Joyce, Ireland, Britain (review)

This informative, even distinguished collection of essays promises to immerse its reader into a newly specific, historically accurate context for reading Joyce's work in relation to British and Irish politics and culture. Perhaps its most arresting claim is that unlike the Englishman Haines in Joyce's Ulysses, the English critics represented here refuse to treat history as a scapegoat in an effort to evade personal or national responsibility for historical wrongs against Ireland. Instead, the editors argue that the responsibility of "a new kind of English Joyce scholar" might be "to hold back from too ready a surrender to historical amnesia" and "to gesture toward the immense debtorship" [of a thing done; an echo of Stephen's telegram to Mulligan in Ulysses] "by doing a great deal of extremely hard and painstaking historical work" (15). These two goals are something that every contributor succeeds in accomplishing: each of the essays in the volume is worth reading for the quality of its research alone; many are also gracefully written.

The editors' introduction should be approached with some caution, however. With seductive intensity, Gibson and Platt present what is almost a manifesto for what they call "the London group" or "the London school" (17). They enthrone History as a fierce and sensual god, his sword grimly drawn against any form of abstraction or transcendence. Instead, they would plunge both hands into what Joyce in Finnegans Wake called the "orange-flavoured mudmound" of history, feeling for the grainy texture of material fact and variant discourses. Instead of "interpreting" Joyce's text (interpretation is under suspicion as a semi-imperial, generalizing imposition upon the resistant complexity and contradictions of a bygone but geographically rooted past), they seek to marinate it in history. Theory is cast as a distorting filter; humanism (like any form of universalism) a simplistic and self-serving fiction. Essays by Finn Fordham and Vincent Cheng pick up this thread but spin it differently: Fordham argues, with intriguing modifications, that Joyce mocks universalism in Finnegans Wake. What he succeeds in demonstrating, however, is significantly different from what he argues: he shows that what is being mocked is not universalization, but extremism and stubbornness. Under Fordham's pen, Joyce's texts perform a delightful, raucous glissando along the continuum from the particular to the universal. Cheng, in partial contrast, perfectly articulates Joyce's exquisite balancing of the rural and the urban, the nationalist and the cosmopolitan, the historical and the humanist, but his readings of Joyce's text, while perfectly persuasive, are less surprising and disturbing than those of Fordham and Platt.

Perhaps the clearest way to illustrate the potential danger of an emphatically historicist approach—one that sets itself against "universalizing" geometries of meaning—is to think of the Annals of the Four Masters, which Joyce evokes in Finnegans Wake through the character(s) of Mamalujo (four old men who are at once the scribes of the Irish Annals and the writers of the four gospels). The Annals is a long, tedious, detailed list of events and dates. It has no pattern; it represents pure particularity, beyond the limits of narrative or even meaning. Such history, while a treasure-trove of information, is indeed a midden. More appealingly, poetry also depends for its effects upon highly particular, unique uses of language: a studied avoidance of the expected, the trite, or the general. But at their best, poetry and history both rely upon carefully constructed patterns as frameworks for meaning; without the formal shapes suggested by narrative or genre—the argument, the story, the sonnet—as a backdrop for the particular, history and poetry dissolve into miscellany. Despite the way that the project is framed, that doesn't happen in this collection.

The essays in this volume, then, accomplish something more difficult than what the editors initially claim: they successfully negotiate the dangerous "no man's land" between history and myth, between fact and desire, between the axis of a specific time and place and the potential extension of the graphs...