Joyce and Wagner

BOOK REVIEWS a good deal of information, but were the edition and its designers only a bit more ambitious, it could be a more useful tool for a wider range of scholars. Dale Kramer University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Joyce and Wagner Timothy Martin. Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 287 pp. $54.50 The proposition that the mind and art of James Joyce were shaped by Richard Wagner should not surprise Joyce's students. The quickest of glances suggests , at the very least, a strong artistic kinship: both artists exploit the resources of myth, emphasize sexual themes, pursue "totality" of form and subject matter, and represent the "modem" or "revolutionary" in art. . . . Wagner's position in early twentieth-century culture made him virtually inescapable, and Joyce, himself a progressive artist and a sensitive musician, had his own reasons for taking the German composer into account. THUS BEGINS Timothy Martin's intelligently argued and elegantly written Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence. The first full-length study of its kind, Martin's book seeks to "assess the connection" between these two cultural giants and to "define its limits." More specifically, the study seeks to "illuminate the background of Joyce's writing, to deepen our understanding of his books," and to "extend our awareness of Wagner's immense importance in the culture of his descendants and especially in the development of literary modernism." Martin makes his case well, for it is difficult, after completing Joyce and Wagner, to resist his claim that the German composer must be counted, with Flaubert and Ibsen, among the Irish novelist's "most important" "contemporary influences," or that, for Joyce, Wagner "did not merely represent the modern; he epitomized it." Martin demonstrates how "Joyce's knowledge of Wagner was conditioned by" numerous "intermediaries" in addition to being molded by direct encounters with the operas. "Entangled as Joyce was in the progressive literary culture of the late nineteenth century, it is not surprising that his earliest Wagnerism was more literary than musical." Despite Joyce's unique abüity to appreciate Wagner's position in nineteenth -century culture—Joyce was "a more serious and better-trained musician than nearly all the Wagnerites in the literary world," he eventually saw each of Wagner's ten major operas, he owned the scores and libretti of these operas ("only Shakespeare occupied more space on 391 ELT 36:3 1993 Joyce's shelf than Wagner"), and he wrote often of Wagner in his essays and letters—"Joyce's first encounters with Wagner were probably second hand, in the writings of intermediary figures already under Wagner 's influence." These figures included Ford Madox Ford, WUliam Morris, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Oscar WUde, Aubrey Beardsley, George Moore, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Symons, Gabriele D'Annunzio , Jessie Weston (author of a book on Wagner in addition to the influential From Ritual to Romancé), and, of course, George Bernard Shaw, whose socialist interpretation of the Ring, The Perfect Wagnerite, Joyce was known to have studied carefully. Martin notes that some of Wagner's appeal for Joyce may weU have resided in coincidences of biography. After all, both set out for Paris in their youths on the slimmest of prospects, in part to establish themselves as artists; and both met indifference and grinding poverty there. Both would spend much of their lives in exüe from their homelands (Zurich was a common haunt), "supported by loyal women whose endurance would be put to the most severe of tests." And both would have to await artistic recognition. Nevertheless, such parallels of biography would not sustain Joyce's admiration for Wagner indefinitely, as the Irishman's early uncritical Wagnerism "would soon be restrained and conditioned by his pride, iconoclasm, and ironic temperament." But what, precisely, did Joyce gain from Wagner? At one point Martin sums up the answer to this question: First, the heroic vitalist Siegfried . . . contributed to the character and aesthetic principles of Joyce's own artist-hero [Stephen Dedalus] in both A Portrait and Ulysses. Second, Wagner's Wandering Jew in The Flying Dutchman served as a model. . . for Leopold Bloom [and] for Joyce's portraits of cultural and sexual...