Voices on Joyce ed. by Anne Fogarty and Fran O'Rourke (review)

This collection of twenty essays has its origins in a lecture series given at University College Dublin (UCD) in the centenary year of 2004, with most of the essays dating from that period. All the contributors have some connection with UCD whether in the past or present. Indeed, in its own way, this book is a celebration of a leading international center known not only for Irish Studies but also, increasingly, for Joyce studies. Appropriately, the collection includes a characteristically close reading by Fritz Senn of the sleepy figure of Morpheus in the "Eumaeus" episode of Ulysses, but it should not be assumed that because five of the other twenty contributors have acquired the title "Emeritus," this is a backward-looking volume or full of nostalgia. On the contrary, there is something refreshing about leading figures in the fields of history, philosophy, anatomy, geography, Italian, music, drama, and cultural studies taking up the challenge inspired by one of UCD's most remarkable lecture series.

The collection is enhanced by a series of thirty black-and-white photographs that were taken by Lee Miller in 1946 and published the following year in Vogue (3). Much is made of this visual material by the editors and by Terence Killeen, who provides a six-page essay on the American photographer. A book on Joyce accompanied by illustrations has much to recommend it, especially when the illustrations formed part of a recent exhibition at UCD. The original photographs, which can be accessed online,¹ are something special—sharp and intelligent, never dull, occasionally humorous, always evocative—and they rightly convey something of post-war Dublin awaiting the appreciation of later generations. We are informed that the captions in the Vogue issue are "tremendously spirited, independent, sometimes feisty comments that are a joy to read" (135). Unfortunately, they are missing from this volume, which is a shame, for I am sure they would have added something to the reader's enjoyment. Most of the photos extend into the gutter and off the page, so they are framed by the edges of the oblong page itself. Bleeding has a special place in page design, but it needs careful handling and should be used perhaps sparingly. After all, there is nothing inherently wrong with margins of white paper space, especially when the originals are not oblong. As for cropping, this also requires more than a little care, and I refer to just one example of what can happen, that of the flower-seller on Grafton Street (200). Juxtapose this image with the one available online, and it is clear that the class opposition is missing from the published image; one assumes Miller has intended that we do not neglect the well-dressed mannequin in the fashionable shop behind the woman in a shawl selling flowers.

The essays open with a densely written introduction by Anne Fogarty summarizing the book as a whole and describing how it all fits together. Her own discussion of Joyce and Charles Stewart Parnell offers itself as a model, in this case, of how memory, whether conceived, as Paul Ricoeur has suggested,² in terms of collective memory or an official history, also has a future. Hence the significance in Ulysses of the unrealized statue of Parnell at the top of what is now O'Connell Street. Fogarty includes a useful survey of how critics have interpreted the relationship between Joyce and Parnell, before injecting something new into the discussion. She shows how the tragic story of Joyce's youth gave way to his view that Parnell occupied the site of contradictory impulses. Joyce, therefore, moves out from the shadow of the "chief" (P 36), and comes to understand how the different guises of his literary Parnellism served "the unrealised promise of nationalist ideals" (40).

Fogarty's stress on "the unrealized" affords a helpful way of thinking about the volume as a whole. Historians are in the habit of policing the borders...