“Strandentwining Cable”: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality by Scarlett Baron (review)

Scarlett Baron’s exhaustive study comes at a time when we are definitely in need of a new, book-length reappraisal of the role of Gustave Flaubert in Joyce’s works. Since Ezra Pound first pointed to the filiation,¹ the only published monograph to tackle the subject, by Richard K. Cross, is now over forty years old,² and the rest are but articles and book chapters.³ Joyce’s engagement with Flaubert’s work not only spans his whole career as a writer: it focuses on writing itself. This begins with the status of the author in A Portrait, which is almost literally translated from Flaubert’s correspondence: “[t]he artist in his work must be like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; you can sense him everywhere but you cannot see him.”⁴ Referring to this earlier borrowing, Joyce jotted down in the Finnegans Wake notebook VI.B.8 that “G. F.” (“like the God of the creation” on the seventh day—P 215) “can rest having made me.”⁵ Thus Flaubert is perhaps the one writer whose influence on Joyce was the most important, and yet phrasing it this way would be unfair to Baron’s study. She is, in fact, careful to place the Flaubert-Joyce connection within a much richer literary web comprising, among many others, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, Valéry Larbaud, and Jorge Luis Borges. More importantly, in speaking of “influence,” I am being embarrassingly naive, employing a binary precursor/successor model that is reductive compared to Baron’s both complex and clearly exposited theoretical framework of intertextuality as a meshing system of transmission.

Baron takes her cue from Stephen’s musings about midwives and navel cords in “Proteus”: “[t]he cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh” (U 3.37). This “strandentwining cable” becomes the eponymous, central image of her study, “an apt extended metaphor for the exceptionally dense and wide-ranging intertextuality of Joyce’s writing, which constantly ‘link[s] back’ to precursor texts, absorbing and entwining the strands of foreign linguistic materials” (2). Reviewing diachronically the whole of Joyce’s oeuvre, Baron is a magical midwife in her own right, as she holds all her threads—or cords, rather—together, interrogating the complex questions of paternity, authorship, and intertextuality. She eventually comes full cycle by seeing in Flaubert’s and Joyce’s extreme practices of intertextuality a probable cause for the development of the critical term coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966.⁶ Indeed, there is something of the absurd Pierre Menard “authoring” Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote in Flaubert’s two final anti-heroes, Bouvard and Pécuchet, as they copy their readings word for word, something that seems to echo Joyce’s own statement that he was “a scissors and paste man” (LettersI 297).⁷ I would, however, differ from this too neat and, in my view, not sufficiently argued conclusion: if Borges chose Don Quixote as the classic work to be “authored” by his Pierre Menard, it was probably with full knowledge that the practice of borrowing verging on copying had a much older history, particularly in Cervantes’s own rewritings of chivalric romances. Indeed, claiming a modernist origin for the notion of intertextuality seems to me a mistake. The concept could be just as well illustrated and inspired by the Renaissance period and its practices of discursive borrowings, allusions, and burlesque, when the absence of modern notions of authorship, originality, and—conversely—plagiarism, made intertextuality a natural environment, rather than a distinctive literary trend.⁸ This, however, would be my only serious divergence from Baron’s extremely rich book, and it concerns the last four pages. The rest of Baron’s argument is thoroughly convincing.

Baron herself is well aware of her inclusion within an intertextual network of criticism, as she weaves together not only the large corpus of her two writers within their literary webs but...