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12. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”
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❦ 261 12 “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” JENNIFER LEVINE AND ANDREW GIBSON I have used imaginary characters and didactic dialogue primarily because this venerable literary form is suited to expounding inquiry and developing argument, but also because the form implicitly invites a reader to join the characters and enter the argument too. —Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies (2001) We liked the impetus for this collection of essays and have taken seriously its invitation to do a different kind of literary criticism. In writing our essay (if that is what it is), we did not either proceed from a reconciliation of different positions and practices or seek to work toward one. We wanted rather to use our pairing, not only to develop and explore differences but also to multiply them, to make differences proliferate. To say this does not mean that the essay was bred of irreconcilable conflict. Quite the reverse: we knew what we wanted to do from the start and were agreed on it. We simply took a specific view of what we were doing. We were not inclined even to start to try to work toward a consensus, but rather to foster differences, to let them thrive. No doubt there was a kind of statement at stake in doing so, a philosophical commitment that, though we did not articulate it to ourselves as such, more or less immediately took us over. In other words, there was a decision: there always is. But it was a decision in favor of a final and, we like to think, quite radical indecisiveness. It was a decision made in favor of gaps, breaks, lacunae, aporias, all of which condition what follow . In effect, we rejected all thought of a (Habermasian or Arendtian) consensus , choosing rather a (Lyotardian) production, if not of dissensus, then at least of conscious multiplicity, of a kind not dissimilar to what is found in his own 262 ❦ J E N N I F E R L E V I N E A N D A N DR E W G I B S ON text “The Differend” (though we would not flatter ourselves that it is so expertly achieved) (see Lyotard 1988). The experimental character of what we have attempted, however, will not be evident at once. The piece begins with an original contribution to recent historical research on “Ivy Day” that both draws quite substantially on materials not exploited before and joins in a debate apparent in earlier and recent instances of such research on the story, particularly the work of James Fairhall and Anne Fogarty. This section relies on the kind of scholarship that Andrew Gibson likes to practice. The research is as painstaking and thorough as he can make it, and the discourse is forensic, single toned, and orthodox. He comes to his task as an archaeologist, sifting through texts that have been rearranged by time (fiction in one place, political writing or government reports somewhere else) to put them back into relationship with each other. By contrast, Jennifer Levine in the second half of the essay is confident that without knowing what Joyce knew, it is possible to read “Ivy Day” and find it meaningful (keeping in mind always that “meaningful” is an elastic term—though not so elastic as to be merely self-indulgent). Criticism can be an extension of teaching: she wants to model here how, in dialogue, we stretch our understanding. She thus invents three characters, each one interested in “Ivy Day” for his or her own reasons. Ultimately, their three voices are intended to sound out her own response to this story of performance and judgment. The essay is therefore deliberately structured as a movement from monologue , not only to dialogue, but to dialogues within a dialogue, though a dialogue and dialogues that incorporate responses to the original monologue. In a closing double reversal, however, we complicate this structure: while Jennifer Levine’s monologue finally emerges from the dialogue she has staged, in its closing section, Andrew Gibson’s voice emerges from its monologic self-enclosure into dialogue. Jennifer Levine meets him there. We like to think that the result is, at least, intriguing and, if not Joycean—how could we possibly claim that it is?—appropriate to Joyce, analogous to certain aspects of his work, in a way that criticism is only seldom. This is the case in at least two important different ways. First, we aimed to create a quite blatantly multivoiced text, a text that...