation to individuals’understandings of and/or impacts onmodernist “formations of community”(16). In “Virginia Woolf and CohabitingCommunities,” Melba Cuddy-Keaneadroitly challenges current scholarly con-sensus on Woolf’s thinking aboutcommunal relationship and also extendsher own earlier analyses of Woolf’snarrative constructions. She demonstratesthat even Woolf’s early writing, not justher work of the 1930s, displays a pro-pensity for “we-thinking” (89). In re-sponse to the “conflicting pressures oncommunity [that] plagued the early twen-tieth-century world,” which both “con-spired to split communities apart” and“sought to impose unquestioning unifi-cation,” Woolf formulates a model of“collective cohabiting,” which Cuddy-Keane compares to current theories ofdistributed cognition and delineates as“process-oriented, and thus changingrather than stable; de-centered, and thuspolyphonic; questioning and contra-dictory, and thus fragile; inclusive, evento the point of admitting the inevitabilityof violence and aggression, and thus notutopian, not easy” (92; 94).

Where Cuddy-Keane is concernedprimarily with how Woolf’s ideas aboutcommunity operate within her writing,Christine Savinel looks in “GertrudeStein’s Autobiographical Communities”at how Stein strategically positionedherself at two key intersections of artisticand linguistic community that could serveher writing. To start with, Stein mined themulti-media avant-garde circles thatgathered around her for “their differentialpotentialities in language, discourse, andform” (119). Additionally, by living inFrance, Stein gleaned several benefits forher creative play with language’smateriality: “an enhanced consciousnessof being alone with her language,” as well

as exposure to “the music of differenceand potentially creative misunder-standings” and “common talk she coulduse and appropriate” in translations ortransliterations (112–13). In this way,Stein “could also interiorize the wholestructure of exchange, thus becomingherself a society of discourse somehow,”with her writerly “voice” functioning as“both absolute signature and complete‘sameness’” in works like The Auto-biography of Alice B. Toklas and Every-body’s Autobiography (113; 119).

While Savinel explores Stein’sdeliberate crafting of voice through herexperiences of community, Benoît Tadiécontends in “President Wilson, the War,and the Formation of Modernist Dissent”that modernist contemporaries as variedas John Maynard Keynes, WilliamBayard Hale, Sigmund Freud, andDashiell Hammett created a surprisinglyunified discourse community as theyresponded to President Woodrow Wil-son’s political rhetoric, consistently criti-cizing his paternalism, his rhetoricalresemblances to his Presbyterian-ministerfather, and his habitual division of “wordsand facts” (126). Tadié argues that “thehostility that President Wilson’s politics,personality, and language elicited” thus“shaped the ethos of modernism, bringingeditors, artists, and authors into what wecan today see as a common front”(122–23).

The collection’s third section,“Cosmopolitan Communities,” includesthree essays considering modernistcosmopolitan community formation fromdistinctly different angles. In “The ‘Per-petual Immunity’ of the Word: Joyce andWorld Peace,” Vassiliki Kolocotroni“vividly displays Joyce wrestling with thekind of cosmopolitan communities” thatnonhegemonic languages make possible(17). The essay examines two idiosyn-cratic moments in Joyce’s career, un-packing the complexities of linguist C.K.Ogden’s 1932 “‘translation’ of ... four ...pages of ‘Anna Livia’” into “BasicEnglish,” an intended lingua franca “builton a vocabulary of 850 words,” andJoyce’s 1919 championing of a pamphletby Antoine Chalas calling on “the greatpowers” to “guarantee the perpetualimmunity of Greece” in recognition ofGreece’s historical, cultural, and, asChalas believed, gravitational centralityto the world as a whole (150). The essayoffers tantalizing examples of the kind ofwork that remains to be done by scholarsprepared to meet the “challenge posed bythe multilingualism of [Joyce] and [his]work” (154). In “Pueblo Cosmopoli-tanism: Modernism and Tribal Ceremon-ial Dance,” Geneva M. Gano considersanother complex encounter between“Western European-defined modernism”and a nonhegemonic culture (159). Ganoexamines the place of Pueblo dance in thearts colonies of Santa Fe and Taos, NewMexico, between the wars, identifying “amodernist idiom that could be describedas translocal” or as drawing “simul-taneously from cosmopolitan ideas aboutart and community and from particular,well-established, community-based cus-toms and relationships” (160). Ganodescribes internal debates over the signifi-cance of Pueblo dance, noting that suchfigures as Harriet Monroe and D. H.Lawrence actively argued against takingPueblo dance and other native arts asmere “primitivist ‘inspiration’” orregarding them as cultural objects in needof preservation, instead advocating forthem as “living, participatory, complexart form[s]” (160; 162). Gano concludes

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020PAGE 10

that by “attending to localized articu-lations of modernism” we can “substan-tially shif[t] our understanding of aesthe-tic, social, and political impulses thatundergird modernist activity more broad-ly” (174–75). Here, Gano showcases boththe significance and the necessity of thisshift: “Native American artists and dan-cers . . . once seen almost exclusively aspassive objects of the primitivist imagi-nary . . . may be resituated as active andengaged participants within an actuallyexisting cosmopolitan modernist net-work” (174).

An especially elegant and tightlyargued essay, Supriya Chaudhuri’s “Mod-ernist Literary Communities in 1930sCalcutta,” could serve as a model formanaging the daunting number of vari-ables that come under the purview ofmodernist scholars theorizing communityat simultaneously local and transnationallevels, while attending to an array of im-portant individuals, collectives, dynamics,and the significance of (inevitablyshifting) class, national, and politicalalliances, and still supplying a schemasufficient to make sense of it all.Chaudhuri begins by conceding that, asMiranda Joseph argues, “‘capitalism and,more generally, modernity depend on andgenerate the discourse of community tolegitimate hierarchies’” (177). Chaudhurinever loses sight of the hierarchizingforces Joseph describes, yet she carefullytraces out a countervailing truth: in theface of global modernity’s very character,as the “working out of capital’s socialrelations,” in colonial societies “writingcommunities served as sites of resistanceand enabled friendships across thecolonial divide” (177). Several of thisessay’s sub-topics include the error oftreating “modernist literary communitiesin Calcutta, Alexandria, or Buenos Airesas peripheral to the core modernistprojects developed in Europe andAmerica”; the importance of regulargroup meetings and “an energetic pro-gram of translation” for “the beginningsof Bengali literary modernism”; and thecomplex inside/outside position of Tagorerelative to Bengali modernism (179; 184).Chaudhuri also offers fascinating insightsconcerning modernist cultural productionin relation to mountaineers, policing,spies, and satire (both written andspontaneously performed) (186-89). Ulti-mately, Chaudhuri’s essay stands as anhomage to the Partichay circle as a

“contact zone” that made possible cross-class and cross-cultural friendship, in thesense that Leela Gandhi describes, as the“lost trope of anti-colonial thought, themeans of transforming the personal intothe political” (191).

The collection’s final section,“Communities across the New Media,”brings together four essays that demon-strate how film and radio, rather thanmerely eroding earlier forms of commu-nity, created new forms of “communalexperience” (18). Laura Marcus’s “Film-Going and Film-Spectatorship: Asso-ciation and Solitude” opens the sectionwith a survey of cinematic studies carriedout by sociologists and ethnographers inthe early twentieth century. Highlightingthe work of figures such as Hanns Sachs,Emilie Altenloh, Dorothy Richardson,and J. P. Mayer, Marcus traces theshuttling of their theories back and forthbetween the collective film audience’sshared, uniquely modern desires and theindividual film viewer’s dreamlike, highlyinterior experiences (197; 212).

The remaining essays turn to thesocial and political effects of radioprogramming, beginning with ClaireDavison’s “Performing Communities:Sound Alliances, Modernist Aerialities,and the BBC Home Service, 1940–1945.”Davison compellingly identifies andevokes the “federating, connective pow-ers of broadcast music,” particularly asused in art-documentaries and “music-and-voice epics” (216). These genresconstitute an integral part of aerialmodernism, which Davison defines as “atransnational art of sound that brought‘fantastic transmigrations,’ ‘aural mosa-ics,’ and climactically layered rhythmsinto the home place” (215). Within thismedium, BBC programming counterednationalistic sentiments and fostered high-er regard for Britain’s wartime allies,especially Russia—through, for example,a series on the Ballets Russes andadaptations of War and Peace and theEisenstein-Prokofiev film AlexanderNevsky.

In “Catchphrase Community: ITMA

and Radiogenic Morale,” Debra RaeCohen zeroes in on the catchphrase, aspeech act peculiar to the performing arts(with particular significance to radio) thatis usually critically snubbed. Like the punas rhetorical device, the catchphrase, asspeech act, is deceptively, even em-

barrassingly simplistic, and thus seem-ingly unworthy of critical analysis. In thiselegant investigation of a socially andpolitically critical moment in Britishcultural history, however, Cohen theo-rizes “the catch word as shibbolethrendered performative and continuous,”as the means by which a certain radiobroadcast (Tommy Handley’s It’s ThatMan Again, or ITMA) crucially extendedradio’s distinctive capacity for sociability(236). By attentively revisiting the BBC’searly struggles to meet the challengesposed by the rise of fascism and theoutbreak of war, Cohen delineates a seriesof stumbles that occurred as the proudlystodgy Corporation strove to unbend inways that would “acknowledge Britishmultiplicity” (236). Through the distinc-tive comic talents of Tommy Handley,ITMA succeeded in “unbending” whereprevious efforts had failed, by producinga “nonspace, an elastic heterotopia thatsomehow remained intact throughout thecomedian’s successive transformations,”in which “intensely topical references”could be “reframed, punned on, decon-textualized, denatured” and where, thus,“the immediate was . . . rendered tem-porarily benign” (240; 246). This essaytreads a graceful line between critiquingthe nation-state’s use of modernistdevices to build a new “liberal con-sensus,” and evincing legitimate appre-ciation of the role played by modernistdecontextualization in the engendering ofan “organic voluntary culture thatyield[ed] a cross-class war-time con-sensus” in the United Kingdom (256;239).

Jessica Berman’s “Re-routingCommunity: Colonial Broadcasting andthe Aesthetics of Relation” picks up, in asense, where “Catchphrase Community”lets off, exploring the further expansion ofthe BBC through its AIR (All India Radio)broadcasts, which, for Berman, are“important sites where we can see whatEdward Glissant calls the ‘multiplepoetics of the world’ come into relation”(253). As Berman argues, much can belearned through a more rigorous focus on“the BBC equivalent in India, called AllIndia Radio (AIR),” “an extraordinarilysuccessful, wide-ranging, culturally andlinguistically diverse operation thatdeserves much more scholarly attention”(257). Because media studies focusing onearly and mid-twentieth century British

media has so “often focuse[d] on theproduction side of radio programming,especially in its metropolitan nexus,” Berman is able to do an incredibleamount of theoretical heavy lifting in thissingle essay by obeying her own firstprecept: “focus on the listener” (257).Merely to fully take in that AIR’soperations “involve[d] multiple sites oftransmission, where metropolitanbroadcasts re-transmitted in the provincesmingled with other local waves of radiosound, as well as multiple modes oflistening; where the audience might hearmoments of an English languagebroadcast in the midst of several hours ofHindi or Bengali programming” is, asBerman points out, to “be compelled tomove beyond the model of colonial radioas a one-way transmission from themetropole” (257). Having established themultifarious intentions and voices thatshaped BBC broadcasts destined forcolonial audiences and having describedthe context of their programming andreception, Berman goes on to examineone case in point: George Orwell’s Voiceliterary magazine broadcast, “in which theprogram moved from Eliot’s voicings in‘Prufrock’ to Una Marson’s Jamaicantones in ‘Banjo Boy,’ read by herself”(265). Berman concludes her essay, andthe collection, with a series of reflectionson this broadcast. She asks how we“might begin to understand the poeticrelations created by this broadcast assomething other than the arrow ofimperial culture directed at the colony,”and invites us to “imagine (listening to)Marson’s voice reading her own poemamong the multiplicity of other voices,the various vernaculars, the assortment ofrhythms and sounds on the AIR airwaves”(267). By listening well to “these radiobroadcasts from the thirties and forties,”Berman hazards, we might find that they“present the faint but growing sound ofthe ‘cultural re-routing’ that was to comeand is still emerging, altering thetrajectory of center-periphery power in anexplosion of new relations” (267). #

—University of HoustonNOTES

1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “ParanoidReading and Reparative Reading,” inNovel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction,ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Durham:Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 25-28.

A Significant English-Language Survey of Irish Environmental Literature

Going Greener Still

Tim WenzellWoven Shades of Green: An Anthology of

Irish Nature Literature.Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,

2019.$29.95

Reviewed by CHRISTIN M. MULLIGAN

WOVEN SHADES of Green: An An-thology of Irish Nature Literature

shows the great variety and depth ofeditor Tim Wenzell’s knowledge andinsight on the topic across history. Hepossesses a keen sense for choosing notonly the key authors and texts, but alsooften underappreciated writers or lesserknown works by famous ones. Arrangedin the volume chronologically, notableauthors include St. Columcille of Iona,(early) William Butler Yeats, JamesClarence Mangan, George Moore, PatrickKavanagh (whose surname, alas, is

misspelled therein), Michael Longley, andMichael Viney. Significant works are“Deer’s Cry or St. Patrick’s Breastplate,”an excerpt from Emily Lawless’sHurrish: A Study, Katharine Tynan’s“The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” aselection from John Millington Synge’sThe Aran Islands, Seamus Heaney’s“Death of a Naturalist” and “St. Kevinand the Blackbird,” Derek Mahon’s “TheMayo Tao,” and an excerpt from TimRobinson’s essential Connemara: Listen-ing to the Wind. Among the less obviousinteresting choices: William Allingham’s“Among the Heather,” Synge’s naturepoetry, Yeats’s “The Fairy Pedant” and“The Two Trees,” John Montague’s “TheWild Dog Rose,” plus valuable poemsfrom the corpora of Moya Cannon andRosemarie Rowley, both of whom oftendo not receive enough critical attentionfrom scholars of contemporary poetry.Perhaps also missing was the moreacclaimed—as the former Ireland Chair ofPoetry—yet still under-anthologized fem-

inist poet, Paula Meehan, who so nimblybalances the admixture of the urban andthe natural, particularly in her work fromPainting Rain. The genres of the anthol-ogy encompass poetry, drama, andexcerpts from nonfiction and novels, butalas, short stories are in short supply, narya one to be found.

Despite this pitiable absence, WovenShades of Green still showcases a re-markable array of Irish flora and fauna, inaddition to topographies or landscapesrepresenting each of the four provinces,while permitting ample room for whatThe Crane Bag (1981) famously called“the fifth province” of the imaginationgrounded in politics, religion, folklore,and mythology. In this time of eco-systemic and climate crisis, John WilsonFoster’s contention in the “Foreword” thatwe have over-politicized the environmentat the expense of the beauty or enjoy-ableness of nature for nature’s sake ispatently absurd. In contrast, Wenzell’spreface and section introductions demon-

strate that he recognizes the political andcultural necessity of eco- and geo-criti-cism as necessary endeavors in Irelandand in Irish Studies today. This volume isclearly intended to give scholars in thefield a place to begin, to expand theirhistorical period(s) of focus, and/or tofunction as a primary anthology for anintroductory course on Ireland and literaryenvironments, for which it is reasonablypriced.

Bearing that in mind, I wouldrecommend Woven Shades of Green forany of these purposes; it could even besuitable, on account of its breadth, for thecasual reader with an interest in readingand learning about the literature andhistory of the Irish landscape. However, Iwould be greatly remiss not to add theconsiderable caveat that I am immenselydisappointed by the lack of Irish in thevolume, other than a cúpla focal [fewwords] of traditional invocation of St.Bríd in Cannon’s aptly-titled “Primavera”that are translated naturally as the poem’s

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020 PAGE 11

conclusion (216-17). Facing-page, inter-linear, or even following translations havelong been standard in the best anthologiesfrom An Duanaire, 1600-1900: Poems ofthe Dispossessed to Calling Cards: TenYounger Irish Poets, and it truly deprivesa bilingual reader or instructor not to havethem for comparison. Furthermore, theuse of Heaney’s translation of the BuileSuibhne (1983), while widely-known,functions as Mangan notably evaluateshis own “translations” in his CollectedPoems: as “more or less free.” As I havepointed out elsewhere regarding Heaney’stranslations generally, this also serves inthis instance, unfortunately, to deny thereader much of the fidelity to and many ofthe nuances of the original.

As I have already noted, Wenzell’sselections are indeed mostly compelling,but he could have made vital and equit-

able room for the Irish language, which,much like Irish nature writing, has alsobeen overlooked, misconstrued, and mar-ginalized (and not merely recently).Specifically, Woven Shades of Greencould do perhaps with fewer works by Æand Yeats, and I would rather seeAnonymous Early Irish Nature Poetryactually appearing across from its EarlyIrish source texts.1 Relevant here and toand my earlier concern about the absenceof short stories, ideally one could havebeen by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, who writesmasterfully about coastal Connemara,such as the lyrical “An Taoille Tuille”[Floodtide] from An Braon Brogach [TheDirty Drop, i.e. from the still], especiallysince it was later translated in by EoghanÓ Tuairisc in the collection of Ó Cad-hain’s work, The Road to Brightcity.

Nevertheless, the most welcome

surprise in an anthology that includedsections and thoughtful introductions withinformative headnotes for each author onEarly Irish Nature Writing, NatureWriting and the Changing Landscape, andNature and the Literary Revival, was thefinal section on The Literature of IrishNaturalists, non-fiction that, as Wenzellobserves, would not typically appearalongside more traditional conceptions of“literature”—but these authors have beenpivotal in the development of contem-porary non-fiction nature writing as avibrant artistic form in and of itself inIreland. Their work is part of the publicdiscourse and the national conversation,and to fully comprehend the context ofwhat is at stake, it needs to be read nowmore than ever. In that same spirit, theappendix of Woven Shades of Green on

environmental organizations in Irelandwill ideally serve to heighten activism andawareness of conservation and pre-servation issues to sustain what Kavanaghaptly describes in “October” as “theprayering that the earth offers” (198),which is almost fully on display in thisvolume. #

—Philadelphia, PA

NOTES

1. By that logic, one could argue that theeven earlier medieval texts like “Deer’sCry or St. Patrick’s Breastplate” shouldhave facing, interlinear, or followingLatin—why not? What’s good for thegoose is good for the gander, and it’s notas if these Latin texts are the length ofVirgil’s Aeneid.

Scandinavian-Sounding Fish, Chocolate Utopias, and Conjured Eggs

Modernist Food and Its PerformancesJessica Martell, Adam Fajardo,

and Philip Keel Geheber,Editors.

Modernism and Food Studies: Politics,Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde.

Gainesville: University Press of Florida,2019.

$85.00

Reviewed by JUDITH PALTIN

ALICE B. TOKLAS opens her cook-book with this item of cultural

persuasion aimed toward her Americanand British audiences: “The Frenchapproach to food is characteristic; theybring to their consideration of the tablethe same appreciation, respect, intelli-gence and lively interest they have for theother arts, for painting, for literature andfor the theatre” (3).1 She closes it with acomposed scene (“more poignant colourthan any post-Impressionist picture”) ofthe excessive production from her garden(280). According to at least several of thecontributors to Modernism and FoodStudies: Politics, Aesthetics, and theAvant-Garde, creating performative ex-pression around the production, prep-aration, and consumption of food whilesimultaneously blurring the boundariesbetween food, aesthetics, and the majorarts is a revolutionary strategy amongmodernists to resist imperial and capitalistgovernmental systems of food, consumer,and text. The collection might have takenToklas’ sententia as its epigraph; theappreciation, intelligence, and livelyinterest of the essays reflect her language.

This seventeen-chapter anthology ofthings food and food-proximate is intend-ed to open the field wider, and, unsur-prisingly, although it was only released in2019, another collection has alreadyappeared with essays along somewhatsimilar lines (Gastro-Modernism: Food,Literature, Culture, edited by DerekGladwin, issued from Clemson UniversityPress in association with Liverpool Uni-versity Press, 2019). Modernism andFood Studies is more capacious; it rangesbeyond gastronomy to consider foodprocessing, provenance, cultural andnational pieties around food and hospi-tality, the conditions and artificial controlof famine and food insecurity, scale,technology and industrialization, foodrevolt, and other matters related tomodernist literature, film, and foodwayspolitics. Its five sections, “Aesthetics andthe Body,” “Cookbooks,” “Globalization,Nationalism, and the Politics of Prov-enance,” “Rationing, Resistance, and Re-

volt,” and “Imagination and Exchange,”are skillfully edited. For example, the lastessay of one section often seems toconstruct a bridge to the next. The fourthsection ends with an essay by BrookeStanley on food regimes in TarashankarBandyopadhyay’s The Tale of HansuliTurn (as translated by Ben ConisbeeBaer) which invites us to read the novelas unsettling the imagined place ofmodernism in global literature even as itreimagines the food-centered exchangesof Bengal, and so it creates conceptuallinks to the next section on “Imaginationa n d E x c h a n g e . ”B r ad fo rd T a yl o r ’ s“Modernist Taste: FordMadox Ford, Queer Po-tatoes, and GoodlyApples” describes thepressure put on Kantianreflective judgment un-der Ford’s efforts “torender those queereffects of real life,” and argues that underFord’s commitment to visual Im-pressionism, “[i]t is the brute, everyday,‘non-Impressionistic’ reality that bothcatalyzes the Impressionistic act andmarks out the limit of its scope” (79, 85).Thus taste, once conceived as universaland wholly separated from necessity, hasnow become taste as an agent within asystem of desire, a Modernist taste thatTaylor says “could be described as thefaculty that perceives the truth of whatvision can register only as queer” (84).Such agency provides a conduit to thenext section, titled “Cookbooks,” whichlargely studies the agentic “artistic prac-tice” (in Sean Mark’s phrase) of recipe-designing, narrating, and food-presenting(91).

The research behind the chapters isgenerally considerable for essays of thissize. Chrissie Van Mierlo consults theWakean Notebooks at Buffalo as well as arange of historians to deliver a geneticand historically attentive account of “ThePolitics of Provenance in FinnegansWake.” Philip Keel Geheber not onlyconsults Paul K. Saint-Amour’s conceptu-alization of encyclopedic narrative tounderstand Marcel Rouff’s The Passion-ate Epicure, but actually counts, inRouff’s 160-page book, “238 horsd’oeuvres and entrées, 25 sauces, 48desserts, and 85 drinks individuallynamed” (188). Asiya Bulatova covers alarge range of Viktor Shklovsky’s ownworks, as well as contextualizing them inhistory and social theory, with multiling-ual and multidisciplinary sources fromRussian, European, and North American

presses. The volume speaks to Joyceansin three chapters on Dubliners, Ulysses,and Finnegans Wake, respectively, whichamount to something fewer than fiftypages out of the three hundred plus of thecollection.

Many of the essays beg to be readtogether. In David A. Davis’ “Modern-ism, Primitivism, and Food in JamesAgee’s Cotton Tenants,” the inefficacy ofAlabama sharecroppers’ food poverty toarouse resistance to the industrializationof modern food production invites com-parison with Sergei Eisenstein’s sailors

aboard the Potemkin whostage a boycott againstthe soup supplied by theg o v e r n i n g r e g i me ,“whose rebellious spiriteventually radiates out-ward to the cheering citi-zens of Odessa” as de-scribed in Graig Uhlin’s“Food and Revolt in

Early Modernist Film” (216). Agee’ssharecroppers’ diet, moreover, wasshaped by the same kinds of capitalistinfrastructural and industrial techno-logical innovations that, at an earlier stageof capitalism, forced the rise of“cottierism,” or potato farming, thatJessica Martell examines in “Potatoes andthe Political Ecology of James Joyce’sDubliners.” Mark’s “The Futurist Art ofFeeding” describes the performative anddisruptive aspects of Futurism’s theatricalmeal-events: many hours’ worth ofcourses, made of dishes which have acomposed “architecture” and inspirediners to feel they consume “WORKS OF

ART,” “while the left hand caresses atactile surface made of sandpaper, velvetand silk. Meanwhile the orchestra plays anoisy, wild jazz and the waiters spray thenapes of the diners’ necks with a strongperfume of carnations” (95-96). Thechapter which immediately follows, “TheFuturist Art of Feeding,” analyzes howFuturist cuisine was “reported on andeven discussed” in U.S. newspapers. HereCéline Mansanti argues that the mix ofmockery and vicarious pleasure thesearticles offered “probably contributed tothe assimilation of the avant-garde by thepopular press, not only by allowingwriters and readers to express theirdeepest anxieties but also, more broadly,by connecting the distant reality of theavant-garde to the personal, dailyexperience of food and cooking” (120).

One frustrating aspect of far-reachingcollections such as this one is that (unlikein a single-authored monograph, for ex-ample) so many strong ideas trailing or

suggested across chapters remain onlyimplied, and tensions may also besuggestive, but one would dearly like tohear the authors discuss them in com-pany. There are occasional conferenceroundtables, of course, but I wonder if thediscipline will ever have a model whereauthors contributing to collections readeach other’s work at some draft stage, andincorporate discussions of meeting pointsand tensions into their final work? GilesWhiteley says that “from the outset,aestheticism was founded on a culinaryanalogy” wherein “[f]ood became a limitpoint that was constantly being put to thetest” inhabiting somewhere betweenpleasure and “corruption,” with figuressuch as Wilde “treating food in the spiritof art” as his Dorian eats cherries whichwere “plucked at midnight, and thecoldness of the moon had entered intothem” (20, 22; Wilde cited from Whiteley24). For Whiteley, reading Wilde andHuysmans, “food allegorizes the aesthe-tic” while “it does not actually satisfytheir desires,” and thus “comes to signifythe impossibility… of satisfying desires”(32). This either results in “ennui” or“returns as dyspepsia or nausea” (34). Inthe very next chapter, Aimee Gasstonfinds Katherine Mansfield working withthe same idea in stories that are “modelsof perfectly balanced ambivalence inwhich death and corruption pull againstdevelopment, energy, and authenticity”(43). However, the denouement is verydifferent, for Gasston notes a feministaesthetic in the trope of the egg, “em-blems of creativity and freedom,” whichfor Mansfield “conjures” the opposite ofennui: “The aim of all Mansfield’s storiesis to wake numbed readers to ‘fierce life.’It is no accident that the two ingestiveactivities of eating and reading occur sideby side; each offers the reward of energy,pleasure, even revelation” (43, 40, 41).The experience of reading both together issimilar to ingesting something bitter, andthen something creamy rich, an unex-pected juxtaposition of tastes.

What unites this volume is itsperennial concern around food and power,in all the different ways that might bemanifested within structures of modern-ity. Even the aesthetic search for newsensation takes place within bodies thatare sites of contest and subject to bio-politics and its manipulations. Martelldemonstrates, in connection with Joyce’sDubliners, that the food economy innineteenth- and twentieth-century Irelandexemplifies how “modern imperial statesmobilize scarcity crises to justify de-velopment initiatives that bring those who

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020PAGE 12

are the most estranged from Europeansocioeconomic norms into the fold andunder control” (247). The collected chap-ters make a cumulative critical-materialistargument that food occupies an inter-sectional grid-point which functions, asUhlin put it in connection with Sovietmontage and surrealist film, “as a repre-sentational vehicle for their reorgani-zation of the social” (225). Food, perhapsuniquely, is the matter at stake inmodernity’s “unresolved clash betweenagrarian and social orders,” in a phrase Icite from the introduction where theeditors were thinking of Jameson’sdescription of modernism’s “riven tempo-rality” (6). While food has had a politicsimmemorially, there are certain featuresof modern food culture and the foodindustry which seem predictably likely todraw modernist critique. First is theimbrication in modernity of food andtechnology, playfully reflected back inFuturism’s dishes whose ingredients in-

clude steel ball bearings and dishesdelivered by “moving carpets” like con-veyor belts (105). Mark says, “As aliterary genre, the cookbook is steeped intradition” (99), thus a natural target formodernist irony and defamiliarization.Carrie Helms Tippen focuses on Faulk-ner’s modernist suspicion of Southernclaims to an exceptional culture of tablehospitality. In “Here There Will Be NoUnhappiness: Chocolate and LangstonHughes’s Utopian Impulse,” Adam Fajar-do analyzes the “frequent trope” ofchocolate in Hughes’s writing to uncoverhow it “helps Hughes move past primi-tivist models of racial identity that domi-nated the modernist era and gives himnew ground for thinking about the diffi-cult pleasures of black identity” (298,301).

The nature of the subject generatessome distinctive features of the collection.There is humor, as in the newspaperheadlines attempting to communicate

Futurist style (“Chicken and Violets?Yes” from the Chicago Daily Tribune,112), or in the excessive consumption byvarious epicureans and decadents in theprimary texts, or in punning conflationssuch as Joyce’s mingling of “nationalcause” and “national cows” that VanMierlo notices (206). Shannon Finckcounts as “kitchen insurrections” Toklas’habit of including “flawed recipes that areimpossible to follow and designed forunpredictable results” (143). In a moreserious vein, Finck also discusses howToklas had to come to grips with the“Murder in the Kitchen” she was requiredto commit in order to serve pigeons (133).As Toklas puts it, “Before any story ofcooking begins, crime is inevitable”(133). There are high arguments, whetherabout Kantian taste or in Martell’ssuggestion that by thinking about thepotato plant we can see that Joyce’s workmight meet Deleuze and Guattari’sproposal for rhizomatic knowledge “oper-

ating in revolt against arboreal demandsof all sorts” (250). There is also the quest-ion of the peculiar intimacies establishedby food. By proffering food, one mayimpose a debt; by withholding it, one mayinstall an enduring obsession (283, 237).Uhlin argues that for the surrealists, “[t]hevisceral experience of eating entails whatNicola Perullo refers to as ‘embodiedknowledge,’ a way of knowing that ex-ceeds rationality because it is rooted inthe sensuous experience of the body”(221). Where food is in the balance, asVan Mierlo says of Joyce’s “Scandi-navian-sounding fish,” “the rhetoric ofself-sufficiency is slyly undercut” (205). #

—University of British Columbia

NOTES

1. Alice B. Toklas. The Alice B. Tok-las Cookbook. New York: Harper Peren-nial, 2010.

Paris PhenomenalCatherine Flynn

James Joyce and the Matter of Paris.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2019.$34.99

Reviewed by MARIAN EIDE

IT IS MORE THAN a little comforting tofind in Catherine Flynn’s pages a

youthful James Joyce not unlike ayounger version of myself, certain thathaving just the right shoes would beutterly transformative. In a letter toStanislaus Joyce about the materialpleasures of living in Paris, James Joycewrote: “O, I have reveled in ties, coats,boots, hats since I came here—all imagi-nary.” At the same time, Joyce was tryingto save enough money from his variousgigs to remit the cost of dentures for hismother. I flatter myself that like Flynn’sJoyce, my passion for shoes betrays notjust acquisitiveness or consumerism, but apowerful belief in the aesthetic and itsmaterial effects on experience. Of course,in his writing Joyce also developed astrong and compelling critique of con-sumer desire. This built to his aesthetictheory in which desire and loathing are tobe stilled before the static pleasures ofany work of art, and to his complexexplorations of materiality andcommunity.

Flynn embarks upon her acute accountof this development with Joyce’s firstsojourn in Paris beginning on December3, 1902, when he was twenty. She notesthat living in Paris was, at the time, anIrish migration tradition as continentalEurope offered an alternative to Britishcolonial culture. In particular, Paris pre-sented both the allures of a sophisticated,cultured modern city and “the appealingrepublican ideal of a culture of free andequal citizens” (3). However, Flynn alsoobserves that with the failure of the 1871Paris Commune and Haussman’s radicalreorganization of the city’s streets, Pariswas a place of “thwarted political hopes,”not unlike turn-of-the-century Dublin.Under its new commodity capitalism aprevious “collective rational deliberation”was replaced by “the ratio of calculation,instrumentalization, and reification, and apowerful mobilization of the senses in atheater of goods and people” (7). In thesecircumstances, as Charles Baudelaire’spoetry reflects, the contemplativeaesthetic is replaced with an aesthetic ofacquisitive desire. Joyce, developing his

aesthetic theory in the streets and librariesof Paris, devised a concept of physicalsensation that would counter the ex-change economy that particularly in-flected a transactional relation betweenmen and women. Joyce’s aesthetic theory,of course, first emerged in the Paris essayin which he describes art “as that whichbanishes desire and repulsion andachieves a static comprehension” (qtd. on12). But that exposure to the intensity ofmaterial production and consumptioninformed his vision of Dublin throughouthis writing, even ashis exposure to theFrench writing scenewas to buttress hisexp e r i me n ta l i sm.Flynn offers an agileanalysis of Joyce’sevolving aesthetictheory in the contextof the philosophers(Aristotle, Aquinas,Hegel) from whomhe drew in his studiesin Paris libraries.

Flynn describesher method as closereading and this istrue of the variety oftextual artifacts sheconsiders alongsideJoyce’s writing, in-cluding Walter Ben-jamin’s Passagen-werk, Baudelaire’spoetry, and AlfredJarry’s Ubu Roi,among many othercreative works fromthe Paris of Joyce’sera. She argues that“intellection takesp lace in minortextual artifacts” andthat “subtle but mo-mentous events occur at the scale of thephrase, the word, and even the letter”(17). While these observations are notnew in their content, there is somethingvery inspiring about the way she makesthe case for what we have done for ages.Equally compelling is the deftness withwhich she locates meaning on a minute,carefully observed textual scale. Flynn’scompelling and elegantly written bookopens with the following claim: “Joycehad three overlapping and equallyimportant relations to Paris. The first is tothe city as a center of literary influence.Moving to the source of this culturalcapital begins in Joyce a second relation

to Paris as a vivid instantiation of modernconsumer capitalism…. [T]he third facetof his relation to Paris was as a locus ofvivid sensory and sensual experiences…”(4). From these relations, Joyce engagedan aesthetic potently devoted to anembodied sense of the personal encounterin which thought is immediately andsensually inflected. This culminates in the“aesthetic sociality” exemplified by theFinnegans Wake book groups thatproliferate from Dublin to Austin. Flynn’sargument is elegantly presented:

Joyce’s contention with the matter ofParis, the aesthetic challenge of asensorially overwhelming experienceof consumer capitalism that theprimary site of European urbanmodernity thrust upon its inhabitantsand visitors and that had been sogenerative for Parisian writers, ledhim to process the materials of Dublinusing a disparate set of aestheticpractices associated with the Frenchavant-garde. In tracing the develop-ment of Joyce’s oeuvre, we will seemodernism’s itinerary through thegreat artistic capital of Europe or, put

differently, the transmission of Frenchaesthetic culture to the Anglophoneworld through the transformativemedium of Joyce’s work. (18)

With Flynn’s guidance, I was able toimagine the overwhelming experienceJoyce must have had moving from im-poverished Dublin to the opulent streetsof Paris. I picture his exposure to newflavors, to enticing perfumes, forwardfashions worn by both men and women,and overwhelming noise from traffic,commerce, music, and conversation. Inthese circumstances, Flynn convinces methat Joyce wanted to imagine writing thatcould engage these “powerful physicalsensations of the modern urban environ-ment” (21) without succumbing to theconsumerist idea that mere possessionconstitutes an aesthetic experience. Thebeauty available for sale had to be under-stood in communal and political terms:the desire elicited by consumable beautycan produce a transactional relationbetween people, but Joyce’s experimentwas instead to create community fromsensual expression and desire.

Distinguishing her approach from theNew Materialism emerging in literarystudies over the last 25 years, Flynnargues that:

Joyce looks for the new forms ofcognition made possible by theunavoidable dismantling of thesovereign individual in urban modern-ity…. This embodied cognition offerscounterknowledge of a human realityof subjugation and imprisonmentwithin capitalism and, at the sametime, allows an awareness of genera-tive, creative encounters that takeplace despite these conditions. If thecity offers freedom and pleasure underthe constraints of the commodityform, this sentient thinking registersvarious kinds of freedom and pleasurethat occur alongside, within, andindependently of it. (14-15)

Flynn’s approach, as these sentencesindicate, is closer to the phenome-nological turn in literary studies of thelast ten years or so, and gives us a senseof the objects on which Joyce’s con-sciousness rested as he produced hisrecreations of Dublin life.

James Joyce and the Matter of Parishinges on the Paris epiphany and Joyce’svarious revisions of this insightthroughout his writings. The epiphanydescribes women, who may be Parisian

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020 PAGE 13

prostitutes, in their leisure time and incommunity with each other. But it iscritical of their place in consumer society.

They pass in twos and threes amid thelife of the boulevard, walking likepeople who have leisure in a place litup for them. They are in the pastrycook’s, chattering, crushing littlefabrics of pastry, or seated silently attable by the café door, or descendingfrom carriages with a busy stir ofgarments soft as the voice of theadulterer. They pass in an air ofperfumes: under the perfumes theirbodies have a warm humid smell….No man has loved them and they havenot loved themselves: they have givennothing for all that has been given tothem. (qtd. on 55)

With this epiphany, Flynn sees Joycestruggling with a transactional relationbetween men and women and the waysthose relations are enmeshed with sensualperception. The women displaythemselves as if for sale, while at thesame time taking their pleasure fromthings that can be bought: their pastriesand perfumes, their soft garments. Butjust as he compares the perfumes theyapply with the subtle, “warm humid”perfumes their bodies emit, Joycecontrasts the possessions they purchasewith what they are capable of possessingwithout purchase, what they can give andreceive emotionally. While Exiles is notof particular interest to Flynn, Richard’sdisquisition on love and possession mightbe seen as one instance in which Joyceworked through the impression he firstrecorded in this epiphany. Bertha’s un-happy response indicates Joyce grapplingwith his initial theory in the epiphany, andrevising it to account for the perspectiveof the women he observed. As Flynnargues, he was to return to the questionthat 1902 Paris instilled in him with eachof the works he produced in subsequentyears.

Reworking the impression from hisepiphany in the encounter betweenStephen and Emma in the library-museumcolonnade scene in Stephen Hero, forexample, Joyce exemplifies an art thatturns from “conscious cognition toinvestigate new possibilities of embodi-ment…. The scene in the colonnaderejects theoretical generalization in favorof an exploration of the particular, con-tingent, and the fleeting,” a practice Flynndesignates “sentient thinking” and“somatic aesthetics” (56).

Though Joyce only resided in Paris forfour months before being called home tohis mother’s deathbed, and though he was

not to live in the city again for nearly twodecades, the Paris of his youth made alasting impression on his literary project.Supplanting his earlier need to controland define through his writings, his timein Paris imbued him with an interest inthe material experience of the body andthe potential of materiality for bothaesthetic and political fulfillment. Parisshaped his understanding of Dublin andcolored his depiction of his home for therest of his career by “allowing him torecognize in his native city the pervasivedistortion of social relations by commod-ity capitalism” (69). Rather than rejectingthe urban environment in the way manyof his peers in the Celtic Revival haddone, Joyce embraced the metropole andits effects as the premise for his creativity.

Turning to Ulysses and Joyce’ssecond residence in Paris beginning in1920, Flynn notes the transformation tothe manuscript motivated by this returnand argues that while this text is lessconcerned with the relational dynamics, itunderstands community relations throughthe sensory experiences of Dublin’sstreets. Those experiences, she observes,are ingested into thought, or, as Bloomreflects, “Never know whose thoughtsyou’re chewing” (qtd. on 112). Flynnexpands on this insight in multipleinstances, but her beautiful reading of theseedcake scene on Howth particularlystruck me. She sees in the exchangebetween the lovers “an exemplary tran-scendence of narrowly construed self-interest” and recognizes that “Bloom’sawareness of himself as temporary isaccompanied by his expanded under-standing of being as constituted byporousness and interpermeation” (121).With Ulysses, Flynn sees Joyce imaginingrelationships within capitalism that de-pend neither on consuming nor abstain-ing, assessing nor judging, but on the kindof porous comingling exemplified by theexchange of seedcake.

Writing about the “Circe” episode,Flynn remarks on its portrayal of andresistance to “a commodified socialworld” (130). These passages “explode”the conventions of capitalist exchange.Explode is a word she uses in an unusualway, but also one reminiscent of thefeminism of the 1980s and 90s and itsidealism about the possibilities forliterature to undo the presumptions andeffects of patriarchal control. She followsthe less common definition which, fromthe OED, means “to reject or discard(something, esp. an opinion, proposal, orcustom)” and “to condemn or decry; todrive off, banish.” Joyce envisions inDublin’s red light district some of theurban transformations “that were

spectacularly instanced in Paris” as herevised the episode during his secondresidence in the city. To capture this senseof revolutionary change, he adapts boththe “nineteenth-century Parisian visionaryliterature” he was reading in his firstresidence and the contemporary experi-mentalism that marked his second. “Ulti-mately,” Flynn argues, “‘Circe’ stages …an art of material co-being” (168). Thesurrealist quality of this episode may havebeen influenced by Joyce’s viewing ofGuillaume Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles deTirésias in Paris, but this episode, in itsturn, is said to have influenced Louis Ara-gon’s Le Payson de Pari.

Walter Benjamin, articulating the roleof the flaneur in the consumer culture ofthe modern city, later addressed Joyce’smetropolitan vision in the Passegen-Werk. In his own discourse, he “radi-calizes the exploding visions of Joyce’s‘Circe,’ replacing the passive sensationsthat prompted insight with a totallydetermining image space that abolishesindividual consciousness in favor ofcollective revolutionary action” (194).Read in conjunction with the Benjaminproject most influenced by it, the “Circe”episode can be seen to drop “readers in anechoing, whispering space in which theybecome engaged in repetitive questioningrather than abstracted insight. This is atransformative space because it is wherepreconceived ideas are useless. With thiscomes new possibilities of being forreaders, the possibility of a new sense ofexistence” (201).

The sense of the collective movesfrom the representational to the aesthetic,and to the anticipation of communal read-ing with Finnegans Wake, where Flynnfinds an “aesthetic sociality” in thevolume’s “creative fostering” of specificconditions of reception: “spontaneity,imagination, and communication beyondmeans-end calculation”; these are the“social demands made by collective read-ings of the Wake” (234). Aestheticsociality “relies on a sensuous awarenessof others’ physical presences—their facialexpressions, their physical postures, theirbreathing.” The text patterns these inter-actions not by modeling best practices,but by always providing alternativeinterpretations or modes through which tointerpret. As such, “The aesthetic sociali-ty of Finnegans Wake reading groupsdepends upon their lack of closure . . .interpretive frameworks come into ques-tion in an experience of co-being, co-creation, and the various joys we eachenjoy” (235). In this process, the trans-actional relations between subjects ofconsumer capitalism, who might expect

some profit from their interpretive invest-ment in each other, are transformedthrough the “fermentational quality”(209) of the book’s prose to create anaesthetic sociality among readers inwhich meaning is both suspended andcreated in community. I particularly likethe idea of Joyce’s prose as taking someresting time to process or ferment beforeit, like Guinness, acquires delicious,effervescent, and intoxicating qualities.Of particular interest in this chapter isAlfred Jarry’s scatological impulse andhis “pataphysics” in Ubu Roi and the wayit magnifies Joyce’s own exploration ofdigestion and waste through the defeca-tory story of Buckley and the RussianGeneral. “Jarry modeled for Joyce,”Flynn notes, “an identification of turd andtext” (222) particularly condensed aroundShem’s writing on his body with his ownexcrement.

The book ends with an effectivereminder of why this exploration is ofparticular importance to us now in 2020,for like the beginning of the twentiethcentury, the beginning of the twenty-firstpromotes the transactional in humanrelations that are “increasingly supplantedby relations of exchange.” For those ofus who teach, it is particularly compellingto have Joyce’s assistance as we resist“what Benjamin calls the ‘penny-in-the-slot’ called meaning” (236). We find inFlynn’s pages that Joyce gives us moreand that we both deserve and need hisproliferative influence.

The subtle acoustics of repeated andshifting sounds, the living body oflanguage through which he presentsembodied being: here is an excessthat, in making demands on us, givesus so much more in return. ForJoyce’s verbal art does more thanheighten our attunement to sensoryexperience. It requires us to grapplewith our own ability to think and tofeel and, I propose here, to think andfeel with one another’s thoughts andfeelings. (236)

Flynn’s book is both gracious anderudite. Its grace is exemplified in theway she thanks a lengthy list of actualreaders and interlocutors in the openingpages with the acknowledgements andrecognizes her anticipated readers at theend. Her erudition is marked in the broadscale of her references, her complexengagement with the thoughts of writersfrom Adorno to Zola and myriad modern-ist thinkers in between. #

—Texas A&M University

Every Taling Has a Tellingby

PATRICK REILLY

David Norris Reads from Finnegans Wake€12.00

Note: Proceeds from the sale ofDavid Norris Reads from FinnegansWake go to the James Joyce Centre.

Spoken [. . .] by those who beat clothes on the banks ofthe river. Lament to Amun (circa 1200 BCE)

DAVID NORRIS’S pleasurable CD recording ofexcerpts from Finnegans Wake—from Chapter 8

in Book I, commonly known as the Anna Livia Plura-belle chapter, and from the ALP monologue closingBook IV—recalled for me a story, probably apocryphal,

about the lyrical, now-so-long-ago voices of the originalAbbey Players. The style of their delivery and quality oftheir performance impressed a visitor to the AbbeyTheatre enough for him to remark to its co-founder,William Butler Yeats, that so marvelous were the Playersand their voices, Yeats was sure to lose them all. Towhich Yeats supposedly retorted, “With those accentswho’d ever employ them?” As it happened, Hollywoodwould. Indeed, the stylized Irish brogue, with itscadences rolling to sing-song effect, an accent that wasessentially developed by Yeats and Lady Gregory andJohn Millington Synge to distinguish their new, nationaltheatre productions, would come to typify the accent ofmotion-pictures Irish as well. Think Barry Fitzgerald orSarah Allgood, both of them originally Abbey Players.After I had listened to Norris’s reading, I read the text onthe sleeve of the CD. It noted that Norris, in his reading,had been influenced in part by a reading of the ALP

chapter as it had been recorded by two acclaimed stageactresses in the second generation of the Abbey Players,Marie Keane and May Cluskey. Though they are notespecially well known outside Ireland, Joyceans mayremember Marie Keane as Freddie Malin’s mother inJohn Huston’s The Dead, and May Cluskey appeared inJoseph Strick’s movie version of Ulysses. Norris, then,may owe something in his reading to the rhythms andrenderings of the Abbey Players.

I’d recommend that listeners to Norris’s forty-or-so- |minute reading first do simply that: listen, withoutreference to the printed text, thereby to get a feel for therhythm and flow of the piece as Norris executes it.Thereafter, feel free to seize from your bookshelf yourwell-worn, dog-eared, marked-up edition of Joyce’smasterwork and open it to page 196.1 Then, listen again—in delight, in surprise, and in a little perplexity (moreof that later)—to Norris’s rendition of amazing pages

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020PAGE 14

into which Joyce declared that he put all he knew aboutlanguage (and prompted some critics to wish he hadn’t).

Norris brings a warmth of feeling to his reading of|the ALP chapter, and he effectively conveys the overallrhythm of Joyce’s demanding prose. Occasionally, hefalters, as when he breaks the flow to snatch some breath,awkwardly, in the middle of a phrase. Define phrase!,you might quip. For in FW, words fuse with or bleed intoone another, thus to create new, often multilinguallocutions and puns and portmanteaus that then fragmentand neologistically metamorphose into fluid newconstructions. These mutations continually compoundand riddle the meaning of the text. As importantly,especially in a recording of Norris’s sort, they also makemusic of the text: the music of a mythic River Liffey’sunending run. In his laudable attempt to vocallyapproximate the changing rhythms in the currents of the“riverrun,” Norris might have brought more nuance andmore mellifluousness to his inflections. I’d like to hearthe tunes in the music of this prodigiously tuneful pieceplayed more variously.

There could be more distinction, too, in Norris’s|rendition of the voices in the piece, as it is not alwaysclear who is speaking, particularly when the voice isnarrational. As for the dialogue between the twowasherwomen, Mrs. Quickenough and Miss Doubt-pebble, on the river’s opposite banks, Norris plays thembroadly, and too often indistinguishably, in anexaggerated manner rather like that of a comic male leadplaying the dame in a traditional Irish Christmas panto-mime; Arthur Lucan and Norman Evans, among othersfrom my childhood, come to mind. This choice mayaccount for the lisps Norris sometimes mockingly—andarbitrarily, it seems to me—affects in his delivery oflines like “There’s Zambosy waiting for me” (207).(Whereas Norris enacts, Joyce, in his recording of FW,simply and unaffectedly reads; and as Eddie Epstein, thegreat and greatly missed Joyce scholar, notes, he rendersthe exchanges between the washerwomen in a lower-class County Cork accent.)

Norris’s characterizations of Mrs. Quickenough and|Miss Doubtpebble tend to be one-note, and for most ofthe ALP chapter, the note is loud. Equally garrulous, thetwo washerwomen seem only to be crabbed with eachother in their mutual impatience, both of them being, asone of them says, “a bit on the sharp side” (210). Attimes, in the text, they certainly are, but, as Norris playsthem, hardly ever are the times that they aren’t. Until heproceeds to the three pages that close the chapter(213–216), wherein the mood shifts, as Norris reads it,and he reads it in dark, whispery tones, to one ofmelancholy. It’s twilight, and the incoming tide iswidening the distance between the river’s banks so thatMrs. Quickenough and Miss Doubtpebble are finding itincreasingly more difficult to hear one another or, in thefading light, to see one another. They compete withnature at nightfall in their efforts still to be heard; yet,somewhat perplexingly, Norris keeps diminishing theirvoices until he slides into the long pause with which hemarks the end of the ALP chapter.

That Norris then brings his recording of FW to a|close with ALP’s soulful sea of last words at the end ofthe novel is a deft and potent touch. However, I’d like forhim to have found for her a more distinctive voice notonly here—in mood and tone it sounds like a melan-cholic continuation of the washerwomen passagepreceding it—but also for her letter on page 201 inChapter 8. Still, one must acknowledge the difficulty ofmaking distinctions between that chapter’s shifting

voices in a text that limitlessly accommodates verbalmetamorphosis and stylistic pyrotechnics, the shiftscoming so frequently and quickly that the reader canbarely apprehend them.

By his “aisne aestumation,” Norris informs the|listener that he recorded the piece into a microphone atone sitting in one take: “Recorded for the German publicbroadcasting Beyerisdchen Rundfunk in a single take in2014. . . . I read it into the microphone standing andmanaging the entire thing without a break.” The record-ing thus produced might have benefited from more thanone take, so as to allow Norris the opportunity toconsider, and further vary, the rhythm, inflection,nuance, and tone of his performance. A break wouldcertainly have allowed him a chance to catch his breath.|

Norris does not comment on the cuts he made to the|text of the ALP chapter, and the listener will likely notnotice them. The reader following the recording with thetext will, however. The cuts made on pages 201 through206 are mostly minor, unlike the absent six pages fromthe bottom of page 207 to the top of page 213, where, itmight be worth noting, Joyce picks up the narrative in hischarming, unadorned recording of FW from nearly a hun-dred years ago. The inquiring, curious listener to Norris’srecording might like to know the reasoning behind thecuts that he chose to make. More information regardingthe development of the text for the recording might havebeen included on the sleeve of the CD.

On his recording, when he reaches the bottom of page|207, Norris does signal a break in the progress of hisreading with a significant pause before proceeding topage 213, which affords readers time to gain theirbearings. An even more noticeable pause follows the endof Chapter 8—“Beside the rivering waters of, hitherand-thithering waters of. Night!”—before Norris moves on tothe end of ALP’s journey on page 627. In the pause thatmarks Norris’s six-page leap to page 213 are lostpassages of text that are among the most accessible in thenovel. Why Norris chose to omit them, the reader canonly wonder. I missed the images of ALP awash in theflotsam and jetsam of humanity as the rising tide,widening the Liffey, is pouring into the city (208). Imissed the cataloguing of Anna’s Christmas presents forher three children that grows into a list of gift recipientsso inclusive—“a thousand and one of them”—and alitany so elaborate that it approaches farce (210-213).

Although Norris is a self-acclaimed admirer and|defender of Joyce’s work, research turns up no scholar-ship by him on Joyce’s oeuvre. Consequently, it isdifficult to criticize on scholarly grounds a recording thatis the product of a passion. Neither is Norris aprofessional actor. His page on Wikipedia states that heis credited with being “almost singlehandedlyresponsible for rehabilitating James Joyce in oncedisapproving Irish eyes” (honest!). He adamantlydefended Joyce against the critical slings and arrows ofhis fellow Irishman Roddy Doyle, who hereticallydeemed Joyce to be overrated. An academic and scholar(but not a Joyce scholar) before he launched his politicalcareer and became an Irish independent senator, he likelyhoned the rhetorical skills he evidences in his reading,and rare the politician who does not draw upon theactor’s craft. Reservations aside, then, Norris’s reading isworthy of serious critical consideration.

Some quibbles: On page 196, the ALP chapter opens|with an ejaculatory “O” that stands conspicuously aloneand unpunctuated as the chapter’s first line:

Otell me all about

Anna Livia! I want to hear all

Despite the “O”’s pride of placement, Norris virtuallyignores it; indeed, he comes close to swallowing it. Twopages on, instead of iterating “I want to hear all about,”as it appears in the text, Norris’s version alters the infini-tive “to hear” to “to know.” And the line, on page 215,“Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him?” he reads (orperhaps simply misreads) as “seven wives to wive him.”Norris’s rendering of the ALP seduction scene is espe-cially effective and affecting—a standout performance—yet he cuts nearly half of it (206-207). Then there arethose random lisps.

More than a quibble, though, is the failing throughoutNorris’s reading to convey vocally, in tone and tenor, theabundant wit and humor in Joyce’s text. The amusementthat lies in the music and language to produce, forinstance, an image of Anna “before she had a hint of ahair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birchcanoedler not mention a bulgic porterhouse barge” (204)should be reflected amusedly in the voice of the reader.Norris, though, is inclined throughout to declaim in amanner more befitting to Shakespearean high drama thanto Joyce’s humorous verbal play. Generally, the tone ofNorris’s delivery would benefit from a lighter touch,from the timbre of Jolympian amusement.

I admire Norris for tackling the knotty Joycean text of|the ALP chapter, and for meeting its challenge. Iencourage him to “gihon! I lovat a gabber” (213). Heaffords the listener a delightful experience, confoundingthough the flood of language may at first be for theuninitiated. To his quite colorful CV on Wikipedia, Dr.Norris, formerly Senator Norris, can add with pride“David Norris Reads from Finnegans Wake.”

So, put in your ear pods or don your headphones, and|take a stroll along the Anna Liffey or any of the myriadother plurabelleous rivers—350 of them—aflow in theALP episode and enjoy anew Joyce’s prose rhapsody.Listen to it “ufer and ufer.” Surrender to its sounds, itssong. The music is pure. #

—Baruch College, CUNY

NOTES

1. All FW references are from the 1976 PenguinBooks edition.

Waking the New WorldBrian Fox

James Joyce’s America.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

$75.00

Reviewed by JONATHAN MC CREEDY

BRIAN FOX’S James Joyce’s Americais, intrinsically, a text that is long

overdue in terms of its arrival to Joycestudies. However, this book makes up forlost time and immediately assumes itsposition as the definitive text for scholarsto turn to if their studies even tangentiallyrelate to Joyce and America. Fox, in hisintroduction, demonstrates that it is an

oddity that no full-length study of themeaning of America to Joyce has beenwritten until now. (The topic of hisdealings with the country have, of course,been covered in many respects, butAmerica’s significance to him has not).He identifies Ellmann’s statement thatJoyce could not “bear” the U.S. as both amisconception and a hurdle that he (Fox)had to overcome in regards to crafting hisown study. Ellmann’s statement unfor-tunately promulgated an idea that thecountry held little value to Joyce, whichled, logically it seems, to him not makingit an important component within his art.Fox’s book is a fierce rebuttal to this clearfallacy and it fights back against unduedismissal and ignorance in what is an

analytical, encyclopedic study on everyconceivable topic connected to Americaand Joyce that comfortably fills an entire,self-contained monograph. The talk ofnew worlds and promise in James Joyce’sAmerica is completely applicable to howit fits in and can be characterized withincontemporary Joyce criticism. There ismuch discovery within Fox’s work, and asense of epic possibility that befits itsAmerican subject matter and its broadlandscapes. The picture on the dust cover,a map of transatlantic shipping linesbetween the U.S. and Ireland, illustratesthe scope of the book, which is laid out infour equal sections that each logicallybuilds upon the last’s dense research.Certain framing techniques structure the

direction of Fox’s analytical approach.First, concepts of American history,culture and politics are rigorouslyhistoricized throughout (9); we will seethis to be a consistent, omnipresentfeature. Second, the book pleasingly dipsinto genetic criticism when required forextra interpretive clout. This is, however,only when necessary, and this keeps thebook well balanced and accessible toreaders who are, quite reasonably, notversed in the content of the more obscureFinnegans Wake notebooks and theaccompanying analytical procedures re-quired to read them.

Chapter I, “American Wake: Joyceand Irish America,” discusses historicalbackground about Irish emigration,

JAMES JOYCE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT #### SPRING 2020 PAGE 15

Joyce’s American references arefurther defined as beingrepresentative of low culture,whether it be in songs, thecountry’s public figures, or itslanguage, which is best shown inthe stylistically frightful (inJoyce’s words) conclusion to the“Oxen of the Sun,” which is, ofcourse, full of American idioms.

political exile, and the cultural tradition ofwhat Joyce called “extremism andbloody” nationalism (18). Indeed, it isJoyce’s own voice which consistentlyrises above those of academic commen-tators since Fox’s approach is to focusupon close textual interpretation. In itsfirst main section, “In the Ranks of theAmerican Rebels,” Fox presents us withuseful analyses of Joyce’s “Ireland, Islandof Saints and Sages,” and “Fenianism:The Last Fenian,” in the context ofdetailing America’s revolutionary historyboth on its own land and in relation to theUnited Irishmen and the Young Ire-landers. Fox notes that America’s revolu-tionary legacy was influential during thebuild-up to the Irish War of Indepen-dence, which leads to complex, concisematerial being developed in theinteresting subsequent section which istitled “American Extremists.” Here, ideasconcerning the definition of Joyce’s ownnationalism, with all its challenging para-doxes, are worked out with continuedanalyses of the two previously mentionedtexts. These deepen with interpretivelevels of meaning owing to Fox’s study ofthem in connection to the politicallandscape of Irish-American republican-ism. He succinctly concludes by statingthat Joyce’s attitude towards Irish Ameri-cans was “deeply indebted to Parnell”(31) because in regards to virulent, states-side Irish republicanism, he “walked onthe verge between sympathy andcondemnation, creating an independentposition in between” (32).

We then transition into the next sec-tion, titled “Shaun McCormack,” whichconcerns the famous Irish tenor JohnMcCormack using an approach whichblends both biography (specifically hisconnections with Joyce) and overallmusical study. Fox demonstrates that IrishAmericans had, to Joyce at least, abourgeois, poor taste in Irish music whichwas inauthentic and beneath the talents ofMcCormack. This section is where thebook confidently displays its colors as anin-depth analytical study of FinnegansWake, which is more than welcome to thereader since Fox proves this to be theinterpretive area where he feels mostconfident and skilled. In this section,primarily Book III of the Wake is given athorough reading in connection to Mc-Cormack being Shaun’s most developedavatar. Fox’s writing flair captures wellShaun and McCormack’s indistinguish-able relationship, and, importantly, heprovides new textual observations build-ing upon already rich research on thesubject. Fox bolsters the interpretativelevel of his work even further in thefollowing section, “What Ish myNation?”, detailing, using copious Wakequotations, McCormack’s Catholicism,gross wealth, and allusions to his fame inthe U.S. In the concluding section ofChapter 1, “Letters from America,” how-ever, Fox makes the unexpected decisionto leave aside the Wake in the place of abiographical study of Giorgio Joyce’sfailed singing career in America in aregrettable harsh reversal of fortune tothat of the millionaire McCormack. Fox’streatment of Giorgio (and Joyce’s fatherlyconcern), and the overall unhappy contextof his journey is convincingly sympa-thetic and it is a very human part of thebook. It is illustrated through a network ofletters written by many individuals onboth sides of the Atlantic and is well-researched and presented.

Chapter II, “The New World Presses:Joyce and American Popular Culture,”serves as an encyclopedic compendiumfor perhaps the most obviously “Ameri-can” sections throughout Joyce’s oeuvre.

This includes many important butneglected additions taken from Joycebiography, Dubliners, A Portrait of theArtist as a Young Man, Ulysses, theCritical Writings, and texts normallyexclusive to genetic criticism, namely theUlysses drafts and Finnegans Wakenotebooks. Fox is particularly eagle-eyedand comprehensive in this chapter andsucceeds in making all his references toAmerica seem as if they are linked to oneanother. In the section “An Intimate andFar More Cruel Tyranny,” Joyce’s“American” references are further definedas being representative of “low” culture(66), whether it be in songs, the country’spublic figures, or its language, which isbest shown in the stylistically “frightful”(in Joyce’s words) conclusion to the“Oxen of the Sun,” which is, of course,full of American idioms. This entiresection develops, logically, into an in-depth study of John Alexander Dowiewho, to quote Fox, is the exemplum of allthat is “garish, demotic [and] commer-cialised” in connection to Americanculture in Ulysses (66). Fox writes hisstrongest analyses on Ulysses in thesection titled “The Circe Cakewalk,”which relates the popularity of minstrelsin Dublin to which he gives deephistorical analysis in connection to themanifestation of the Bohee Brothers whoappear to Bloom (76–77). This is, notunexpectedly, a part of the book devotedheavily to the grim topic of colonialismand slavery in America, which is a themethat Fox deals with delicately and pre-cisely. In particular, this part skilfullyintegrates Bloom’s own identity as an“other” into Ulysses in a fluid, richlyanalytical style.

The next section, “Lapps for Finnsthis Funnycoon’s Week,” studies acollection of genetic entries connected toFinnegans Wake in the fields of music,the Ku Klux Klan, and a range of otherscattered American references. Foxsuccessfully pulls these together into asingular focused narrative by showinghow they are individually applied to thetheme of Shaun abusing Shem, who isoften “black or blacked-up” (82) andinflicted with racist slurs, in particular theterm “coon.” This selection of materialsbrings to horrible light the most unplea-sant aspects of American culture andencourages the Wake reader to return tothe book with a heightened sense of pityfor Shaun’s miserable sibling. The closingsection of Chapter II, “Heinz CansEverywhere,” is a useful review of topicsinvolving American film and television,although how Joyce integrated jazz intothe musical soundscape of the Wake lacksanalysis and deserved focused attentionhere. (It is well documented in Joyce’sGrand Operoar by Matthew Hodgart andRuth Bauerle).

In Chapter III, “Real AmericanWriters: Joyce and American Writers,”the book becomes, perhaps unavoidably,less convincing, and in hindsight it seemsbrave that the topic was taken on withsuch a grand scope in mind. The asso-ciation between Joyce and Americanauthors is an area that has received com-paratively little attention within literarycriticism. Despite this research obstacle,Fox attacks the topic and ably poseslegitimate questions and, in conclusion,he certainly opens up broad discussion ona multitude of useful topics. In theintroductory section, “Something WeHave That They Don’t,” Fox creates ahistorical framework around which tobuild his study, which is America’sentrance into the tradition of high artisticworld literature in the early twentiethcentury. Convincingly, he builds a case

that there exists an uneasy, unresolvedrelationship between Joyce and Americanliterature. It is one defined by its

instability, and this serves as a base forhim to build his analyses. However, thefact that Joyce is dismissive of America’sliterature in the majority of extant sourcespresents unenviable challenges to Fox torationalize; for instance, the quote: “Idoubt that [America] is going to producemuch literature of importance as yet, forto produce literature a country must firstbe vintaged, have an odour in otherwords” (116). Often, Fox’s research israther inconclusive. For instance, hiswork about American short stories andtheir artistic inspiration to Europeans isextensive, but since he eventually determ-ines that Joyce largely resisted the pull oftheir influence within Dubliners, it doesbeg questions about why he gives thetopic so much attention.

Similarly, Joyce sits uneasily withinthe large section which convincingly linksIrish revivalist ideas to those of thewritings of Whitman, Thoreau, Harte andCable. The so-called age of Roosevelt(1901–09) and its “deepening of tiesbetween Irish writers and America” (119)emphasizes the desire, at the time, for theformation of an “un-English” literarycanon on both sides of the Atlantic (119).This is a rich topic pertinent to the studyof the Irish revivalists, but this is notwholly applicable to Joyce, who insteadreceives relatively surface level attentionhere in connection to Dubliners and its“American” references (123–25). Fox’ssection on Walt Whitman, under thesection titled “The Priest Departs, theDivine Literatus Comes,” is undoubtedlyinteresting and creative, focusing on thehistorical standpoint that “[by] 1904,attachment [in Ireland] to Whitman hadbecome a sort of orthodox position forIrish writers and cultural nationalists”(129). This is, in part, elucidated throughFox’s useful references to the CriticalWritings, which bring to light linksbetween James Clarence Mangan andWhitman. He positions Joyce in contrastto the cultural nationalists, demonstratingthat he viewed Whitman, rather, as anunorthodox figure. In a strong section,Fox interprets Stephen’s Shakespeareantheory in “Scylla and Charbydis” as beingimbued with the “spirit of Whitman”(134) owing to Stephen’s irreverent dis-mantling of the Englishman’s work.

In the section on Washington Irving,“Then I Did Rip Van Winkle,” Foxadopts an interpretation based upontransatlantic connections and the linksbetween the old and new worlds ofIreland and America (139). Even thoughIrving’s currency within many literarycircles was diminishing by the 1920s, Foxuncovers Joyce’s own personal buckingof this trend through a broad coverage ofhis references to stage versions of “RipVan Winkle” in “Circe” and allusions toA History of New York in FinnegansWake. The section from pages 146–48 is anotably satisfying genetic study thatbridges the gap between close interpretive

analysis of Finnegans Wake and niche,focused notebook study. Here, Fox showshow Joyce took notes from Irving’s non-fiction, which was in fact gaining criticalinterest at this time (139). This clearlyshows that Irving’s work held signifi-cance to Joyce as a nonfiction writer.Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is, unfor-tunately, revealed in this chapter, by nofault of Fox’s own, to be a book thatJoyce used primarily to mine for “colour-ful Americanisms” in Finnegans Wake,rather than anything more significant.This is coupled with the fact that Joycedid not in fact read the novel, due to timerestraints and eye troubles, whichrequired David Fleishman to perform therole of his note taker (114). Normally,this unfortunate truth would scupper anypossible academic argumentation thatJoyce valued Twain’s work on a deeppersonal level, but Fox pushes throughthis problem and develops intellectuallyengaged and relevant observations inspite of this that will prove useful toJoyce scholars analyzing HuckleberryFinn in any capacity.

Chapter IV, “Who Killed JamesJoyce? Joyce’s American Reception,” isthe section where we can expect to findanalyses of Joyce’s legal wrangling in theU.S. and the U.S.’s academic reception tohis work and contribution to the so-called“Joyce Industry.” Its title, “Who KilledJames Joyce?”, is, of course, coined fromKavanagh’s misanthropic poem, charac-terized by its tortuous rhymes and jokeswhich, at best, trigger wry smiles. It is,pleasingly, stylistically consistent withthe rest of the book, rather than being anannex that juts out noticeably andawkwardly from the remainder of thecontent. There is a sustained focused onthe presence of “American” content inFinnegans Wake, which in this chapterrelates to the topics of legal troubles andcourtrooms used within literary settings.Fox’s analysis of the “Boston Letter” is,however, ill-placed here, receiving a mostlengthy study as a close textual reviewwith accompanying genetic (“Scribble-dehobble”) investigation. This imme-diately distracts from the interestingmaterial about the American academicresponse to Ulysses in the 1930s (153). Itis, additionally, the least successful sec-tion of genetic criticism in the book,owing to its uncharacteristic quoting oflarge portions of notebook entries withinsufficient analysis. It is regrettable that,perhaps, the most obvious portion ofFinnegans Wake with American andtransatlantic textual connections receivesa relatively late and disappointing level ofcritical attention in terms of stylisticexecution, and lacks new, insightfulmaterial. Also, the much-touted topic ofAmerican academia surprisingly plays aminor role in the final evaluation of thissection.

In the next part, “The Differences areEpocal,” the text has a structure andtheme more in keeping with Chapter IV’sexpected layout. There is historicalbackdrop of what constitutes an “Amer-ican reception” from a European point ofview and it contains much background onliterary battles between academics of theNew Humanist and New Critical Schools,and the anti-academics of the NewJournalists (164). Fox demonstrates fullunderstanding of the curricula of Amer-ican universities and opinions of promi-nent critics, setting forth a developedinterpretation on how the abuse levelledupon Joyce’s avatar Shem are a responseto the ad hominem attacks that the authorreceived by certain Americans. ThatJoyce integrated notes from Dr. JosephCollins’ review of Ulysses fits in well

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with the surrounding research and puts itinto suitable context. Discussions onacademese and academia then logicallylead Fox to I.6 and the “Professor Jones”passage (168–69), and he documents stepby step notebook additions and changesas part of his interpretation, whichprovides the meat of much of the bestfindings dotted throughout. This keepsChapter IV from lapsing into a bio-graphical form of writing which, despitebeing useful, would inescapably cast hisbook into Ellmann’s shadow. If Fox haddeparted from his original critical style,his book would have become unbalanced,so his decision to keep everything con-sistent was a wise choice.

One flaw inherent within Fox’s book,however, is that by the nature of its title itis duty bound to research everything (andanything) that involves America inJoyce’s works, which can lead to un-focused discussions that are not veryconnected with America at all. Dis-cussions of Joyce’s relationship with EzraPound, say, fall into this trap (173–81).According to the confines of the book’stitle, and because Pound is an “American”writer, Fox must ergo study him at length,but, as it quickly becomes clear, therelevance of Pound’s “American identity”to Joyce’s work is negligible at best.Pound’s information about the “inter-nationalization” of Joyce’s writings (177)and comments about his own antipathytowards America draw the topic of“America” into the book only briefly. Thesignificance of Pound’s “American-ness”to Joyce is, of course, overshadowed byPound’s disapproval of Finnegans Wake,as well as his editorial skills. Thatunavoidable blemish aside, the section isa very instructive collection of quoteanalyses and discussion about letters be-tween Joyce and Pound which serve as anintroduction to more detailed studies else-where, and Fox usefully discusses theintegration of Pound material into Finne-gans Wake.

The next section, the “Unique Estatesof Amessican,” covers much legal con-tent. The U.S. ban on Ulysses is, ob-viously, a key topic that requires full andunique analytical treatment here. TheUlysses censorship trial is weaved into thebook on occasion, but, to this reviewer’ssurprise, a larger, separate portion is notdevoted to its historical overview or sig-nificance. On the whole, Fox resistscommenting further on the subject, nordoes he add his own biographical materialto the already plentiful research available.His solution to the problem of potentiallyrehashing old research is to delve into theeffect that the Ulysses ban had on Joyceand the ad hominem attacks he suffered,and this all concludes with a discussion ofthe Festy King trial in Finnegans Wake(183–84). This approach works well andkeeps the book fresh, but to the slightdetriment of diluting its distinctly “Amer-ican” content—after all, Ulysses wasbanned in the U.K. as well. Fox strugglesslightly with this unfortunate lack ofphysical backing in the notebooks here,and this, perhaps by necessity, leads tooccasionally unfocused sections involvingU.S. alcohol prohibition (186). This,

while relevant to the topic of banning,strains to warrant multiple pages ofanalysis within the overall framework. Inthe same section, Samuel Roth’s piracy ofUlysses is introduced. Similar to the Ulys-ses censorship trial, this was to be ex-pected as a topic within Fox’s book as abiographical requirement but arrives verylate. Fox highlights openly that theincident has already been very well docu-mented (189), so he takes an identicalapproach to that of his documentation ofthe Ulysses censorship trial, which is totrace the significance of the unfortunateincident throughout Finnegans Wake.Plagiarism and literary theft naturally lendthemselves to analysis here, which Foxskillfully applies to Finnegans Wake in agrand but cleverly concise scope wherewe also return to the topic of race (193).

In the book’s conclusion, Fox returnsto the topic of American academia inJoyce studies, which feels like a slightmismanagement of information, and says

belatedly, “If Americans did indeed ‘in-vent’ Joyce, as Flann O’Brien claimed,then they seemed remarkably indifferentto what Joyce had to say about theirfellow countrymen” (195). This is aninteresting and vital question but, sadly, itis presented too late for developedcommentary and it is a puzzle why it wasnot integrated into Chapter IV’s section,perhaps in association with PatrickKavanagh’s poem “Who Killed JamesJoyce?” Nevertheless, in regards to thegrand thematic core of his work, Fox’sstatement here that “Joyce pairs Irish andAmerican histories” (196) is thoroughlyconvincing and rings true once we returnto Finnegans Wake and reread the“American” sections with his eruditecommentary sticking in our minds firmly.In particular, the macrocosmic idea that

Joyce viewed a decolonialized Americaas a point of reverence through which to“interrogate the emancipatory forces atwork in [the revolutionary era] IrelandJoyce was writing about” (196) is anespecially useful concept. Material con-cerning the domination of the U.S. withinthe Joyce industry (198) would also haveserved discussion within Chapter IV,especially in light of Geert Lernout’s oft-quoted statement that every country in theworld views Joyce in a radically differentway (200). Fox’s inclusion of thissuggests that valuable marked differencesexist between American Joyce researchand Joyce research elsewhere, but,unfortunately, this interesting material isnot integrated into the book. Later, Fox,in fact, draws further attention to gaps oromissions in his research (200–01).Unfortunately, many of these listed topicsseem useful and, in retrospect, lack justi-fication for their omission. Fox mentionsthe Irish American author F. P. Dunne

here, but it is not clear why he didn’t getanalytical treatment in Chapter II becausehe has obvious relevance to the questionof Joyce’s appreciation of Americanwriting. Not only are his characters Mr.Dooley and Hinnessy in the “Musey-room” section of Finnegans Wake, butalso Joyce wrote a charming piece titled“Dooleysprudence” in 1916 aboutDunne’s Chicago barman hero. Addi-tional questions posed to us by Fox in thefinal two pages concern America’s cars,financial services and markets, econom-ics, linguistic history, female writers, andcomic strips. They seem like obviousmissed opportunities since they wouldhave undoubtedly strengthened ChaptersII and III had they been included.

In a final evaluation, Fox’s book is acohesive and highly erudite work that

succeeds in its prime goal, which is toelucidate the nature of what Americameant to Joyce. This question is answeredby the entirety of Fox’s rich and nuancedstudy, which covers, as demonstrated,four major areas of analysis and a com-plete review of Joyce’s works, biographyand genetic materials. It is difficult to seehow the main topics researched could beinterpreted in a more thorough criticalmanner. Fox’s book is most successfulwhen involved with Finnegans Wakeanalysis, and his usage of geneticcriticism is skilful and stylistically fluent.His positioning of this difficult, oftenniche critical material is seamless along-side non-genetic, more conventionalresearch. Therefore, this book offers read-ers who are not normally exposed to thisfield of study an opportunity to enter intoits analytical milieu in a refreshing,accessible manner. Fox is also careful tokeep his book new in terms of its researchand he cleverly presents well-documented

topics in ways that have unique perspec-tives. The book does have a lack ofanalytical focus on occasion, as noted,and certain topics are attributed anunmerited lack of importance, but theseare, within the totality of the text, minorflaws. On a grand scheme, the book’sbiggest achievement is that its memorableand compelling research, and overall“American” feel, heighten the reader’ssenses to the evident fact that the U.S. isan intrinsic entity within Joyce’s works,and this will spur on further investigationin the very broad areas of Americanculture, history and politics. #

—St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia

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