‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality by Scarlett Baron (review)

The self-declared object of this book is to provide the first full-length examination of the impact of Gustave Flaubert on James Joyce’s development as an author. This reader was eager to get to the nitty-gritty of the relationship, but Scarlett Baron spends a bit too much time defending the unique premise of her project. She argues, for example, that Joyce and Flaubert had much in common because both followed the upheavals of their respective epochs, were devoted to their art, and toiled for years before they were satisfied with the final product. Surely this could be said of numerous great writers. The book sets out to ‘establish a plausible bibliographical foundation to support such a line of inquiry’ (p. 20), and the results of these efforts seem rather tangential. There are forensic scourings of Joyce’s personal library: for instance, ‘The copy of Madame Bovary bears two signatures. […] The copy of L’Éducation sentimentale is signed once on the half-title page and the signature is dated 1901. It seems likely […] that both copies were purchased at the same time’ (p. 22). It is still unclear, however, if, when, and where Joyce actually read these books. Pre-empting potential naysayers, the author states: ‘although this study’s critical eye will be trained exclusively on Joyce’s relations to Flaubert, it is not an influence study’ (p. 11). In fact, this is very much a book about influence, and its strongest and longest section, Chapter 5, explores insightfully the relationship between Ulysses and the Tentation de Saint Antoine. In this central essay Baron highlights convincingly the specific echoes of Flaubert’s language that reverberate in Ulysses: for example, Antony ‘drops down on all fours’ and Bloom (as Bella) ‘sinks on all fours’ (quoted on pp. 164 and 172 respectively). Most readers will agree that it seems impossible to read Joyce’s ‘tempt’, ‘saint’, and ‘demon’ without evoking Flaubert’s Tentation. Chapter 6, on Finnegan’s Wake, is the only other section of significant scope, but parts of it get bogged down by conjectures regarding Joyce’s time in Normandy, such as ‘Joyce’s travels in the summer of 1925 suggest a motivated quest for exposure to a particular kind of literary inspiration. The dates and provenance of his letters during this period reveal an itinerary intriguingly evocative of a Flaubertian pilgrimage’ (p. 219). The third chapter, on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the fourth, ‘Adultery and Sympathy in Ulysses and Exiles’, are promising but underdeveloped. On another note, Baron spends so many pages arguing for the (sometimes striking) similarities between the two authors that the contrasts between their respective œuvres, epochs, and cultural backgrounds are ignored. One also wishes that she had mentioned, albeit briefly, a few of the many other authors that Joyce famously read. Doing so would have brought the book closer in spirit to the all-encompassing ‘strandentwining cable’ (from Ulysses, ‘The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh’, quoted on p. 140) invoked in the title.