Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars by Margot Gayle Backus (review)

Margot Gayle Backus’s Scandal Work is an ambitious study that traces the complex ways in which fin de siècle scandals and scandal-making were deployed by Joyce throughout his writing. As Backus shows, in thoroughly researched detail, scandal was one of Joyce’s perennial adversaries, and his obsession with newspapers and the techniques by which journalists generated moral outrage infused his own writings. In particular, Joyce took from media sensations what Backus calls an “array of strategies for exerting social influence through representations of transgression,” which led his own literary works and his life to be considered occasions of scandal.

Scandal Work begins by discussing the broad impact of fin de siècle newspaper scandals, both individually and collectively, on Joyce’s work; regrettably, Finnegans Wake is omitted. It begins by exploring changes in newspaper reports of the late nineteenth century. The “new journalism,” as Matthew Arnold called it, was fixated on exposing moral laxities for the prurient enjoyment of the general public. As Backus shows, this journalistic approach had far-reaching consequences for political and private spheres, and Joyce’s work engages with the effects of scandal-mongering on both; scandal recurs in his early letters, poems, and essays and in well-known scenes such as the Aeolus episode of Ulysses. It may be traced as “a word, as a theme, in allusions to particular scandals, and, most significantly, as a subterranean organizing principle unifying and hierarchizing a wide array of disparate image patterns.”

Backus attempts to unite contrasting scandalous elements through her readings of Joyce’s fiction, and, as a result, Scandal Work frequently strains at the seams: its topics include the Home Rule movement, homophobia, the Dublin Castle scandal, the Phoenix Park murders, the fall of Parnell, the trial of Oscar Wilde, W.T. Stead’s “The Modern Tribute of Maiden Babylon” articles, the infamous Punch cartoons of simian Irishmen, and many more. Backus provides short histories of these events, which are by now familiar to most; these portions seem to be aimed at students of the Victorian period and of Irish history, and sit uncomfortably with the detailed and convincing analysis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses that occupies the later parts of the book, and in which Scandal Work comes to life.

Backus’s methodology is not merely to identify Joyce’s allusions to newspaper scandals, but to explore the ways in which he developed “successful strategies for evading scandal’s pervasive disciplinary powers.” Central to her study are three emblematic figures: W.T. Stead, Charles Stewart Parnell, and Oscar Wilde, each of whom courted publicity before falling foul of the desire of readers, journalists, and editors for moral condemnation of apparent sexual misconduct. Backus constructs an intriguing argument about Joyce’s relationship to these men, suggesting that he made extensive use of their distinctive representational strategies, “employing both their ‘scandal work’ and their double identities as subjects and objects of scandal to define his own style of counterhegemonic scandal work.” However, she fails to argue adequately for her yoking together of these three men: although Parnell and Wilde suffered horribly from their persecutions in the pages of newspapers, Stead—himself a journalist—prospered as a result of his involvement in a media sensation that he had self-authored (his description of his prison term as a “charming season of repose” and habit of wearing his prison uniform on each anniversary of his conviction is a world away from Wilde’s miserable imprisonment). Furthermore, Backus struggles to illustrate the significance of Stead in Joyce’s writing, particularly in comparison to her sophisticated and revelatory analysis of the presence of Parnell and Wilde in A Portrait and Ulysses. We are told that Gabriel Conroy of “The Dead” is “subtly compared” to Stead, but are given no details other than her suggestion that the choice of...