James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism, and: Ulysses in Critical Perspective, and: Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings (review)

John Nash's James Joyce and the Act of Reception is a thoughtful, astute, and invaluable contribution to two affiliated and increasingly debated questions. For this book not only offers a meticulous and persuasive account of Joyce's career-long engagement with his audiences—in Ireland and in Europe, in his lifetime and beyond—it, perhaps more importantly, also makes a significant contribution to ongoing critical conversations about modernism's relationship to various imagined audiences, its supposed resistance to the "common reader," and its often-cited dependence upon patrons and coteries.

Nash begins by reminding us of Joyce's status as the central protagonist of a well-known modernist myth; that of the aloof, elite artist championed because of his supposed indifference to his audience. What follows provides a sustained interrogation of that myth, as the book reveals a writer not only absorbed by the difficult circumstances of his own reception, but also concerned to transform those circumstances into the material of his art. Finnegans Wake's numerous, often playful, invocations of its bored, baffled, perplexed, or "ideal insomniac" audience is revealed as the fruition of a sustained Joycean preoccupation with "writing . . . the act of reception" (3).

Moving chronologically through the Joyce oeuvre, Nash begins with a lively account of Dubliners as a submerged assault upon the Irish Literary Revival's conception of an ideal, communal audience. While such an audience was in the process of being created through the Abbey Theatre by W. B. Yeats and others, Joyce, brooding in exile, offers a rival vision of "the specific audiences whom the Revival ignored or misjudged," bringing "a bored audience to life" (41). His analysis reaches its apotheosis in "The Dead," a story preoccupied with theatricality and blocked communications, and significantly composed while Joyce was simultaneously frustrated by his own failure to secure an Irish publisher, and by the Dublin riots over the first night of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. In Nash's compelling reading, "The Dead" and, in particular, Michael Furey's silenced haunting of its closing pages from Ireland's west, becomes, amongst other things, a resonant assault upon "the revivalist social and ideological form of a national audience" (60). For Joyce, Nash conclusively demonstrates, audiences are never so homogenous.

Chapter 2 turns to one of Joyce's most famous "scenes of reception" (97), the "Scylla and Charybdis" library episode in Ulysses. Stephen's delivery of his Shakespeare theory to an alternately intrigued, exasperated, and even bored audience of Dublin literati passing the afternoon in its National Library is embedded in rich historical contexts. Nash shrewdly excavates the contemporary cultural politics of the National Library of Ireland and the affiliated Irish "university question" which preoccupied students and scholars at both Trinity and University Colleges. Those complex, fissured politics determine the splintered, uneasy reception of Stephen's Shakespeare theory by those gathered in the library to hear him. Stephen's declaration that he does not believe his own theory only underlines the instability of his audience.

Chapters 3 and 4 are, perhaps, the most significant and ambitious chapters of this study, since they logically turn to Finnegans Wake, surely the most notoriously "difficult" of all modernist fictions. "We have become used to thinking of modernism as a collective movement distinguished in part by its expulsion of mass culture and so-called ordinary readers" (98), Nash reminds us, and Finnegans Wake is frequently seen as exemplary, and, less frequently, offered as a curiously democratic text, in that, since there is no model for competence, then there can be...