How to Read Joyce, and: Joyce (review)

These two short introductions to Joyce pose an interesting question for any reviewer or reader: are they merely Joyce-lite, bite-sized snapshots of the work of the maestro designed for a culture with a limited attention-span, or do they represent two epiphanies, manifestations of the intellectual “whatness” of Joyce’s work? Both seek to cover the entirety of his life and work in books designed to be read in the length of time it generally takes undergraduates to tackle the first three episodes of Ulysses. There is, of course, no reason to think that a short book of a hundred pages or so could not serve as a useful and informative introduction to an author who believed his work would puzzle academics for centuries to come: after all, Joyce was published in the first anthology of Imagism, the poetic style designed to represent with the utmost concision some important core experience (though arguably, Joyce’s “I Hear An Army” is not really an Imagist poem—CP 44).¹

Given the many introductory guides already available about Joyce, however, we may wonder, first, do we need another batch, and, second, why they are getting shorter? The answer to the second question probably revolves around price, publishers being well aware that the undergraduate market for books is being squeezed and that a student might well buy Derek Attridge’s little book for £6.99 but not, say, his edited overview, The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, at £16.99.² Assessing the value of these two books and whether they serve a valuable function requires some further discussion.

Both books have their merits, and, in a sense, both are designed for slightly different purposes. Attridge’s text appears in a series on “How to Read,” edited by the philosopher Simon Critchley, and, according to its back-cover blurb, aims to be “a personal master-class in reading—which brings you face-to-face with some of the most influential and challenging texts in history.” Other books in the series include some old friends in Joyce studies—Jacques Derrida, Thomas Aquinas, and Carl Jung—and the format ensures that each chapter starts with a quotation from a key text, followed by the author’s commentary upon the passage. It is thus akin to the experience of a teaching session, and, in the case of Attridge’s volume, we get the sense that it would be a very fine class to attend. Ian Pindar’s book is part of a series devoted to the “Life and Times” of famous figures, so Joyce rubs shoulders here with Winston Churchill, Marlene Dietrich, and Louis Armstrong, among others.³ It is nicely illustrated and printed on glossy paper (the Attridge volume contains no pictures and has a utilitarian paper quality), and the focus is more upon Joyce’s biography and the historical times in which he lived; only one chapter concentrates in any depth upon a text (Ulysses), although all the major works are granted broad brush-stroke discussion. Its ideal reader, presumably, is that of the person generally aware of Joyce but perhaps never having read his works.

From the point of view of the academic reader, Attridge’s book is the stronger overall, and, repeatedly, I nodded in agreement at the points made that were familiar to me from my own teaching of the author. Though a slight volume, it contains the distilled knowledge of a critic with some twenty-five years experience of research on Joyce. Attridge is a self-confessed “Joycean” without apologies, and, in many ways, I could think of no better person to introduce an under-graduate, or any other reader, to the joys of reading Joyce.⁴ It is also impressive to see Attridge’s scholarly study of literature, language, and ethics slipped lightly, but with authority, into this text. In the introduction, he argues that the true “richness” of Joyce’s texts can...