Joyce, Give and Take by Annalisa Volpone (review)

There is a seductive symmetry to the organization of the four essays comprising Annalisa Volpone’s study of James Joyce in the context of literary influence: her first chapters explore two significant influences on Joyce’s work—Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and William Blake—and her subsequent ones examine Joyce’s influence on two later writers: Vladimir Nabokov and Derek Walcott. Enhancing the symmetry of this structure, Volpone limits her discussion of Joyce’s work to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in chapters 1 and 2 and then reverses her course in chapters 3 and 4, which focus on Finnegans Wake and Ulysses respectively. This strategy makes the overall organizational principle of her intriguing, although brief, book a chiasmus on Joyce as a nexus of influence, comprising the “give” and “take” implied in her title.

After a brief introduction, in which Volpone quickly sketches the outline for three basic paradigms that will guide her analysis—”intertextuality, echoicity and plagiarism” (14)—she focuses on the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses. Specifically, she pinpoints a single passage from Stephen’s interior monologue in which he mentions “the name of the Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)” (21, U 3.144). Volpone uses this passage to discuss Pico’s place in Stephen’s philosophical education, particularly his idea that the meaning of everything could be deciphered if one could only learn the language. Subsequently, she resituates Pico’s influence in shaping Joyce’s conception of an encyclopedic work that could represent the totality of existence. Volpone writes, “Stephen’s masterpiece has to become the summa of the modern world[;] precisely like Pico’s doctoral thesis, it has to include de omni re scibili” (29). Her argument becomes overdetermined when she makes more tenuous or circumstantial claims requiring more development than a single essay can provide, such as, “[l]ike Pico, Stephen is a young intellectual, who has studied in Paris” (27). In general, though, Volpone does a fine job of arguing for the centrality of Pico’s influence on Stephen and, by extension, Joyce.

In the following chapter, Volpone examines how Blake affected Joyce’s writing, particularly his idea of apocalypse as presented in Jerusalem—his last major text and a summa of his life’s work—on Joyce’s own literary summa, Finnegans Wake.¹ Much more has been written about Blake’s influence on Joyce than Pico’s, so Volpone does not have novelty on her side in this chapter. She does an admirable job, however, of entering the critical discussion without merely rehashing the positions of others and is able to do this not only by maintaining a relentless focus but also by grounding her analysis in compelling close readings of specific passages from the respective texts. Blake revises the Biblical notion of apocalypse as a personal revelation—an act perceived through the imagination—not unlike Joyce’s own secular appropriation of epiphany. Tracing the echoes of Blake in Joyce’s own ideas of apocalypse, Volpone argues, “Joyce refers to Blake not so much for his complex cosmology, even though the Wake presents some echoes of it, but rather for the prominence that Blake gives to imagination as the ultimate reality” (42). She supports this claim by tracing some of these Blakean “echoes” in the Wake, focusing “on the very concept of the marriage/union between mystery and ‘mysttetry’” (47). Volpone is at her best when unpacking Joyce’s dense portmanteau words, like “mysttetry” (FW 60.20), explaining the significance of the part to the whole and drawing connections back to Blake. She goes too far out on a limb occasionally, though, when she draws a speculative connection between a line from the Wake and a quotation from a letter that Blake wrote to George Cumberland and concludes that “[u]ndoubtedly this sentence signals Joyce’s endorsement of Blake’s philosophy of mind” (50). This general claim could certainly be valid, but I am skeptical about an argument that a single sentence—even in the Wake—could support the weight...