Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars by Margot Gayle Backus (review)

The book presents a powerful reading of Joyce’s engagement with the culture of journalistic scandal at the fin-de-siècle. His family’s fortunes irredeemably shaken by the scandal-driven fall from grace of Charles Stewart Parnell, James Joyce became more than merely a critic or anatomist of scandal culture according to Margot Gayle Backus. Scandal lies at the heart of Joyce’s fictional strategies and the social agenda towards which those strategies were directed. Yes, Joyce understood, and lamented, the emergence of the sexual scandal as a textual commodity and a political bludgeon, and his texts, as we have long known, engage with scandalous episodes beyond that of Parnell, including the trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde and the salaciously reported divorce of the English member of Parliament Charles Dilke. More than that, though, Backus argues that Joyce internalized the deep linguistic and cultural logic of the scandal and, in his novels, turned it on its head, undermining its defamatory force and making scandal into a means for freeing expression and creating space for eccentricity rather than a means of shutting them down. Joyce’s fictions thus both illustrate and defuse scandal’s potential to silence radicals and reformers. While the English press used scandal journalism to cripple the Home Rule movement, stereotype the Irish as brutes, and scapegoat male homosexuals, Backus argues that Joyce uses scandal “homeopathically” to “expose, circumvent, and short-circuit its broader social effects” (7).

Scandal journalism, Backus argues, usually results in the exposure of private, perverse practices, the abnegation of the person whose scandalous practices are publicized, and the accrual of moral authority for the journalist and his readers. Acutely conscious of the effects of scandal on Wilde (about whom he wrote in his early journalism—CW 201–05), Joyce knew that scandal could ruin the life of a prominent artist as easily as that of a wayward politician. Because he was loath to expose himself to scandal’s risk but equally committed to expressing himself despite its oppressive threat, Backus argues that he fashioned an array of strategies simultaneously to capitalize on and defuse scandal’s power and to protect himself against its dangers. Like Wilde, Joyce publicized potentially scandalous details of his own life (public drunkenness, frequenting of prostitutes, and even the flirtation with sadomasochism that inflected the Joyce and Bloom marriages). Unlike Wilde, Joyce married such “self-libeling” disclosure with defensive narrative tactics (89), including the opacity of his prose, his dense and promiscuous allusiveness, and a protopostmodern parodic play that reveals the power dynamics at work in scandal journalism—as when we see Leopold Bloom, semiconsciously terrified of having his own peccadillos exposed, stewing over the Dilke and Parnell divorces in “Eumaeus” (U 16.1358–1410).

Backus conducts this argument by first laying out the history of the sexual scandal as it emerged hand-in-hand with the New Journalism of the late-nineteenth century. Her account offers a genealogy of the sex scandal and an incisive close reading of its rhetoric and logic. Scandal journalism, she argues, emerged from the journalistic practices of Home Rule proponents William O’Brien and T. M. Healy, who publicized the homosexual practices of colonial authorities in Dublin Castle as an insurgent tactic amid tension after the Phoenix Park murders. That this audacious stratagem withstood a libel claim opened the door to the journalistic exploitation of “scandal fragments” (20), and the strategy would recoil upon the cause of Irish nationalism in the cases of Dilke—whose potential as a home-rule friendly British M.P. was defused by a concocted sex scandal—and, most famously, Parnell. Amidst these upsets, the British tradition of silence surrounding homosexuality crumbled, and the euphemism “unspeakable crimes” arose to represent it and migrated from the Irish to the London press (46). The Cleveland Street and Wilde scandals followed, establishing the ground from...