European Joyce Studies 19: James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel ed. by Finn Fordham and Rita Sakr (review)

This volume, edited by Finn Fordham and Rita Sakr, brings together eleven essays that originated in a series of papers and panels at the 2008 XXIst International James Joyce Symposium in Tours. According to its editors, it examines "many previously unexplored facets of the intricate [Gustave] Flaubert-Joyce relationship but its analyses also extend to both ends of the nineteenth-century" by discussing Joyce's responses to Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Émile Zola (12). Many of Joyce's writings, including Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, as well as his letters, essays, and notebooks, are examined, providing new insights into his work.

As the editors state in their introductory essay, the purpose of this volume is to encourage continued research "to investigate further Joyce's relations to other French prose writers of the 19th Century to whom Joyce refers" (12). They note, as do most of the authors of these essays, that much remains to be explored with many topics having been understudied or entirely neglected.

The first essay, "Joyce and Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo and 'The Sisters,'" by Cóilín Owens, considers how Dumas "provided Joyce with some of the imaginative apparatus for his story 'The Sisters.' . . . Dumas's dramatization of the relationship between Edmond Dantès and l'Abbé Faria informs Joyce's handling of that between the narrator and Father Flynn" (20). The next two studies examine Balzac and Joyce. In "Balzacian Ghosts in 'The Boarding House,'" Benoit Tadié points out the "similarity between Joyce's Dubliners and Balzac's Comédie humaine" by comparing the boarding house of Mrs. Mooney to the "pension bourgeoise" of Mme. Vauquer in Le Père Goriot (30).¹ In his essay, "Joyce and Balzac: Portraits of the Artist in the Age of Industrial Production," David Spurr presents Balzac and Joyce as "chroniclers of the fate of artistic autonomy in the modern world of bourgeois commercial capitalism" (42) by equating Balzac's portrait of the artist in Illusions Perdues and Comédie humaine with Little Chandler in "A Little Cloud" and Stephen in A Portrait and Ulysses.²

The only essay on Hugo, "Hugo's There?!" by Fordham, examines how Joyce's allusions to Hugo's works show their "centrality to Joyce's Romantic figurings of the artist" in A Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, as well as how Hugo's theory of genre and his use of the Battle of Waterloo express his "revolutionary spirit" (60). For Fordham, Hugo's importance to Joyce is "underestimated, languishing . . . in Flaubert's shadow" (67). He makes an admirably thorough use of Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" Notebooks at Buffalo and David Hayman's First-Draft Version of "Finnegans Wake."³

The next five essays are devoted to Flaubert. Valérie Bénéjam, in "The Elliptical Adultery of Ulysses: A Flaubertian Recipe for Succès de Scandale," attributes Joyce's "presentation of adultery and sexual intercourse" in Ulysses to being inspired by Flaubert, especially as related to "the legal and critical history of Madame Bovary" (76).⁴ In "The Opposite of Despair: St. Anthony meets St. Patrick," Robert Baines points out that critics have studied the influence of Bouvard et Pécuchet on Joyce's works, but little critical attention has been given to the importance of La Tentation de Saint Antoine for both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, especially the resemblance of the portrayal of St. Patrick in book four of Finnegans Wake to Flaubert's depiction of St. Anthony in Tentation.⁵ He argues convincingly that the true influence of Flaubert can only be seen by looking at both Bouvard and Pécuchet and Tentation.

Matthew Creasy, in "Inverted Volumes and Fantastic Libraries: Ulysses and Bouvard et Pécuchet," maintains that the research both Flaubert and Joyce famously undertook "was...