Violence, Narrative and Myth in Joyce and Yeats: Subjective Identity and Anarcho-Syndicalist Traditions by Tudor Balinisteanu (review)

At the outset of his book, Tudor Balinisteanu acknowledges that while his “object of study is the literary text, especially the works of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce,” his interest does not lie in “literature as an object that can be explored in contemplation” (2). Rather, he advances a theory of the “ways in which literature can be seen as a means to an end, effective in, and effecting, social reality” (3). To recognize literature as what he calls “an instrument of grace,” we must discern in it elements that can engender states of mind and feeling “of the same kinds as . . . forces driving social change” (2). Although not acknowledging this overtly, he seems animated by the desire to redeem modernist work that, for some, might foster a kind of aesthete’s repose inimical to action on the social plane. Balinisteanu cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty to frame the question of how aesthetic experience contributes to a process whereby “‘man transcends himself towards a new form of behaviour, or towards other people, or towards his own thought’” (3).¹ For Balinisteanu, literature should be thus transformative, and he devotes the book to tracing out the process whereby work by Yeats and Joyce can be thought of in this way. Balinisteanu’s account, however, does not suggest that texts written by Yeats and Joyce are in any way particularly suited to effect such beneficial transformation—and although he often invokes their names, analysis of their texts is notably slight.

For the basis of his theory, Balinisteanu chiefly evokes the early-twentieth-century French anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel, of whose work many modernists were aware, in part through T. E. Hulme’s 1914 translation of Sorel’s best-known work, Réflexions sur la violence.² Michael Tratner argues that many moderns were affected by Sorel: “Joyce was strongly influenced by syndicalism and Sorel’s formulations,” and “Yeats put together the necessity of violence and of an elite in thoroughly Sorelian poems praising the Irish syndicalist James Connolly.”³ Yet, standing apart from the historicist methods of New Modernist Studies, Balinisteanu does not spend time unfolding Sorel’s impact on Yeats and Joyce. He is concerned neither with establishing ways in which Yeats and Joyce engaged Sorel, nor with tracing the ambivalence toward Sorel that marked responses of many modernists interested in Sorel’s thought, such as Wyndham Lewis. Instead, he emphasizes on how Sorel’s “theory of social change” offers a way of understanding Yeats, Joyce, and literature more generally (24). His account charts how Sorel’s theory of “social myth” (5)—which Sorel defines as systems of images (such as those of the general strike) that can mobilize a crowd toward revolution—illuminates how the work of Yeats and Joyce can affect readers. In his Sorelian reading, the aesthetic experience of work by Yeats and Joyce removes readers from their ordinary selves in a kind of epiphanic moment out of time, entailing religious feeling and “aesthetic enrichment,” leading to what Sorel called an “epic state of mind” (117, 104); this state is then “translated into a language of action” and paves the way for social change (69).

The way Balinisteanu draws upon Sorelian theory for his purpose is curious on several counts. As Paul Sheehan notes in Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence, Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence is a “disquieting” book that is “still the cause of some controversy,” since “Sorel advocated violent, revolutionary class struggle as a panacea to the decadent cast of modernity.”⁴ Balinisteanu nowhere acknowledges that Sorel’s thought has been “disquieting” to many. Moreover, although one of main terms in the title of his book is “violence,” Balinisteanu never unpacks Sorel’s distinctive conception of the term; for Sorel, it emerges from the context of turn-ofthe-century France and is associated with syndicalism and heroic proletarian “passion” that can...