Review of Janine Utell's James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire

In 1921, James Joyce refused to grant Jacques Benoist-Mechin's request to see the Ulysses schema, even though Benoist-Mechin was in the midst of translating portions of the novel into French. According to Richard Ellmann, Joyce responded humorously by protesting that "If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality" (JJ 521). Joyce's jocoserious denial has become a foundational narrative of the scholarly industry his work has spawned, as well as a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the centenary of the 1922 publication of Ulysses approaches and with the hundredth anniversary of the 1907 edition of Chamber Music—Joyce's first published text—already passed, the accuracy of Joyce's proclamation, as well as his immortality, seems assured. A recent "Joyce, James" search of the MLA database netted over 10,000 citations, and neither the arguments nor the pace of publications shows any signs of abating.

But have Joyceans finally exhausted everything there is to say about the seven major prose works, two poetry collections, voluminous letters, and extensive manuscript holdings? Having passed through phases of scholarship dominated by psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, post-structuralism, feminism, historicism, post-colonialism, and genetic criticism among others, is the Joyce industry, like the river Liffey in Finnegans Wake, experiencing a "commodious vicus of recirculation" (FW 3.2)? Are we indeed destined to repeat "The seim anew" (FW 215.23)?

Derek Attridge rightly points out in Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (2000) that commentary begets commentary, and the vast array of scholarly sources available makes it increasingly unlikely a given critic will be able "to track down everything that has been said on his or her chosen topic."¹ As a result, he concludes, Joyceans are now writing what has come before "over and over again, using a newer vocabulary to articulate the same insights" (Attridge 170). But is Attridge's assessment of the state of Joyce criticism entirely accurate? Perhaps one reason for the persistent sense of "the siem anew" is that critics keep returning to a few key issues in Joyce's work, such as his depiction of love, marriage, and adultery, because his texts are multifarious and do not offer up easy or uncomplicated answers. Janine Utell's James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, and Desire (2010) reveals that new scholarship need not be a mere recycling or glossing of what has come before, but it also shows that the over-abundance of Joyce scholarship can lead to critical myopia in the quest for originality. Over the past two decades, Joyceans have cast their nets both deeper and wider in order to illuminate new dimensions of his oeuvre, especially through contextual, interdisciplinary, and genetic studies. The ever-present danger, however, is that, in attempting to carve out a unique space in an over-crowded field that values novelty, critics may ignore the essential contributions of earlier scholarship. Such omissions, reflecting the increasingly specialized nature of contemporary literary criticism, mar Utell's sometimes incisive study.

While Utell's book has several interwoven strands, the principal focus of James Joyce and the Revolt of Love is an exploration of Joyce's relationship to what Utell, drawing on the work of the philosopher Emanuel Levinas, terms "ethical love." She defines the term as the "commitment to mutual flourishing and recognition, even in the face of the pain of infinite distance and separation that comes with love" (8). Drawing primarily on Giacomo Joyce, Exiles, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake as well as his letters, Utell argues that "Joyce imagines marriage to be the ideal means for two people to come together—a complete joining . . . yet we find again and again that such a union is impossible, or that to fully partake of...