Joyce & the Burden of Disease

ELT 39:2 1996 this objective) a Marxist analysis focused on social class and commodification . While Youngs reasonably concludes that "the British exploration of Africa was largely about Britain" (208), he is well-aware that the Victorian explorers whose texts he analyzes were major agents in the "scramble for Africa" and its subsequent exploitation (continuing after imperialism as "development," a.k.a. neoimperialism). But this has been the standard conclusion for the last fifty years of scholarship focused on European and American discourse about Africa. Patrick Brantlinger ______________ Indiana University Joyce & the Burden of Disease Kathleen Ferris. James Joyce and the Burden of Disease. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. ix + 182pp. $24.95 IN HER PROLOGUE, Kathleen Ferris sets forth clearly the scope and thesis of her study: "What I shall present in this work is the evidence, medical, biographical, and literary . . . linking the theme of guilt, which permeates Joyce's writings, to venereal disease, and showing that, in all probability, Joyce was infected with syphilis" (7). Building on her presentation of evidence that Joyce suffered from syphilis, Ferris contends that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are "autobiographical and confessional in nature" and that they "form an allegory of [Joyce's] life, an account of his emotional and spiritual journey" (8, 14). She regards these later works as coded confessions that critics have misunderstood because Joyce deliberately led readers astray, for example, by emphasizing the "Homeric and comic" aspects of Ulysses while concealing "the mental suffering Joyce experienced because of his disease" (153). Thus, Ferris argues for a radically new reading of Joyce's works as products of obsessive guilt leading to a final act of contrition. How persuasive is this argument? In my opinion, Ferris has assembled a good deal of interesting new material that Joyce scholars will need to take into consideration, but the conclusions she draws from that evidence all too often depend on loose associations, leaps of faith, or a willingness to ignore more obvious interpretations. The problem is compounded by the fact that the argument of James Joyce and the Burden of Disease is insistently reductive: if Ferris were more willing to admit that there are many valid approaches to a text as rich as Ulysses, she would not find it necessary to claim that the book's comic and epic elements are mere camouflage for its themes of guilt and 250 BOOK REVIEWS redemption, which in turn are directly traceable to Joyce's having contracted syphilis. Her determination to exclude other interpretations, along with her tendency to exaggerate the implications of her evidence, weakens what otherwise would have been a more valuable contribution to Joyce scholarship. Some of the study's recurrent problems may be seen in this passage, which follows the assertion that Bloom has syphilis: "When Bloom contemplates Blazes Boylan keeping his appointment at 7 Eccles Street, the sound 'Clappyclapclap' echoes through his head. In 'Oxen of the Sun' and in 'Penelope,' the clap of thunder sounds like the crack of doom (Ulysses 388-89, 726). CL·p is a slang term for gonorrhea, but I will argue here that Joyce uses the word to encompass venereal diseases generally, including syphilis" (55). Although Ferris promises to argue that "clap" may refer to syphilis, she never really does so, but simply repeats her contention. For that matter, she does not clearly indicate the context of "Clappyclapclap," which in "Sirens" is part of the description of the applause in response to Simon Dedalus's singing (11.756 in the Gabler edition), nor does she explain what this has to do with thunderclaps or with clap as a venereal disease. I tried to figure out what she means, in connection with her argument about syphilis, by "the clap of thunder sounds like the crack of doom," but that proved difficult, in part because "Ulysses 388-89, 726" is apparently an error: it does not mean lines 388-89 and 726 of the "Oxen of the Sun" and/or the "Penelope" episode in the Gabler edition (which she cites elsewhere, using chapter and line numbers), nor does it mean pages 388-89 and 726 either in that edition or in the 1961 Random House text. It is...