A Companion to James Joyce (review)

Everybody needs friends, but is that really why Blackwell, which has already provided companions for such lonely souls as John Milton and Emily Dickinson, as well as for entities like “The British and Irish Novel” and “Modernist Literature and Culture,”¹ has now published another associate for Joyce? No, this impressive new academic book, authoritatively edited by Richard Brown, is a “companion” because these days it is much better to be that than a sales-depressive “anthology” or “essay collection.” Those titles may promise information and interpretations, but a companion connotes emotional support, sturdiness, reliability, and fun. As well it should, too, since even the most dedicated Joycean will think U.S. $199.95 is a lot of money for a vade mecum, however faithful. I hope libraries can afford it, however, for this is a very good book.

Like Dante joining a “genial throng” of wise predecessors in canto 4 of the Inferno, so does this erudite tome enter a “fair school” already on the shelves. Putting aside the myriad scholarly companions not named companions, Joyceans can turn to Zack Bowen and James F. Carens’s 1984 A Companion to Joyce Studies, Derek Attridge’s 1990 Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, which was substantially revised and reissued in 2004, and the 1998 A Companion to James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” edited by Margot Norris.² The award for all-time most companionable Joycean goes to Vicki Mahaffey, who has a chapter in all five companions.³

Where does the new Blackwell tome fit in? Twenty-five years ago, Bowen and Carens were able to present their volume as an attempt “to deal with the entire body of Joyce’s work and with the range of contemporary scholarship on James Joyce” (xii). They promised “substantial essays on all aspects of Joyce’s life, thought, and works,” a “complete background,” and “a guide through the complexities” (xii). It would not be exhaustive but would nonetheless function as “a complete and thorough survey of Joyce’s life and work” (xiii). In practice, as Jean-Michel Rabaté points out in his contribution to the newest companion, Bowen and Carens’s encyclopedic pretention was unjustified because their eight-hundred-page book made no mention whatsoever of many authors and trends that had started shaping Joyce studies in the 1970s, including Jacques Derrida, Karl Marx, Jacques Lacan, and feminism (268). Much slimmer, the 1990 Attridge companion aimed to be a “first resort” for those who had neither “the time” nor “the desire” to sift through the vast output of Joyce criticism but still wished to “deepen and extend their enjoyment and understanding” (xii). In order to keep up with the “best of current and recent studies of Joyce,” the 2004 Attridge compilation cut some articles and added others on sexuality, consumer culture, and postcolonialism (xi). Norris’s Ulysses companion was one of those all-in-one books for students that tried to answer questions like “what is deconstruction” and “what is psychoanalytic criticism,” while at the same time offering illustrative readings.

The youngest Companion is not Bowen and Carens’s key to all Joycean mythologies, not Attridge’s taste-making by an elite arbiter, and not Norris’s theory-cum-text primer. Brown’s guiding editorial premise, though he does not put it this way, seems to have been that Joyce is infinite and that to accompany him or his texts is to throw oneself into a field of rapid and limitless expansion. Mixing traditional and original topics, the book’s twenty-five essays expand the contexts, categories, and themes that “might inform our study of Joyce, while by no means exhausting the possibilities of such expansion” (2). A plausible subtitle would have been “Joyce in the expanded field.”

There are three parts, each with an uninspired title: “Re-reading Texts” (17–89), “Contexts and Locations” (91–238), and “Approaches and Receptions” (239–426). The first has four essays on major works. The second has nine that come at Joyce from a wide variety of...