The Strong Spirit: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce 1898-1915 by Andrew Gibson (review)

With The Strong Spirit: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce 1898-1915, Andrew Gibson, one of Joyce’s leading contemporary commentators, continues where he left off in Joyce’s Revenge,¹ a carefully calibrated text that drew out the Irishness of Joyce’s Ulysses and added significantly to similar studies of the subject by critics such as Seamus Deane, Vincent Cheng, Enda Duffy, Declan Kiberd, Luke Gibbons, and Emer Nolan among others.² Gibson’s work has widely been seen as a theoretically informed and important contribution to the reclamation of Joyce’s writings for Ireland, and his writing helps in the teasing out of Joyce’s complex politics, which was for too long dismissively marginalized. Most usefully, perhaps, it also draws out the author’s and his country’s English connections as seen in Ulysses. In Gibson’s own words,

in Ulysses, Joyce works towards a liberation from the colonial power and its culture. He also takes his revenge on them. There is a will to freedom in Ulysses, and a will to justice, but also a recognition that the two do not necessarily coincide. Joyce’s revenge gets much of its form from the novel’s concern with Irish culture as shaped and determined by English cultural nationalism.

(Revenge 13)

For Gibson’s Joyce, the will to freedom and to justice is read exclusively in terms of Ireland’s attempts to gain political freedom and justice from British colonization. It might more usefully be suggested that, while this is certainly an important and indeed a central concern of Ulysses, to limit the book only to this idea or to suggest that it is the dominating intention is to provincialize Joyce’s work and to ignore its larger reach and ambition. This is not to call for a return to a non-political Joyce, to the Joyce of Ezra Pound or even Richard Ellmann—quite the contrary. It is to say that Joyce, while concerned with the English-Irish knot, did everything in his literary power not to remain caught up in it, Mangan-like, and his works offer considerable tools for its untying.

If Ulysses is, for Gibson, Joyce’s revenge, in The Strong Spirit, he argues that all the Joyce texts before his 1922 novel (except the poetry, which is not considered) are, in a sense, preparatory to this great aesthetic-political event and are equally entwined in the Irish-English political bind, with Joyce’s participation in what he calls Irish “national resurgence” (235). Gibson’s new work starts where Joyce’s Revenge left off but does so by taking several steps backwards in time and turning the focus onto Joyce’s earlier writings: Dubliners, A Portrait, and Exiles (which he sees, in a surprising and original reading, as an allegory of the relationship between the two Irelands of nationalism and unionism), but also on his Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, most particularly the journalism that he penned while in Trieste.³ In a very real sense, one cannot read Strong Spirit without having read Gibson’s previous works (to which he, at times too often, refers), and it is fair to see his entire Joyce output as a kind of critical work in progress, especially since there is a new volume on Finnegans Wake still to come. Mostly the work is elegantly argued, but at times it does adopt an unnecessarily confrontational style with regard to earlier critics whose readings of Joyce, once influential, have already been comfortably superseded.

Discussing Ireland in the opening episode of Ulysses, the Englishman Haines blandly exonerates England from any wrongdoing and instead pronounces that “history is to blame” (U 1.649). History too is at the heart of Gibson’s project in progress. The idea of progress/continuity/graduality, which is implicit in Gibson’s approach to Joyce’s works, clashes to...