The Value of James Joyce by Margot Norris (review)

Margot Norris is always worth reading on James Joyce. Her first book, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (1976), showed me and many other aspiring Joyceans of my generation not only a way to read the Wake (and a way to use theory productively in English studies—a lesson that was to become even more important in the decade to come) but also why that reading might matter in aesthetic, sociopolitical, and psychological terms. Her more extensive, ambitious study of Joyce's oeuvre, Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism (1992), brought her formidable abilities to bear on Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses as well. Norris has remained a writer who has never let Joyce's famous difficulties obscure her arguments for the importance of his writings as works of revolutionary art that are always morally and ethically engaged. Her readings of his prose have been so compelling, her formulations of the stakes of those readings so provocative, that she has served not simply as an exegete of these challenging texts; I know from using her books and articles in my own classrooms for many years now that she is a writer whose work recruits new Joyceans to the fold.

Her postmillennial projects concerning Joyce are therefore particularly fitting: she has edited a fine edition of Dubliners (2006) in the Norton Critical Editions series. She has published Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses (2011), an intriguing experiment in what we might discover if we approach Joyce as naive readers, fresh to the text and untutored (but also uncontaminated) by the shelves on shelves of criticism that threaten to obscure the blue book of Eccles. Even her Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners (2003), which is pitched more to the critic than the beginning student, nevertheless keeps the classroom and readers new to Joyce in mind. Indeed, in this text as well as the 2011 Ulysses study, she employs her titular "virgin reading" approach, reading each story as though for the first time and thereby recapturing the strangeness, the surprises, the questions that we may long since have decided were answered or resolved.

Her most recent contribution to the field, The Value of James Joyce, is the most hospitably open-armed of her studies to date. This brief introduction (a little over a hundred pages of text) is a thematically organized guidebook to Joyce's work, from Dubliners through Finnegans Wake. It is perfectly in keeping with Norris's enterprise over the past decade that her latest invitation to Joyceans-in-the-making opens with an introduction and first chapter concerning themselves with "Democratic and Cosmopolitan Joyce" and "The Significance of the Ordinary" in this challenging writer's prose. Emphasizing the demotic, humanistic Joyce for his "ability to fascinate both highbrow academics and ordinary readers" (1), Norris celebrates Joyce's relevance and his appeal: "his willingness to exercise a remarkable generosity in his embrace of all that is human" (2). This generosity is Norris's, too, as she offers new readers ways into Joyce that are themselves of obvious interest and importance. "The value of Joyce's work," she tells us, with characteristic lucidity and conviction at the end of her introduction, "lies in its enormous efforts to enrich our concept of the human—the aim of all art, to be sure, but achieved here in particularly broad and complicated ways" (6).

In her examination of "the ordinary" in Dubliners and Portrait, Norris is not only helpful but often revelatory. For examples of the fruits of her studiously down-to-earth approach, I'd single out her descriptions of the psychological and financial intricacies that bind Corley and Lenehan together in "Two Gallants"; her discussion of what occurs in "Counterparts," which turns out "to be the tragedy of the death of the ordinary, of life when ordinariness is imploded at every turn by the drama of human needs, urges, pressures, and violence" (19); and her astute presentation of how much is mundane and daily...