Preface

In his 1982 “Preface” to the New and Revised Edition of James Joyce, Richard Ellmann observed that, working over the landmark biography in Joyce’s own spirit of “total candor,” he felt “all my affection for him renewed.” Amanda Sigler’s “Joyce’s Ellmann,” the opening essay in this volume of JSA, provides a meticulous history of the birth and development of Ellmann’s enduring affection and of the challenges he faced in candidly chronicling the life of an often elusive and contradictory subject. Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished correspondence, Sigler locates the serendipitous “beginnings” of the biography in a conversation Ellmann had with Yeats’s widow shortly after World War II. Intrigued and “delighted” by the young Joyce’s arrogance in a now famous encounter with Yeats, Ellmann went on to fashion a portrait of the artist as a devoted family man whose rebellious pride was tempered by compassion and humility. In detailing the biographer’s research methods and interpretive choices, Sigler provides an engrossing account of Ellmann’s adventures, struggles, and breakthroughs: his multiple trips to European cities, efforts to maintain research funding, negotiations with publishers, interviews with obscure or recalcitrant interlocutors, and responses to contrasting accounts of incidents from Joyce’s life.

While Sigler makes Joyce’s biographer a biographical subject, Peter Nohrnberg anchors his study of Irish masculinity and the cultural politics of sports in the autobiographical details of Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen’s political skepticism, Nohrnberg argues, is consistently revealed through his cunning self-removal from “the whirl of scrimmage.” As a boy at Clongowes, Stephen feigns participation in the Anglicized game of “gravel football,” but he later casts an equally dismissive eye on Davin’s (and the Gaelic Athletic Association’s) militant promotion of indigenous Irish sports as an expression of virility and nationhood. Extending his study of the gender politics of Irish sport to the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses, Nohrnberg provides a compelling and original reading of Bloom’s encounter with the shot-putting citizen (modeled on G.A.A. founder Michael Cusack) through the lens of Gaelic athletics. While Bloom promotes the self-improving benefits of such activities as tennis and Sandow’s exercises, his antagonist insists that traditional Irish sports alone can serve the more vital purpose of “building up the nation.” Boxing, as Nohrnberg demonstrates, plays a particularly important role in this imaginative nation-building, for the violence of the ring, as glorified in the Dublin press, serves as a “metaphor for political liberation” and “hetero-normative masculinity.”

Denise Ayo’s “Scratching at Scabs: The Garryowens of Ireland” explores another neglected feature of the “Cyclops” episode—the scrofulous dog that accompanies the citizen to Kiernan’s pub. Tracing the history of Garryowen figures in Irish song, fiction, and drama, Ayo not only demonstrates Joyce’s allusive familiarity with this literary tradition but argues that he draws upon the work of Gerald Griffin, Maria Edgeworth, Dion Boucicault, and H. De Vere Stacpoole to evoke Ireland’s colonial dilemma. In Ayo’s carefully contextualized reading, Garryowen embodies two undesirable Irish identity options arising from British-imposed stereotypes: the “quaint savage” and the compliant civilian. If colonialism produces a bifurcated self-image for Ireland, Lauren Rich reveals in “A Table for One” that it also engenders a particular form of alienation that Homi Bhabha terms “unhomeliness.” Focusing on the figure of the solitary diner in public eateries in Dubliners and Ulysses, Rich argues that Dublin’s fragmented and largely unemployed populace “unhomed by colonial rule,” sought a sense of community in the city’s pubs, cafés, and tearooms. As her penetrating reading of “Two Gallants” reveals, however, by simulating domestic comforts, public eateries awaken a desire for home that they can never really satisfy. Thus, Lenehan leaves the Refreshment Bar with the illusory glow of belonging, only to be “re-consumed by the exploitative foodchains of the colonial city,” while the hermetic Duffy of “A Painful Case” can find no reassuring sense of companionship in restaurant or pub. Rich goes on to argue that Bloom feels the acute burden of exile and...