James Joyce and the Burden of Disease (review)

In a compact book (154 text pages) Kathleen Ferris seeks to convince us that in order to obtain a straight view of James Joyce we need to accept two main themes: (1) that Joyce’s work is darker than we had supposed, in part because his Catholic conscience never really faded in the way that has been alleged, and (2) that the governing theme of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is the syphilis—hitherto denied or else unsuspected—that she is convinced the author contracted in early 1904, and that, in a prepenicillin age, shaped his life thereafter. As for proposition 1, she is dead right: no Jesuit-educated Irish lad could simply shrug off the Faith like a jacket he had tired of, the way folk of a more secular bent seem to have little trouble imagining. And as for proposition 2, she makes a very strong case for Joyce as a decades-long syphilitic, something biographers hushed up out of deference to their Joyce family sources: she has had good medical advisors and has worked through the textbooks they assigned, and her lists of symptoms are in order.

But beyond that—syphilis as the governing theme of the masterworks? Briefly: to insert so radical a proposition into Joyce Studies, an edifice seven decades old, would entail more finesse than Ms. Ferris commands. As early as page 1 there is a sloppy reference to some writing by Melvin Friedman that I cannot see how to locate; on page 18 George Antheil’s surname is misspelled twice (and again in the index); on page 54 the sacred date of Bloomsday is two days off; on page 77 she is trying to persuade us that Bloom’s treatment for a perfectly literal bee sting was really an inunction of mercury for syphilis. After such bobbles and many more, we will hardly lift our eyebrows at all when we are told on page 81 that a phrase in Ulysses (1922) alludes to Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale (1934). Not suicidal errors, one by one; but their accumulation does testify to a disregard for detail: a habit of reaching for the cleaver in a scalpel-and-forceps milieu.

The bee-sting instance is typical. For it is crucial, in Ulysses, to distinguish what is so from fancy talk round it, a distinction that Joyce enjoyed teasing readers with; and here what is so is established by at least six mutually supporting recalls strewn through several hundred pages of text. It happened 3 weeks and 2 days ago, in the back garden on Whit Monday, 23 May; the bee, dazed from butting its own shadow on a wall, tumbled into Bloom’s open shirt and stung him in the left infracostal region below the diaphragm; at the hospital just down the street, a student dressed the wound—and so on. Ms. Ferris cites none of the above: only an inflated parody of the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville in which the bee becomes “a horrible and dreadful dragon” (p. 77). This certainly could be heard as syphilis-talk, and then might not the salve “of volatile salt and chrism” (p. 77) be a prepenicillin inunction of mercury? Oh sure. And that is how she goes on and on, turning our century’s architectonic prose wonder into a huge blur of code centered on the author’s disease—which he likely had, but did not have always on his mind.