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  • Surviving or Reviving Modernism?1
  • Jean-Michel Rabaté (bio)
Morton P. Levitt, James Joyce and Modernism: Beyond Dublin. Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. $89.95.

This is a refreshingly honest and vibrant collection of essays connected with Joyce, some of which go back to the early 1960s, thus offering us an overview of a surprisingly consistent critical perspective on the Irish writer. Rare would be the Joyce critics able to publish older and newer pieces together, spanning in the process four decades, without having to rewrite, apologize or modify substantially. It is a testimony to Morton Levitt’s endurance that he did not have to do this but instead provided each essay with an introduction mixing biographical or contextual reminiscences and theoretical points. Interestingly, the collection takes up an essay that delighted me when I read it first, the homage to Harry Levin published in the Re-Viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism in 1991 under the title of “Harry Levin’s James Joyce and the Modernist Age: A Personal Reading”—an essay that might well be considered as the germinating force behind the present collection, so much so that one would be tempted to call this book quite simply: “Morton Levitt’s James Joyce and the Modernist Age: A personal reading.”

To confirm this impression, one can then re-read this re-reading of an indisputable classic of Joycean scholarship, which opens with a somewhat paradoxical thesis: when dealing with Joyce, one should not never define oneself too squarely as a “Joycean,” that is, a specialist of the author. Harry Levin’s unique asset was to have been above all a Renaissance specialist who wrote the famous essay on Joyce at Joyce’s own suggestion and who, while publishing on Renaissance authors, also authored the influential “What was Modernism?” in 1960. Even if one may hesitate in asserting that it was Levin who gave the age of Modernism its name, it is clear that the essay announced the demise of Modernism at a time when its currency—as bandied around by Clement Greenberg in the domain of the visual arts, for example—was high, if already violently contested. Like Levin, Morton Levitt aims at providing a better definition of Modernism, while taking Joyce as a focus, that is, as a field of forces, some converging and others diverging.

It is thus no surprise to see the book open with a good-natured debate between Morris Beja [End Page 583] and Morton Levitt about one important preliminary question: how can one be a Joycean? Beja takes issue with the sentence that opens the collection (“I’ve contended for years that I wasn’t really a Joycean”) and remarks that he nevertheless decides to consider his old friend Morton Levitt as a Joycean. I still remember the startling way Jacques Derrida had begun a marathon, five-hours-long talk on “Yesses” in Joyce at the Frankfurt James Joyce Symposium in 1984 by lengthy considerations of the impossibility of founding a “Joycean competence.” While playing the role of the humble outsider who has not read “all the books,” he was in fact slyly questioning the basis for any “knowledge” of Joyce and Joycean matters since, almost by definition, they include everything in literature, culture, and history. There is no Joycean competence that would rest assured of its verifiability. Levitt’s position, although more traditional, poised as it is between the broad spectrum of comparative literature and the narrower competence as a trained reader of lots of different texts such as required by New Criticism, is in fact not far from Derrida’s problematic. More recently, Derek Attridge has returned to the problem of “being a Joycean” in his Joyce Effects. 2 Moving from the autobiographical level to the theoretical mode, Attridge shows extremely clearly that his own schooling in the Leavis tradition in England did not predispose him positively towards Joyce and that Joyce has been able to absorb the successive waves of critical schools, from deconstructive, psychoanalytical, feminist, historical, post-colonial, queer, or culturalist. One of the factors explaining Levitt’s refusal to claim this “being a Joycean” is a more oppositional stance on the issue of “theory.” While noting that “the theorists...

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