Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and the Reprobate Tradition (review)

Alistair Cormack’s Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and the Reprobate Tradition is a reliable analysis of the Vichian tradition as it relates to William Butler Yeats’s A Vision and Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.¹ Cormack argues that, in opposition to a linear history, these works reflect a non-teleological, circular vision of history, which is articulated in the writings of Giambattista Vico.² For Joyceans, the strength of Cormack’s writing lies in his clear and accessible contextualization of Vico’s works and philosophies, both in the biography of Joyce and in his placement of Vico within a scholarly tradition of Joyce’s moment. Joyceans who have focused on the holdings of his library and letters to family, friends, and colleagues have observed the influence of Vico on Joyce’s work; Cormack develops these observations by examining the way Vico’s vision of cyclical history may help to clarify such moments in the “Proteus,” “Scylla and Charybdis,” “Oxen in the Sun,” and “Cyclops” episodes in Ulysses and the “Nightlessons” and colloquy between the Archdruid and St. Patrick sections of Finnegans Wake. Cormack also demonstrates Joyce’s pattern of borrowing ideas, terminology, and narrative structure from Yeats’s writing and from A Vision in particular.

I find Cormack’s initial premises regarding Yeats and Joyce to be insightful and correct. In his opening chapter, “Yeats and Joyce: The Punch and Judy Show of Irish Modernism,” for example, he argues that, though they are typically opposed in Joyce criticism, Yeats’s project and Joyce’s were more tempered and less contradictory than they have often been described. While Joyce’s early refutation of nationalism, as understood through his rejection of Yeats’s Irish Revivalist movement, may appear to be a denial of Irish nationalism altogether, he was, Cormack suggests, more committed to representing an Irish nationalism than critics have assumed. Joyce’s use of the reprobate tradition, which involves a sort of dialectical exchange through the alternating realist and idealist voice of Stephen Dedalus, sometimes obscures this fact. Meanwhile, Cormack argues, the very people Yeats critiqued were those who aggrandized him, and, as a result, he stands as a figurehead of a movement he did not fully endorse, at least in terms of its composition. And, like Joyce’s, Yeats’s views necessarily matured in his later writings, including A Vision.

Elsewhere, the portions of this first half of Cormack’s book feel a bit like a dizzying tour de force of philosophers, ranging from Vico to Giordano Bruno, William Blake, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aristotle, György Lukács, Jorge Luis Borges, and others,³ whose theories Cormack knowledgeably describes. Despite the odd omission of Theodor Adorno, Cormack knits together the ideas of this vast array of philosophers and writers well, connecting them to Joyce’s biography and assuring us that the proof needed for these perambulations is revealed in a later close reading of the primary texts.

Cormack’s readings of Ulysses, A Vision, and Finnegans Wake are convincing especially insofar as they insist on 1) the importance of the idea of a circular history and 2) the contradictory existence of an idea within its opposite or “interpenetrating contraries that Yeats calls the gyres” (162), as revealed in Joyce’s texts. They sometimes lead Cormack to promising conclusions on both the micro- and macro-narrative levels. In the later chapters on Ulysses, for example, Cormack suggests that Buck Mulligan serves not so much as the villain of the story as he does a theoretical pole embodying the belief in a materialist, linear history, a counter to Stephen’s belief in an idealist, cyclical history (91). I find this assumption of moderation in Mulligan’s character to be persuasive, and it is demonstrated in both Joyce’s characters and in the overall narrative design of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. For Cormack, Mulligan serves as an example of the way that the figures in Ulysses, especially...