Joyce's Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation (review)

This is a celebration of error as indicative of authenticity, a corrective to 'false' ideals of totality and completion. Its subtitle should be its title, since the book is a dissertation-style engagement with theory and criticism, liberally quoted, and uses Joyce as little more than a primary example.

For three dubious reasons, Tim Conley attributes an 'aesthetic of error' to Joyce. The first reason is that Joyce was aware of and interested in errors, since his characters make them - although these are not, of course, Joyce's errors. Conley sees these fictional errors as paradigmatic for Ulyssess but fails to indicate how, since he does not address textual instances of irreducible ambiguity or aesthetic misjudgment. The second reason is that there are editorial problems with Ulysses that are difficult or impossible to resolve - none, as far as we know, intended by Joyce. The third reason is that Finnegans Wake consists mostly of puns, which Conley sees, for reasons that elude me, as 'erroneous' and necessitating reader-error. With characteristic hyperbole he writes, 'the Wake is ... all of Joyce's writings, or all literature everywhere, grossly misspelled, mistranslated, thoroughly botched.' Literalizing metaphor - any truth in what he says can only be metaphorical - he affects naïveté about multiple punning and ignores the other languages involved in Joyce's multilingual puns.

The fundamental mistake in this book is a pervasive confusion between ontological and aesthetic categories. Nothing in nature is whole or perfect, including human knowledge, but art can and does achieve unity or wholeness and beauty. Conley prefers art to be 'erroneous,' since it then corresponds to our inability to know well or fully. In this he seems to advocate New Critical 'imitative fallacy.' Confusion between art and life also underlies his misreading of Pound's words 'I cannot make it cohere' as a declaration of admirable aesthetic 'sabotage' that challenges assumptions about correctness. Isn't it true, rather, that the disunity of the Cantos is an aesthetic failure which indicates nothing about our limited ability to know what is real or true? Keats's urn, or its viewer, is wrong about beauty and truth. Neither is the other. That is why notions of correctness and accuracy may apply to content and never to form.

Conley makes other silly claims: that all figures and voices in the Wake 'are writers as much as they themselves are written'; that Joyce is not the author of Ulysses but merely a disunified centre where authorial voices or influences converge; that the writing writes itself; that the places and dates in the postmark in Ulysses are 'akin to apologies for the erroneous nature of the text'; that 'the events of those years' (1914-1921) 'in those places' (Trieste-Zurich-Paris) 'shaped the work' to such an extent that 'Joyce is incidental, or accidental, a vehicle.'

In a daring four-page epiphany of self-indulgence, Conley immerses himself in 'how errors occur' by writing largely about his own writing, while ignoring his spellcheck - an exercise possibly instructive for someone who has never made a mistake.

He writes sometimes with engaging cleverness, sometimes clumsily. I reread the first sentence on page 82 five times before locating its main verb. He has the immature habit of indulging frequently in statements in parentheses, which interrupt flow of expression. He also habitually enlists Joyce to write for him by quoting the Wake - a mistake because such quotations are out of context and go off in two or more directions, seldom making a single clear point.

There is little here for anyone interested in Joyce. Convinced that 'all interpretations can be thought of as errors,' Conley seldom attempts literary analysis. He regards the Wake as his primary vindication: to read it 'is to make mistakes, and to enjoy' it 'is to cherish what the mistakes reveal.' Despite considerable verbal pizzazz, this book is intellectually timid in its basic contention that all writing and reading is erroneous - an exaggeration as near to...