Hating Joyce Properly

"One must have tradition in oneself in order to hate it properly."

—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

In meditating on the plight of young scholars who wish to devote some significant portion of their careers to a study of Joyce, Colleen Jaurretche has recently critiqued a job market in the humanities that demands "diverse, culturally sweeping projects" while devaluing "the authority, legitimacy, and integrity of sustained, in-depth work on one author." ¹ Resisting what she sees as a market-driven demand for scholarly diversification, she concludes that "sustained attention is threatened when we shape and mold our younger members into various forms of professional prudence that delegitimize the pursuit of the single-author study." ² This assault on market-forces, while seductive (albeit now familiar) in its terms, runs the risk of nostalgically looking backward to a purer moment in the history of literary studies, when scholars could lovingly devote their time to Joyce, or Eliot, or Pound without having to trouble themselves about the "thick descriptions" of historical and cultural contexts increasingly favored by the new Modernist studies. Jaurretche, of course, overtly makes no such claim, and there is no reason to suspect that the type of single-author work which she imagines would ignore the rich insights of cultural studies. The danger in lamenting the decline of the single-author study, however, is that by focusing too intently on a particular figure of literary genius, we will, as Ann Ardis suggests, "reproduce Modernism's negative evaluations, silences, and outright erasures of other readings of modernity [and] simply reinscribe a Modernist mapping of turn-of-the-twentieth-century . . . literary and cultural history." ³ Our very wish to embrace Joyce and the other major Modernists even more tightly in the loving grasp of our monographs may very well squeeze the life out of the texts themselves, as we continue to reproduce already well-worn images and myths of Modernism.

The scholarly problem that Jaurretche identifies, however, is genuine and perhaps felt even more acutely by those who wish to study Modernist authors without the considerable machinery of the Joyce industry to sustain them. Our agonies, however, have less to do with the changing intellectual marketplace than with the very success Joyce scholars have enjoyed in that marketplace. That is, novice Joyce scholars, in particular, must first confront the sheer volume of Joyce criticism to be searched and read—an archive now grown so substantial that it threatens to overwhelm even the most earnest scholar hoping to launch his or her own research into Joyce. The labor of actually reading a text such as Ulysses or Finnegans Wake pales, after all, in comparison to what has become the real task of the modern Joyce critic: sorting through the monographs, biographies, letters, notebooks, journal articles, and conference proceedings that constitute the ever-expanding output of what Vivian Mercier described over four decades ago as the Joyce industry. The high cost of entry into this industry—measured by the stacks of books and journal articles that one must read before attempting an article—likely has more to do with the shift away from dissertations and monographs on Joyce than does the vaguer and thus much too easily vilified rise of market forces within the academy. Who among us, when looking with dismay at the tightly packed shelves of Joyce criticism, has not cast a somewhat jealous eye on David Jones or Patrick Kavanagh, whose works frame the considerable Joyce collection in my own small university library? Indeed, who has not felt at least the occasional—if often only secretly confessed—hatred of our own critical tradition that Adorno describes?

This is not, it must be noted, the hatred of the frustrated undergraduate looking to find just the one or two books needed to complete an essay assignment on Ulysses. Nor is it even the hatred of the graduate student who wants to produce a dissertation on Joyce yet feels that she will have nothing original to say. It...