James Joyce: Texts and Contexts by Len Platt (review)

It is certainly apt that this book, a dependable, stimulating introduction to Joyce’s texts (including Ulysses, which the author justly characterizes here as “obsessively self-referential”—97), should make fairly frequent references to the concept of an “introduction.” Len Platt clearly realizes that one of the introducer’s tasks—supplying a biographical account of his or her chosen writer—allows that author’s works to seem comprehensible as the products of a particular kind of person. He duly provides, in the first chapter, a succinct summary of known facts about Joyce’s life, while warning the reader that the writing of biography is never an innocent activity. Accordingly, Platt explains the way Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce has helped to establish what has become a widely accepted narrative of Joyce’s career and oeuvre. In this account, the reader is told how an artistically ambitious young Irishman fled the provincial oppressiveness of his native land for Europe, where, by composing in exile some of the canonical texts of high modernism, he grafted his works onto the strong pillar of European civilization, which would have been impossible in his benighted homeland where political and cultural separatisms, together with narrow-minded philistinism, were gaining ground. As Platt pithily puts it, “[i]n the exile formulation of the biography, Ireland becomes stultifying to the young James Joyce; Europe liberating” (8). Platt convincingly challenges this frequently repeated tale by arguing that questions about the condition of Ireland in Joyce’s youth are central to understanding the trajectory of his career. To realize that the country was the victim of imperial subjection by its English neighbor is to grasp something fundamental about Joyce. In his texts, the colonial predicament is inscribed in compelling ways, ones relevant to twentieth-century and even current global experience.

Platt gives more space to Joyce’s early works than is usual in introductions of this sort. This serves his purpose, revealed later in the book, of highlighting the ways Joyce can be read as an artist preoccupied with the colonial subjection of his country. Thoughtful analyses of the early prose writings allow Platt to demonstrate how deeply Joyce felt the ignominy of Ireland’s conquest by England. He writes persuasively, for example, of how the young Joyce identified with the nineteenth-century Irish Romantic poet James Clarence Mangan, noting that Joyce found in that precursor one who “elevat[ed] dissipation and despair … into an embodiment of racial consciousness” (25). Platt emphasizes, too, that Joyce became convinced of the “virtues of realism” quite early, a belief that enabled him, in Dubliners, to supply an exacting realistic study of “the micropolitics of empire” (26, 34).

An astute reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the second chapter of the book shows what the work owes to popular novels on English public-school life and prepares the reader for the examination of Ulysses (the focus of chapter 3 where questions about genre, parody, and pastiche emerge as obstacles to be reconnoitered, the mountaineering trope that lurks in Platt’s text).

In chapter 7, Platt observes, “As [my] book approaches its end, it becomes even clearer, whatever the difficulties, that Joyce’s fiction is tightly bound up with critical history and the academy” (149). He further claims that Joyce’s texts have become “inextricable from cultures of criticism” (150). Accordingly, the most important chapter of the book is entitled “Ulysses, Ireland, Empire,” where Platt judiciously examines how Ireland and its colonial condition have, in recent times, been at the center of critical readings of Joyce’s key texts.¹ Having conducted his survey, he observes, “The above is probably sufficient … to indicate how the ‘Joyce and Ireland’ framework developed to form a new, if now waning, orthodoxy” (86). It would have been interesting to know what new orthodoxy Platt thinks is replacing this framework. He does not say, though later he indicates that genetic criticism currently occupies the high ground in Joyce studies when he writes...