Joyce’s Love Stories by Christopher DeVault. Surrey (review)

Christopher DeVault’s critical assessment of Joyce’s “love stories” makes an important contribution to Joyce and modernist studies. DeVault’s book draws on Martin Buber’s I-Thou concept and also relies on extensive, close textual analysis to provide a sustained investigation into the status of love in the “Joycean oeuvre’s amorous trajectory” (118).¹ DeVault does not shy away from any part of Joyce’s body of work, devoting two chapters to the love stories of Dubliners, three to Stephen’s amatory pursuits, one to Exiles, and three each to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Defining love in terms of Buber’s ethical approach to interpersonal, aesthetic, and political relations that emphasizes a dialogic self-to-self (as opposed to self-to-object) relational model based on compassion, solidarity, reciprocity, and equality, DeVault argues that Joyce effectively articulates a love ethic: “the true love of others over the narcissistic desire of the self” that also enables “a more dialogic form of socio-political interaction” (4). Though mobilizing Buber’s philosophies ahistorically yields somewhat flat, or capacious, categories of “otherness” and “body politic,” DeVault’s close analysis of those categories in each text convincingly demonstrates that Joyce’s ethic evolves over the course of his oeuvre. It peaks at the diegetic level with the personal and political openness to the other in Ulysses, and at the extradiegetic level in Finnegans Wake as the narrative style—Wakese—“challenges the facile constructions of self and other” and celebrates “difference and dialogue over the monologic narratives” (247).

In his analysis of “Joyce’s amorous spectrum” (127), DeVault takes Irish paralysis as a given and considers in each work the conflict between love and narcissism, through the negotiation of which Joyce advances the amorous potential of an open, loving approach. The first six chapters show the perils of narcissism, the “alienating forms of self-love that undermine [characters’] personal and political goals” (137), exemplified by the inability of certain Dubliners—Mr. Duffy, Gabriel Conroy, Stephen Dedalus, Robert Hand, and Richard Rowan—to love and support others, despite their encounters with amorous alternatives. Bloom, an “anomaly” in Joyce’s work, affirms his beloved, offering empathy as “an alternative to the bitter narcissism” and a resolute commitment to the personal and sociopolitical worlds of Ulysses, in effect, to Molly and to his fellow Dubliners (179, 156). Thus the Blooms’ marriage—despite the challenge of adultery in which Bloom and Molly share culpability—exemplifies Buber’s idea of “genuine dialogue,” characterized by “the reciprocal affirmation inherent” in their compassion and fundamental openness (159). At the same time, Bloom is “Joyce’s most productive political agent” because he models citizenship in terms of an “empathetic political advocacy” (173, 185). He assumes a bond between himself and others in everyday life that manifests as political parallax and “multivocality,” which collapses the “univocality of the nation” (183, 187). DeVault’s analysis of the Wake, which draws on bold assertions of a relatively clear set of love narratives, turns from the positive love ethic of Ulysses to explore the self-centered desires of another set of “the Joycean cast of self-lovers” (203): Issy, Shem, Shaun, and HCE—in all of their textual manifestations. ALP emerges as the only character in the Wake fully able to model self-sacrifice and openness to the other. DeVault is careful, however, to frame his Wake readings in terms of the dreamer’s difficult and changeable characterization and narrative style, arguing that the dream-text’s “polyglot storytelling medium” imagines and enables fundamental political change, an example of Buber’s “vital acknowledgement of many-faced otherness” that promotes “genuine dialogue within a body politic” (247, 235).

In introducing the book’s topic and methodology, DeVault rightly historicizes Joyce’s own position on the subject—his strong objections to nauseating sentimentality and the strictures of Catholic marriage—and even evaluates that position in terms of Joyce and Nora’s relationship, though at times the analysis moves fluidly between biography and...