Reading Joyce (review)

Reading Joyce is a benign, innocent title but its author, David Pierce, is anything but a naive reader of Joyce’s work. For over thirty years, he has analyzed Joyce and authored a number of books concentrating on his texts.¹ Now, he provides a relaxed, engaging narrative of Joyce and his writing for general and more advanced readers. This account offers a vibrant narrative of Joyce’s life and works, tracking down allusions, references, and details that represent the personality of the man, as well as the cultural history of his art.

Reading Joyce is a discursive book with numerous personal asides and private comments that make the reader feel comfortable with Pierce. His concern is with understanding Joyce, for he is repeatedly aware of readers’ hesitation to engage with an author purported to be “difficult.” The autobiographical dimension of the volume, initially surprising and off-putting, becomes a welcomed aspect of the book, distinguishing it from other attempts to read Joyce’s life and works as a whole. “Coping with Joyce” is how Pierce more accurately describes his program, offering various points of approach and perspectives from “Snapshots of Joyce,” a discussion of the author in photographs, to a treatment of Joyce at twenty-two and what Dublin might have been like in 1904 (13).

Pierce’s goal is not to provide an overarching analysis of Joyce’s work but to take readers through the experience of reading him. The uneven distribution of Pierce’s chapters—four on Dubliners, one on A Portrait, three on Ulysses, and a final one on Finnegans Wake—reflects an interest rather than an obligation to discuss individual works equally. He proposes a series of intersecting topics relating to all the works, including the importance of streets in Joyce’s writing. In calling Ulysses essentially “a novel of the streets,” his critical point is that they offer “a form of security away from the insecurity of the home” for Joyce and his characters (25). This partly grew out of Joyce’s own constant movement growing up in Dublin: the family had twelve different addresses before he left for the continent in October 1904. Streets thus offered Joyce a place to reflect, and Pierce remarks that photos of Joyce in the streets of Paris taken by Gisèle Freund are one instance of their importance.²

Delay is another useful concept Pierce develops. Replacing the idea of difficulty in reading Joyce with delay, he argues that Joyce’s practice is one of deferring meaning, postponing the obvious and letting signification accumulate through reference, repetition, or the revitalization of words. The reader’s job is to move through levels of meaning as with the word “gnomon” in Dubliners (D 9), a term that differs from, but does not reject, the Euclidian concept (73–74). Learning the actual denotation of such terms and the way Joyce uses them is always an act of discovery, Pierce argues.

Pierce is especially attracted to Joycean places, sites of encounters that contextualize character in his novels. For example, in chapter 9, entitled “Leopold Bloom at Home and Work” (221), he reconstructs #7 Eccles Street, floor by floor. Using historical information, photographs, and axonometric architectural drawings, he shows the layout of the house derived principally, but not exclusively, from the fictional source. The actual home was demolished in the 1960s, but there is enough evidence (and even photographs) to document the building.

Other domestic objects appear in this chapter, including a container for “Plumtree’s potted meat” (226), obtained, as the photo caption notes (in perhaps a first for Joyce studies), from eBay. He further observes that, in 1909, Joyce stayed for one night at #7 Eccles Street, visiting his friend J. F. Byrne who had rented the premises (226). Details about Eccles Street and its lodgers expand our appreciation of its significance in the novel, Pierce’s captions mixing the documentary with the unexpected. In one, he comments on the paucity of Jews in Ireland—the 1901 census only registered 2000 in the entire...