In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • This Timecoloured Place: The Time-Space Binarism in the Novels of James Joyce by Agnieszka Graff
  • Laura Pelaschiar (bio)
THIS TIMECOLOURED PLACE: THE TIME-SPACE BINARISM IN THE NOVELS OF JAMES JOYCE, by Agnieszka Graff. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012. 166 pp. $49.95.

Agnieszka Graff’s This Timecoloured Place is a dense and ambitious book, and its subtitle—“The Time-Space Binarism in the Novels of James Joyce”—explains why. With such a complex assignment in mind, when a philosophical approach is conditio sine qua non, conceptual [End Page 882] density is inescapable. This is a most welcome element, provided the effort serves a good purpose and leads the reader into fruitful insights. Graff succeeds only partially, which is already a triumph per se, given the task she undertakes.

This Timecoloured Place is divided by the author into five chapters: the first dealing with the time-space binarism theoretically, the second with history (the time-space wars in 1920s Europe), and the final three with the texts themselves—A Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. In reality, the book is much less tidy than its introduction claims, and by and large metacritical discourse prevails at the expense of Joyce and his works. A serious flaw, at least for this reader, is Graff’s decision to omit Dubliners, a choice she defends by claiming that “the argument about space and time pertains to the novel, a form that tends towards (or, as in Joyce’s case, resists) a certain historically determined type of completeness” (19); the impression is that many of the ideas Graff discusses would have been more complete and convincing had she actually taken into consideration Joyce’s short stories.

In order not to scare the potential reader, perhaps I should note that the treatment of the time-space issue is strictly limited to a contained historical period: 1920s Europe. While the first “theoretical” chapter contains a concise comment about St. Augustine’s Confessions,1 Graff darts very quickly to the contemporary era. Martin Heidegger is dealt with in a couple of lines, and Edmund Husserl is mentioned—but only because Graff finds in him the idea that she is eager to put forward as the guiding concept of her enterprise: that text is the model of time and that reading and writing serve as a pattern for temporal experience. The problematic tangle between time, space, and language is thus introduced, and it is within this tangle that Graff proceeds, although she does so rather chaotically. Time, space, and language in twentieth-century literary theory constitutes the next block of discussion, with A. A. Mendilow, Henry James, Gérard Genette, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Ricoeur, and Roland Barthes the theorists taken into consideration. Ricoeur and his idea of narrative identity represents the philosophical (and moral) space to which Graff claims to belong.2 The chapter ends with a lengthy examination of three passages taken from modernist prose works (D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying3) in which time, space, and language receive a particularly relevant metaphorical treatment.

Joyce is briefly encountered at the beginning of chapter 2, which is dedicated to the space-time wars of the 1920s, and quickly abandoned. Graff’s attraction to metacriticism surfaces, and Giordano Bruno’s philosophy and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön become the central preoccupation.4 The “space-time war of high modernism” is competently expanded upon, with modernism and its complications [End Page 883] clearly being Graff’s strong point (51). Wyndham Lewis, who famously accused Ulysses of being a temporal novel about flow, flux, and chaos,5 is discussed at length since he is also one of the prototypes for Shaun, the Ondt, and the Mookse—among his many other appearances in the Wake. Paris/transition and London/The Enemy are the two major geographical and literary battlefields, while Henri Bergson’s durée is identified for its philosophical background.6 Graff, however, does not see Bergson’s work as a paradigm for the development of Ulysses since his understanding of durée cannot be expressed in words. Bergson’s distrust of words...

pdf

Share