Joyce & Nationalism

BOOK REVIEWS without any sense of irony, as Joyce's own confession (146-47); and (d) the insistence that Vladimir Dixon did not write the letter, printed in Our Exagmination, to which he signed his name, since "the internal evidence of the letter points to Joyce himself as its author" (148). There are, however, a number of places where I believe Ferris has made some very useful points. I always thought that during Stephen's confession in Portrait the priest was probably warning him mainly against the "unnatural" sin of masturbation when he said, "let me implore of you to give up that sin. It is a terrible sin. It kills the body and it kills the soul"; now I regard Ferris's reading of the passage as a "warning... against the dangers of venereal infection" as making equal, if not better, sense (20-21). I had not noted the references to Salvarsan, also known as arsenic compound 606, in Finnegans Wake (345.20, 478.9), but Ferris is surely right in noting that Joyce refers in these passages to that drug, which was used to combat syphilis (74). I'm also intrigued, although not quite convinced, by the argument that the "bee sting" that sent Bloom to the hospital was in fact a venereal infection (77). There are numerous other local insights in this book, but the whole seems less than the sum of its parts. Joyce might have had syphilis, but in my view the evidence presented here is inconclusive. Many details in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake could be references to syphilis, but there are usually other interpretations that make as much sense: HCE's "vile disease" (FW 33.17), for example, is almost certainly syphilis, but it is just as surely other diseases as well. Yet if Ferris has not quite justified her large claims for the centrality of syphilis in Joyce's life and art, she has asked important questions about the relationship between biography and fiction and has drawn a portrait of the artist that deserves close attention. Patrick A. McCarthy ______________ University of Miami Joyce & Nationalism Emer Nolan. James Joyce and Nationalism. New York: Routledge, 1995. xv + 219 pp. $59.95 LN THIS WORK Emer Nolan takes on several major tasks. She explores Joyce's politics as this operates in his writing as well as considers the relation of his writing to nationalism. Further, she stretches our understanding of modernism, wanting to show that Joy253 ELT 39:2 1996 cean modernism and Irish nationalism "can be understood as significantly analogous discourses" rather than only mutually exclusive directions . If successful, such an effort could redefine Joycean modernism, moving away from the transnational and universal Joyce that Nolan claims the American liberal tradition in Joyce studies has constructed. Nolan claims, further, that modernism can express postcolonial concerns , rejecting the more usual position that the postcolonial necessarily allies itself with the postmodern. Overall, this orientation aligns James Joyce and Nationalism with other recent books that examine Joyce's writings in the light of the history through which he lived and the politics his writings seem to espouse, such as Margot Norris's Joyce's Web: The Socml Unraveling of Modernism and Enda Duffy's The Subaltern 'Ulysses'. Drawing on most of Joyce's oeuvre throughout the introduction and six chapters that compose the work, Nolan offers insights that will provide rich territory for other scholars to develop. In the introduction, "Modernism and Nationalism," she pays tribute to the insights of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis about the tensions in Joyce's work between his nationalism and his modernism. If efforts toward a "revisionist Joyce" are to be countered effectively, Nolan observes, "we must revise our interpretations of his modernism as simply on the side of the 'modern'" and thus simple-mindedly favoring change. Nor is it enough, she declares, to accept the split between extreme and moderate nationalism with Joyce safely within the border of moderation since the polarizing of moderation and extremism "can be deconstructed." Thus, to ally Joyce with Arthur Griffith's nonviolent Sinn Fein is to align Joyce with anti-Semitism and imperialism, both of which he opposed. In Chapter 1, "Joyce and the...