James Joyce: Oral and Written Discourse as Mirrored in Experimental Narrative Art (review)

In the introductory lines of his James Joyce: Oral and Written Discourse as Mirrored in Experimental Narrative Art, Willi Erzgräber tells us that the theoretical framework for much of the book in hand rests upon an essay by Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher entitled "Language of Immediacy and Language of Distance: Orality and Literacy in the Area of Tension between Linguistic Theory and History of Language."¹ These titles, both translated here from their original German, as well as the highly structured, scientifically numbered layout of Erzgräber's book (not to mention my somewhat irrational fear of German philological studies), suggest that the text will require some heavy interpretive lifting through dense, theoretical discursive analysis. This is not the case, however. After briefly remarking on Koch and Oesterreicher's concepts of oral discourse as "language of immediacy" and written discourse as "language of distance" (11) and presenting a short summary of M. M. Bakhtin's notion of the "image of a language"² —from which the author derives the mirror metaphor of the book's subtitle (13)—Erzgräber embarks on a series of close readings of oral and written discourses that Joyce appropriated and transformed for use in his narrative works. In doing so, the critic makes extensive use of recent commentaries on Joyce's texts, including a number of studies in German, to produce an effective and quite readable synthesis of existing thinking on dozens of discursive instances in Joyce's oeuvre.³

Erzgräber reminds us that in his "continual artistic mirroring of reality" Joyce recalled and incorporated much of what he heard and read into the "complex linguistic reality" of his literary creation (15). These bits of discourse include: conversation and gossip, political speeches, academic disputations, folk songs and tales, the Catholic liturgy, private correspondence, advertisements, newspaper articles, light fiction, sermons, and legal documents. Erzgräber examines them all. Beginning with Joyce's written epiphanies and their reworking for use in Stephen Hero and Dubliners, the author goes on to examine the use of oral and written discourse in several of the stories in Dubliners and a good many instances in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, before giving us engaging readings of moments in nearly every episode in Ulysses, to which he devotes over half the book. He closes, as expected, with exegetical commentary on several passages in Finnegans Wake. For some reason, Erzgräber chooses not to deal with Exiles—perhaps because the dramatic text is not really narrative per se.

Some sampling is in order. In section 1.1.4, "Threats and Their Context," Erzgräber investigates how Joyce's revision and repositioning of his first epiphany (which relates a dialogue between Mrs. Joyce and a neighbor, Mr. Vance, who enters a room carrying a stick and demanding an apology from young Jim⁴ ) at the opening of A Portrait both transforms and enriches the original text. Recontextualizing the conflict outlined in the epiphany completely within the Catholic family that will eventually try fruitlessly to keep Stephen from breaking away from the Church, Joyce infuses the earlier discourse with a "semantic depth and artistic effect by [its] integration into a narrative context which in the final analysis is a Promethean-Luciferlike revolt on Stephen Dedalus' part" (33). Erzgräber reaches this conclusion following the lead of A. Walton Litz in the latter's introduction to the 1991 edition of Joyce's Poems and Shorter Writings, in which we read (and Erzgräber cites—33) the following: "Even as an isolated incident this epiphany is an arresting account of a sensitive child's confrontation with authority; but the fragment does not become a 'revelation,' a radiant image, until it reaches its place in Portrait as an introduction to the obsessive themes of guilt and submission" (159). This example is typical of Erzgräber's method throughout the study...