Joyce through the Ages

ELT 43 : 4 2000 Joyce through the Ages Michael Patrick Gillespie, ed. Joyce through the Ages: A Nonlinear View. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. χ + 215 pp. $49.95 THE FINAL PRODUCT of the 1997 annual conference at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, this collection does thought-provoking work with the conference theme, "Joyce through the Ages." In organizing the volume into three sections, its editor Michael Gillespie latches on to the concepts from chaos theory introduced by Peter Mackey's essay; these paradigms were probably fresh in his mind from Gillespie's own 1997 article "(Meta)physics and 'the portal of discovery': Literary Criticism and the New Physics" published in the James Joyce Quarterly. But the original conference theme speaks better to me, as I reconsider ways that the essays converse with one another and carry us toward future understandings of Joyce. I find that the best essays are rich in the contexts they provide, recovering and shaping cultural and historical conditions both for Joyce's ages of creative activity, and for the eras of critical interpretation that have followed. Gillespie starts the volume with his own essay, claiming common interpretive subjectivity of history and fiction in regard to Joyce—an argument that can scarcely be expected to shock the anticipated readers of this volume. It does provide the first of several examples of vanishing disciplinary boundaries—a phenomenon invited by Joyce's texts and visible in numerous other essays. Gillespie's invocation of Irish films—and particularly Neil Jordan's Michael Collins—for his critique of supposed historical objectivity contributes to this pattern. Gillespie has consistently offered the context of Joyce's own reading, focused most immediately in his library as a contextual ground for understanding his place in cultural history. For this essay Gillespie has delved into the histories of Joyce's time regarding the fall of Charles Stuart Parnell, including William Francis Collier's History of Ireland for the Schools, and he reminds us once again of Joyce's recourse to Thorn's Dublin Street Directory, as well as his relatives resident in Dublin, to assure factual credibility. For additional contact with Joyce's historical contexts, other authors in this volume take Joyce back, not just to his own book collection, but to the public libraries available to him, and to the popular press. Pointing to the index of Richard Ellmann's 1982 James Joyce Jean Kimball protests , "Joyce's library habit has never been given the documented biblio500 BOOK REVIEWS graphical attention that his drinking habit has." Drawing on research she has been conducting for decades, Kimball offers a fine, broad history (complete with chart) of the chronology Joyce shared with the psychoanalytic movement. Some of it is set in the obvious Jungian terrain of Zurich. In Joyce's Trieste, she suggests that the scientific and intellectual community gravitated toward developments in Vienna. Kimball is able to enhance previous sets of allusions to psychoanalysis in Ulysses, and especially to "Scylla and Charybdis," expanding greatly on what Weldon Thornton considered a "far reach" to Otto Rank's 1912 InzestMotif . But she makes her own reach, beyond Rank and Freud and Jones on Hamlet to accommodate lesser pieces Joyce might have stumbled upon in the current periodicals section of the library. Her example, J. (Isidore) Sadger writing on persons whose '"principal or exclusive sexual interest' is in the buttocks" is indeed well suited to the propensities of Leopold Bloom. In a similar move, Roy Gottfried sits Joyce down to read a comic piece in the Dublin Illustrograph of 1899, "One Way of Carving a Turkey," applying this in comparison to Joyce's most memorable scenes of carving in "The Dead" and A Portrait. He also puts George Meredith's essay "On the Idea of Comedy" firmly on the Joycean reading list. A convergence of time and place similar to Kimball's psychoanalytic summary is offered by Peter Francis Mackey, who provides a useful digest of the three guiding principles of the Parisian Henri Poincaré's Science et Méthode, published in French in 1908, translated to English in 1914. While the essay provides a new vocabulary derived from chaos theory for describing Bloom, I find...