Collaborative “Dubliners”: Joyce in Dialogue edited by Vicki Mahaffey (review)

In its most sinister connotation, the word “collaborate” brings to mind the conspiratorial climate of Vichy France from which James Joyce fled during the final year of his life. The growing international conflict cast shadows of betrayal such as Joyce had long feared—and often come to expect—from allies-turned-adversaries, including the falling out with John Francis Byrne or the romantic advances of Vincent Cosgrave towards Nora Barnacle. These are the two most discussed examples, but, granted, they sometimes emerged more clearly as fictional conflict than biographical content. As Richard Ellmann notes of the former, “in actual life Joyce searched in vain for any foundation for his feeling that Byrne’s change in attitude toward him was a betrayal, but in his books he propounded various theories to explain it” (JJI 120-21). Despite such actual or perceived treacheries, Joyce also knew the brighter possibilities of collaboration. Bold elopement and eventual marriage with Nora, literary partnerships with the likes of Eugene Jolas and Samuel Beckett, and the critical and fiscal patronage of Sylvia Beach and Harriet Shaw Weaver rank among the happier pairings that helped Joyce face the countless personal and professional challenges of his life.

Collaboration around Joyce’s work persists today in a healthy abundance of critical interactions. International symposia, summer schools and seminars, Wake reading groups, and Bloomsday festivities all bring together scholars to share ideas, expand views, and sharpen arguments. Still, the collaborative process or dialogical approach remains practically absent from the final print form. Publications tend to reflect results largely grounded in single-author-ship, reflecting the individual mind striking out for the depths of the text. Writing together is the exception rather than the rule in Joycean circles, as in literary and cultural studies overall. This is somewhat in contrast to the tradition of the lab or field partner in the sciences and the co-investigator in medicine. Apart from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which collaborative partnerships have become household names in literary criticism or critical theory? While there have been noteworthy critical teams in Joyce scholarship—Burton A. Waisbren and Florence L. Walzl, Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes—solo work is the norm.

Yet, co-authorship would seem an instinctive response for a critical project concerned with the author who coined the creative-communicative tandem of Shem the Pen and Shaun the Post. Their collaboration, as intellectual complements and rival siblings, is part of what moves the textual process of Finnegans Wake from introverted conception to extroverted publication. A new collection of essays about Dubliners espouses and embodies the idea of collaboration by bringing together pairs of scholars to work out tandem readings for each of the fifteen stories. Editor Vicki Mahaffey has coordinated the efforts of a diverse group of critics for Collaborative “Dubliners”: Joyce in Dialogue. This volume of co-authored essays offers a fresh direction in Joyce studies and a rare offering in humanities research as well. The scholarly pairings present sometimes divergent, other times complementary, viewpoints that respond to the editor’s strategy “to create a situation in which each critic had to negotiate with a different set of assumptions in a collaborative effort to create a more elastic, responsive, capacious reading of the text” (2). That strategy yields exciting results as a diverse range of contributing partnerships engages with the text and each other to develop a series of original readings of the stories in Joyce’s collection.

Dubliners is an ideal focal point for collaborative reading because, as Mahaffey and Jill Shashaty observe in their introduction, it is the most frequently taught of Joyce’s texts and the tales themselves call to mind the collaborations that defined British-occupied Dublin and Nazi-occupied France. As significant as these historical contexts are the pedagogical ones that provide the theoretical frame for the introduction and, by extension, the entire project. Paulo Freire, Socrates, Hannah Arendt, William Herzog, Jesus Christ, and even Robert Frost’s poetic...