Cannibal Joyce

Foreword

Foreword Ronald Reagan will be remembered for many things, but the one that sticks out in my mind is his fondness for jellybeans. Our fortieth president shared a sweet tooth with another world leader, King Edward VII: in “Lestrygonians ” the latter is revealed on his throne, “sucking red jujubes white.” The comfits of the king are clearly meant to be discomfiting: the king and his empire are bleeding the colonies white, draining the blood from the red areas of the map. At the end of “Circe,” the king’s at it again: a red jujube turns white in his phosphorescent face as he “levitates over heaps of slain.” Edward VII is a cannibal: his colonization, in Rice’s excellent phrase, is colonic. The connection of presidential jellybean and imperial jujube has been made possible by Rice’s brilliant exploration of Joyce’s digestive capacity. No one is better in this business than Rice at the precise overview, the detailed and comprehensive analysis of a particular theme. If you or I were to be set the topic of the cannibal theme in Joyce we might think of the return of Stephen’s mother, the Eucharist, and the limerick on the Reverend Mr. MacTrigger. Perhaps we might include Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and the near-anagram of Caliban, and say something about Joyce’s cannibalization of earlier literature in “Oxen of the Sun.” But only Tom Rice would show us that Gabriel Conroy derives his name from a Bret Harte novel that begins with an account of the snowbound Donner party. Only Rice would connect the cannibal trope in fairy tales to the ogres, trolls, and witches of Dubliners, would give us the etymology of cannibalization (from World War II) and cannibal (from 1492) and make both relevant to Joyce, would find traces of vampirism in Stephen’s villanelle, would call Finnegans Wake a literary and linguistic incorporation that is intended to be the reader’s breakfast. Everything from Shylock to seedcake is thrown into the maw, until suddenly all of Joyce is about consumption. When Rice arrives at the moment of truth in the Gresham Hotel, as Gabriel asks his innocent question about the nature of Michael Furey’s death—“Consumption, was it?”—we reach, like Gabriel, the last moment of our innocence, and our souls swoon with the new possibilities of Rice’s reading. Rice has other fish to fry: Cannibal Joyce is not just a study of alimentary aspects in Joyce’s writing, but an investigation of all the ways in which Joyce can be considered an agent of cultural transfer. Joyce’s detachment from his native language as a Berlitz instructor in Pola and Trieste allowed him to manipulate and eviscerate the word: Rice shows us how the linguistic instability of Finnegans Wake is anticipated in the first pages of Dubliners. Language is let loose in Ulysses: a punning analysis of adverbial modifiers in “Scylla and Charybdis” valuably underscores the comedy of that episode, and includes the worst pun on Bakhtin’s name that I have ever come across. For Rice, Ulysses is a mincer: when Stephen minces Mr. Deasy’s words, just after the letter-writer has smugly celebrated the fact that “I don’t mince words, do I?,” we are given both a reading strategy and an essential clue to the Joycean method. Ulysses, in its cannibalization of literary and mythological tradition, is a reprocessing of all that has come before. And then Rice turns his attention from language and the literary past to the technological present, and in a series of dazzling essays he places Joyce squarely in the middle of a postwar avant-garde that embraces the new technologies of sound reproduction, photography, cinema, television, and radio. For Joyce, who predicted not only the fall of Finland but the atrophying effects of television on the interpreting mind, the embrace is pythonic: one must consume or be consumed. This is one of the rare books where the subject and the author find their perfect match: the consumption theme is a rich and rewarding approach to Joyce’s work, and Rice has given us, in witty and lucid readings of a wide range of texts, a banquet of ideas to savor. Sebastian D. G. Knowles Series Editor xii / Foreword ...