Bringing Joyce Down to Earth

WAS JAMES JOYCE ecologically savvy? That is the question addressed throughout this collection of timely essays. While opinions about the extent/evidence of Joyce’s environmental sensitivity vary from essayist to essayist, all agree about the importance of ecocriticism. Ironically, it is Joyce’s urbanism rather than his identification as a nature writer that qualifies him, for most of these commentators as an ecocritical author. In their introduction, editors Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin provide a history of and context for ecocriticism defined both as an attempt to engage with “the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature,” and also as “the study of the relationship of the human and the non-human, throughout human cultural history and entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself.” Thus the concerns of the twenty-first-century ecocritic extend from the country to the city, from the animate to the inanimate and beyond.

Beginning in 1978 with William Rueckert’s article “Literature and Ecology, An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” the field has expanded to incorporate concerns about our endangered environment(s) and literature’s role in foregrounding the transcultural implications of its hazards. “Interconnection” is a term frequently invoked by virtually all of the contributors. How do literary texts, particularly Joyce’s, address the connections among nature, culture, the environment, and language? By 1996 the Association of Literature and the Environment (ALE) and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE) had been inaugurated to provide answers. It was not long before the very nature of Nature was called into question as well as the meanings of “ecology,” “culture,” and “the environment.” Increasingly, ecocriticism has concerned itself with “ethical, practical and political concerns” and has branched out into subgenres, including “environmental criticism, cultural ecology, ecofiction, literary ecology, ecotheory [and] literary environmental studies.” For purposes of this volume, however, the term “ecocriticism” is consistently employed to examine Joyce’s engagement with issues of “space, place, culture and embodiment.” Noting that Joyce’s works demonstrate environmental concerns ranging from air pollution to waste removal, the editors argue that Joyce’s oeuvre can be considered indicative of the ecocritical issues salient to his time and place in Ireland as well as to current environmental challenges. Brazeau and Gladwin explain that the current collection seeks to bridge the gap—via ecocriticism—between the apparently contradictory views of Joyce as a high modernist, on one hand, and a politically engaged Irish writer on the other. Their hope is that the collected essays will inspire a “fruitful dialogue between Joyceans and environmental critics.”

In the first of three sections, contributors focus on “Nature and Environmental Consciousness in Joyce’s Fiction.” Nature proves more difficult to define than might be expected, however, for Nature is both real and realized. That is to say, Nature is vitally present to us in and of itself, yet it is made relevant—realized—according to cultural conditioning which is often as destructive as it is felicitous. “Environment,” too, is slippery term, suggesting as it does a phenomenon separate from, albeit all-encompassing of, the individual self. Ecocritics have come to recognize that the individual is a constitutive part of his/her environments (physical, psychological, social) and that failure to recognize these intimate connections is what brings about the various environmental crises we currently face.

Discovering “the prevalence of environmental references in Joyce’s work,” Fiona Becket addresses one aspect of the environmental conundrum in “James Joyce, Climate Change and the Threat to Our ‘Natural Substance.’” Focusing on anthropogenic climate change—the global warming effect of unbridled human polluting practices—Becket argues that “climate change shares some of the characteristics of the commodity.” She invites an ecocritical appreciation of Marx, who recognized the “interrelations between nature and human nature [and refused any] polarizing distinctions between them.” Inviting comparisons between Joyce’s works and those of contemporaries such as John Cowper Powys, Becket concludes that in “Circe” and elsewhere Joyce exposes...