Shaw and Joyce: "The Last Word in Stolentelling"

A book that would look at George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce together, following their reception of each other and probing for traces of influence, would seem to be long overdue. Since the publication of Dominic Manganiello’s Joyce’s Politics (1980), interest in Joyce’s anarchist and socialist sympathies has made Joyce more of a subject of the kind of political studies that have long focused on Shaw. Likewise, given poststructuralists’ appetite for new authors on which to focus, Shaw’s playful inversions of melodramatic convention and his inveterate use of paradox would seem ripe for comparison with Joyce’s more celebrated language experiments. Certainly, as Martha Fodasky Black points out in her new book, notable similarities between the two men make them a tempting pair to discuss in tandem. Both were Dublin expatriates; both revolted against the strictures of nation, religion, and marriage; both repudiated the Irish literary revival; both found inspiration in Ibsen; both were early exponents of antiromantic realism; and both to a large extent were comic modernists. Their differences may not have been negligible. Shaw grew up in a Protestant home and Joyce a Catholic one, Shaw became a celebrity of enormous influence whereas Joyce wrote for a small and very select audience, and each had totally opposed views on the proper role of art, Joyce carefully avoiding anything resembling Shaw’s political instrumentalization of his plays. But these differences merely serve to heighten interest in why their rebellions against Irish insularity took such different paths.

Unfortunately, Shaw and Joyce: “The Last Word in Stolentelling” is a somewhat disappointing study of the two writers. Rather than rigorously comparing their views, literary methods, and responses to each other in the context of the intellectual milieu of their time, Black focuses almost exclusively on tracing Shaw’s influence in Joyce’s writings, with predictably blindered results. It is her thesis that Shaw is more than simply an important and heretofore unrecognized influence; she argues that he is the important factor, albeit one Joyce sedulously tried to hide, behind the younger Irishman’s art—that Shaw is Joyce’s “secret mentor” (65), “literary father” (69), and “ideological sire” (79). Although she recognizes that both writers are stylistically dissimilar, Black asserts that “the germs of Joyce’s themes are in the polemics, prefaces, and plays of the famous Fabian” (5).

Much of what Black has to say in defense of her “stolentelling” thesis is provocative. Joyce’s early critical essay “Ibsen’s New Drama” borrows arguments from and makes specific textual reference to Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891). Like Shaw’s plays, Dubliners depicts people trapped by social convention and beholden to delusory ideals. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays Stephen Dedalus as a kind of “devil’s disciple” who exemplifies Shaw’s much repeated injunction to reject “duty.” And Finnegans Wake makes numerous mischievous references to Shaw and his plays. But Black is not content to rest her case on such solid but modest foundations; she insists on finding evidence confirming Joyce’s covert discipleship to Shaw in all but the most inhospitable places. In trying to link the two writers politically, for example, Black writes, “Joyce’s nonviolent, individualistic ‘anarchist’ sympathies were, in fact, a clone of Shaw’s, which, like Joyce’s, did not extend to belief in planting bombs or dismantling governments” (16). Never mind that Shaw’s anarchist “sympathies” are of little relevance in comparison to his deep allegiance to Fabian state socialism; by reducing Shaw and Joyce’s political differences to a shared lack of faith in “planting bombs,” Black can make them look more similar than they in truth were. Similarly, in trying to argue that Leopold Bloom is “a doppelgänger of Shaw” (225), Black selectively calls attention to a series of potentially Shavian characteristics in Bloom that might as easily point toward other sources. Bloom may, like Shaw, oppose corporal punishment, advocate the humane treatment of animals, speak against...