Reading Joyce in and out of the Archive

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 13, Summer 2002© 2002 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 1 While this is perhaps a commonplace observation about the role of secondary criticism , the extent to which Joyce’s academic critics have influenced his reception has not been fully documented. The role of literary criticism, for instance, emerges as having been quite significant in the history of Joyce’s European reception, see Lernout and Van Mierlo, eds., The Reception of James Joyce in Europe. Reading Joyce in and out of the Archive WIM VAN MIERLO Joyce’s works have been blessed—some might say: burdened—with a vast body of critical writing. While that body of writing is not all academic—it began with a good number of critical appreciations by Joyce’s friends, supporters and acolytes in literary journals and booklength studies that appeared alongside book reviews and critical notices in the popular press—it is certainly worth reflecting on how academic writing has shaped and guided the reception of Joyce’s œuvre. That this is not purely an academic question is contained in the fact that readers (whether they belong to that first generation of readers puzzled by Joyce’s radically modernist style in the thirties and forties or to the vast class of Joyce enthusiasts and graduate students who struggle with the allusive detail or narrative and intertextual complexity of the later writings) so often approach Joyce through the critics.1 Sifting through the various responses to academic Joyce criticism, a striking paradox emerges: on the one hand, an utterly hostile dismissal of Joyce criticism, amounting to a veritable industry with all its connotations of being overbearing and overproduced, comes from readers who find it hard to cope with the abstruse, self-indulgent discourse of academic criticism; on the other hand, the continuing use of “classics” of Joyce criticism, such as Ellmann ’s biography, Gifford’s and McHugh’s annotations, Kenner, Hayman and Hart, Glasheen, Atherton, Campbell and Robinson, Tyndall 02-T2429 9/13/02 12:07 PM Page 32 wim van mierlo 33 2 In the past five to ten years, the Joyce industry has turned particularly self-reflexive with the appearance of a large number of studies on the reception of Joyce’s writing and the disciplinary history of Joyce studies and the International James Joyce Foundation. I am thinking here, among others, of Charles Rossman, “The Critical Reception of the Gabler Ulysses” (1989 and 1990); Geert Lernout, The French Joyce (1990); Jeffrey Segal, Joyce in America (1993); Joseph Kelly, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon (1998); Fritz Senn, “The Joyce Industrial Revolution According to one European Amateur” (1998); Michael Groden, “Perplex in the Pen—and in the Pixels: Reflections on The James Joyce Archive, Hans Walter Gabler’s Ulysses, and James Joyce’s Ulysses in Hypermedia” (1999); a special issue of Joyce Studies Annual 2001; and Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo, eds., The Reception of James Joyce in Europe (forthcoming). and so on, follows from many readers’ feelings of inadequacy to confront Joyce’s complicated works on their own terms. (When Morris Ernst, the attorney in the 1933 United States v. Ulysses trial, was questioned by Judge Woolsey whether he had read the novel, Ernst denied , explaining that he could not make sense of it: “This was before glossaries and instructional aids had been published” [Ernst 7].) Is the fact that they are “classics” perhaps a redeeming quality? In the light of the history of Joyce studies and of Joyce’s reception, it is worth considering just what kind of reception these critical works themselves were given and how they have impacted readings and perceptions of Joyce in general. My aim, however, is not to review great classics of Joyce scholarship , nor is it my purpose to write the history of the Joyce industry in its various emanations or the genesis of various foundations or critical projects. Others beside myself are far better positioned to do so.2 Instead, I want to historicize certain moments in Joyce studies by investigating how particular exponents of that critical industry, in particular those that involve archival research in...