Ethical Joyce (review)

Amidst the recent explosion of criticism on James Joyce, most of which asks us to reexamine his texts within political, social or postcolonial contexts, a book called Ethical Joyce is almost to be expected. That it is as subtle, interesting, and useful as Marian Eide's Ethical Joyce is the very pleasant surprise. Eide reads ethics in the textuality of Joyce's work, arguing that "Joyce's aesthetic choices constituted his performative ethics and suggest an ethical practice for his readers" (2). Aesthetic concerns move to the forefront of this interpretation—but are always paired with the question of ethical performance and response. In her reading of "particular ethical dilemmas or opportunities" within "specific textual moments" (3) Eide presents us with a strong understanding of the ethical demands Joyce places on his readers.

It must be clear from the outset that Eide is not concerned here with ethics as a guide for moral behavior. She argues that the distinction between morality and ethics is one of the great contributions of twentieth-century ethical philosophy and quickly distinguishes her version of ethics: "Ethics as I am defining it, is an engagement with radical alterity, or difference, within the context of ultimate responsibility. . . to the other in his or her environment" (3). Eide engages with questions of the differences between text and reader, text and author, genders, generations, nations and races within the specific contexts of Joyce's work. That leads her to extended discussion of families in Joyce's life and work, of Stephen Dedalus and his relationship to knowledge and colonial power, and to questions of intersubjectivity, family, and marriage in Finnegan's Wake. Nowhere does she allow the reading to get overly arcane or worse, prescriptive. Rather as she puts it, "My aim in Ethical Joyce is to offer an explicit ethical alternative to models of interpretive control or to the idea that reading is at heart an expression of or struggle for power" (25).

That is not to say that this book does not engage us in a sophisticated exploration of post-structuralist ethics, and in particular, post-Levinasian ethics as it applies to reading Joyce. In particular the introduction emphasizes the importance of recent feminist ethical theory as it elaborates the themes of inter-connection and inter-subjectivity and introduces the topic of desire into ethical thought. As Eide argues, "at the heart of Joyce's literature is an exploration of ethical desire. . .[which] refuses to take another as an object" (16). Thus the question of Joyce pushes us to rework the question of ethics from the feminist standpoint—a particularly fertile avenue for recent theory from Margaret Urban Walker to Seyla Benhabib. Eide's "Introduction" would be useful on its own as a guide to the importance and complexity of current feminist ethical thought.

Chapter one continues the theoretical vein of the introduction, offering perhaps the most abstract methodological framework of the book in its use of the geometric concept of the gnomon, the remainder of a parallelogram from which a smaller parallelogram of the same proportions has been removed. "Gnomon" is one of the words that appears at the beginning of the Dubliners' story, "The Sisters," and Eide uses it to understand the connections between relationship, proportion, and that which is missing in this storyand in Joyce's playExiles . The chapter asks us to consider that the constant ellipses so often remarked in these works involve us in an ethical relationship with the text. "By inscribing gaps within the text [Joyce] signals the space of each reader's interpretation, and indicates a literary partnership in the creation of textual meaning" (39). In Exiles the question of the gap appears between male and female characters, while Beatrice Justice functions as the mediating force. In Eide's terms "she presents the possibility of ethics in acts of creativity" (50), modeling how we as readers are called to answer to the text in an ethically responsive manner.

The chapter...