Aesthetic Inclusion in Narrative Nonfiction: The Return of the Banished and Repressed

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Rereading Kevin Birmingham’s response to my original review essay I feel a little like Alice being told (scolded?) by Humpty Dumpty that he is the master and will determine what a word means. Nevertheless, I begin by commending the essence of Birmingham’s response just as I commended his The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses in my original review essay. What a splendid scholar he is and how wonderful that he wrote this book and how thoughtful a response to my criticism, even if he at times overstates my objections and takes umbrage where none was meant. In discussing the what-could-be and maybe-a-bit-more-emphasis, I am not finding fault but being a bit of a resistant reader who thinks Birmingham might have done somewhat more here and a little less there.

Because Birmingham is a scholar whose work I very much admire, I shall speak to the issues he raises in his discussion of my original review and try to indicate the important issues on which we differ.

Birmingham eloquently presents his focus as “the lifespan of a book—rather than the lifespan of an author or a movement—as the cellular unit of cultural development and therefore as the basic object of study when dissecting our cultural organism,” arguing that “the narratives surrounding novels are as important as our analyses of the novels themselves” (342). What I, as a pluralist, am suggesting is that a) there are different narratives surrounding Ulysses than the one Birmingham presents; b) the novel itself is for me the primary focus. To make these suggestions is not to diminish his accomplishment, but to encourage the kind of substantive dialogue among scholars—of which I hope this exchange is an example—that opens doors and windows to further exploration.

Let me stress our large areas of agreement. Both of us agree that imagination is essential in interpreting archival material and turning it into a coherent narrative, and that narrative is the way we impose an order on a sequence of events. While Birmingham argues, “A nonfiction narrative’s absent events, people, and influences are not oversights” (343), I would hope he meant to write, “A nonfiction narrative’s absent events, people, and influences are not necessarily oversights.” Nor does such a statement magically dismiss a reader from noting places where the narrative could be more inclusive, say, of the parallels between Cubism and Ulysses that go beyond Quinn’s shipping paintings and 14 copies of Ulysses in the same box: “Quinn’s smuggling dramatizes the way painterly experiments shaped Ulysses’ reception in the United States—they were part of the same radical shipment” (344). Birmingham may think this is a crystallizing moment, but for me this is less significant and does not speak to the important relationship between Ulysses and the multiple perspectives and semiotics of Cubism. The importance of this relationship to modernist studies is all the more foregrounded by the groundbreaking exhibit and exceptional catalogue of Lauder’s Cubism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Indeed, I do think—and so did Quinn, who argued that “Ulysses was cubism in literature” (Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book 195)—that the really important connections between Ulysses and Cubism need be further explored.

I hope that he and I also agree that there is more than one narrative and that we can tell the story of modernism(s) differently. A narrative in its selection and arrangement of material is an ordering with a particular teleology. In the choices the author makes, all narratives have an element of autobiography and tell us something about the author. In this case, Birmingham reveals his preference for archival...