Facts are one thing; the language we use to mimic facts is another.
Communication requires translation. This is true whether we transpose one language into another or whether we merely receive information conveyed in the printed word and, in a complicated, cyclically reiterative and interpretive process, we recast it in more familiar patterns which snap into place more decorously within our own unique mental worldviews, all independently construed.
With great anticipation I’d looked forward to The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge University Press 1990, Derek Attridge, editor, First Edition). Other volumes in the series which I’d previously read were deserving of their prestigious reputation. I was surprised and disappointed to find many of these eleven essays more lackluster than luminous. However, as Attridge envisioned an ambitious book that would fluently contextualize every aspect of James Joyce the writer as it delivered original insights from all of his published writings and workshop material, the First Edition of this Companion perhaps succeeds better than might have been foretold.
This book addresses Joycean attributes of biography (Who is James Joyce?), text (What happens in his works?) and literary theory (Why should we be impressed?). The biography section, comprising the first four essays, is the least engaging, adding little fresh insight into Joyce’s life. Unfortunately, this consumes a full third of the book.
If you’re still reading, the next four essays ― the text section ― are far more interesting. John Paul Riquelme efficaciously splices together three different essays as he plumbs the inter- and intra-stylistic mutations informing Dubliners, Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Although in Dubliners the focus is always (except in “The Dead”) on the external, on gritty and mean realism, the concrete elements of this world seem to thinly veil a suggestive symbolic significance that lingers a heartbeat away. Riquelme emphasizes alternating rhythms in Joyce’s texts. An oscillation between this realistic external materialism and an internal fantasy-vision serves as a tool for character depiction in Stephen Hero and as stylistic molding in Portrait. Stephen Hero unfolds in the moment, while much of Portrait develops as Stephen Dedalus continuously reassesses his memory, modifying his responses to and interpretation of events and ideas. Riquelme helpfully illuminates subtle, yet critical, shifts in Stephen’s character in Stephen Hero. The revolutionary evolution of style within Portrait, signaled by the tremors at the end of each section of that novel, points the way to more radical tectonic displacements that will rock Ulysses.
Jennifer Levine tackles that particularly illustrious slab of Joyceana, considering whether it is better approached as a poem, as a novel or as “text.” Inevitably arriving at the predictable answers of “Yes,” and “It depends,” she does give us much insight to ponder along the way. Likewise, Margot Norris nicely handles her discussion of Finnegans Wake, emphasizing Joyce’s plundering and rewriting of his previous texts, just as he has always done, always changing his point of view and his expression of his expanding sphere of observation and reflection. Norris also stresses the vying reactions to the Wake embraced by two camps of readers: those who wish to control the text, to pin down meaning, and those who celebrate its literary revolution, its liberation from self-imposed limits. Of course the same binary classification applies to those interested in any and all of Joyce’s works. Somewhat contra-chronological, an essay by Vicki Mahaffey follows, taking up Joyce’s shorter and less-sung works, and a fine source for consideration of these it is.
Reading Joyce, studying him, we can’t help reflecting on how the polyvalencies enwombed in words allow for subjective, parallactic and gestalten interpretation only with a view to their positional relations. This is equally true within a sentence, or a story or chapter, or with reference to a whole book, or to his entire fractal oeuvre. We may require a new kind of psychological calculus, or spectral analysis, to finally grasp Joyce, for no other writer ever evolved so continuously and over so many orders of magnitude during his career. To decode a text word order and context are critical, of course, but so are our personal histories as readers. The variables of personal memory and comprehensive ability, our grip on reality and a willingness to continually reassess everything, including our own conclusions, are essential tools brought to bear. As we turn each page, the ground of apprehension trembles beneath our feet. We must question our answers today, and interrogate yesterday’s verdicts anew tomorrow.
What is it to read Joyce, or anyone? All text is serially reconstructed within the singularly wrought chambers of evocative vision of he who encounters it. What makes our minds so variant? Our ages, experiences, time spent in serious and critical reflection and study, time spent watching sit-com reruns, our needs and desires, our longings, our opinions and beliefs, our biases and prejudices, the things and people we hate and love, our tangled personal situations and miscellaneous problems and likelihood to laugh or to refrain from doing so. Every book I re-read is a different experience precisely because I’ve become a different person than I was during my last read. Reading is inseparable from interpreting; rather, reading re-interprets an author’s intent, or his own artistic conception.
In the literary theory section of the book, Hans Walter Gabler contributes a significant, if not important, essay regarding Joyce’s writing processes, which also serves as a sort of rehash and meta-analysis of what’s come before. Gabler begins with Joyce’s own suggestion that he compensated for a lack of imagination with a premeditated hierarchy as intricate as Dante’s, an elaborately reticulate artistic scaffolding and architecture. Gabler develops a theory that Joyce dismantled texts, medieval to recent, broke them down, digested them and recast them in his own image, that he continued to do this with his own texts throughout his life. That he wove a web of interlinked symbols the links of which reinforce and compound the significance of solid objects symbolized. With substantial and accommodating reference to Joyce’s workshop materials, Gabler describes an ouroboros approach to writing and rewriting such as the world has not witnessed previously outside of religion, self-devouring and self-generating, a regenerative form of composition preoccupied not with plot but accentuating numinous whatness for its own sake. Joyce’s scaffolding is not used to support the construction of a preconceived skyscraper and is subsequently removed: the scaffolding itself is the ground upon which the celestial edifice is elaborated. The building is the physical, external manifestation of the occult internal vision.
Gabler’s encompassing portrait of Joyce’s plenary vision is electrifying. He is appropriately awestruck, I think, although he sometimes succumbs to his own veneration when he speculates, for example, that Joyce held vast swaths of text in his head before he ever wrote down a word. There is genius to writing, yes, but there is also craft, and an illusion is spellbinding when the sleight of hand succeeds, leaving only an appearance of magic. That does not make it magic, though. Still, this provocative essay opens a window onto the working of Gabler’s own mind which is useful, if for no other reason, because it helps one better assess the lingering aftertaste of controversy regarding his text of Ulysses. He’s better judged in the light of his intellectual prowess on display here.
Of the two remaining essays, one is extremely irritating for becoming more of a polemic intended to promote a political point of view than for anything it tells us about Joyce, and the other is a helpful positioning of Joyce within ― or maybe alongside ― the doubtable framework of modernism and post-modernism.
With James Joyce, the ambiguity is of no less importance than the precision: most authors write to constrain interpretation, to cut off false readings, but Joyce spurned convergence, always embracing the divergences and multiple interpretations. The hungry human intellect with determination will always find sequence . . . structure . . . relationship. Some seek to solve every equation. Some seek control. Others cry out for the anomaly from which all creativity springs.
The act of reading Joyce is one thing; Joyce’s act of writing was another. Contemplate the processes that must have occurred within the imagination of the artist whose product was the text, conceiving the conceptual shapes of his art, sifting through words and word-clusters known to him in quest of just the right combination of fragments which, when optimally assembled, produced the effect of a sentence packing just the desired amount of precision and ambiguity. The writer too has had to translate an imaginative vision into a fitting word stream and what’s more, he must have done so knowing he was obliged to rely upon his many readers to reconstitute his imaginative vision not in its original form, but in forms unique to every reader’s mind. In other words, he knew we would reshuffle his words in other words. What is it to be an author? To seek absolute control of imagination and chain Andromedan language, or to relinquish authority, to smash the icons, to play the rebellious part of Perseus? To build a text as reliant on ambiguity as on precise meaning? Writing and reading is like integrating and then taking a derivative. All those runaway R values. . .
One cannot read a text without changing that text, and any commentary about a text, such as this hit and miss Cambridge Companion, is an attempt to persuade others to come around to your point of view, knowing that the readers of your commentary must needs once again recast your words into their words, and so on, ad infinitum, worlds without end.
[N.B. The contents of the Second Edition of this book, published in 2004, differ extensively from the First Edition, reviewed here. Whether this is due to dissatisfaction with the First Edition, or because an opportunity for newer voices to be heard was available, or for some other reason or reasons, I don’t know, but this review can only be applicable to the earlier release.]
Tagged: James Joyce
