Simply Joyce by Margot Norris (review)

We have long known how indebted we are to Margot Norris’s studies of James Joyce. She has increased our indebtedness by writing more books about Joyce in her retirement than most Joyceans in their careers. In Simply Joyce, the debt is especially owed by nonJoyceans, non-literary-specialists—the “virgin” readers she addressed in her previous book, Virgin and Veteran Readings of “Ulysses.”¹ But “veteran” readers will profit from Simply Joyce too, as this veteran can testify. The series in which the volume appears advertises itself as offering “brief but authoritative introductions to the world’s most influential people”—from Simply Austen to Simply Woolf, and along the way, for example, Simply Chaplin, Simply Freud, Simply Hegel, Simply Heidegger (honest), and even Simply Wittgenstein (ix, xi).

I cannot vouch for all those other volumes, but here “simply” does not in any way denote “simplify.” Norris’s aim is not to put “aside the remarkable complexity that makes his themes and language so aesthetically and intellectually rich, but to make his unique work accessible” (xiii). And she does mean “unique”: one of the chief ways she accomplishes her aim is through her sheer passion for Joyce’s “virtually unprecedented literary universe” (xix).

Much of Norris’s emphasis throughout is, inevitably, on Joyce’s language and literary style (or styles). There are full chapters on Dubliners, A Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, but first she pays brief attention in a preface to the epiphanies; the poems (and how their lyricism looks forward to important elements in Ulysses and the Wake); and Exiles (and how its portrayals prefigure the complex relationships among Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Blazes Boylan). A short introduction of eight pages is on Joyce’s “Life and Career.”

The chapter on Dubliners opens with a reminder about the concept of epiphany and its centrality to an understanding of the technique of each story. Norris then treats all the stories in sequence. For each, she presents possible interpretations—some potentially controversial—without pushing them further than she can or should go. In regard to the first story, “The Sisters,” for example, she points to “various innuendoes” that “suggest that the priest may have molested the boy in some way” but uses them primarily to show that the reader must confront “a dilemma of moral judgment, trying to determine how to feel about the relationship as the narration represents it” (10-11).

Norris is especially good at bringing out the connections throughout the volume, and especially between juxtaposed stories, so that, “[p]laced next to Eveline Hill’s story, Jimmy Doyle’s enlarges the diversity of Dubliners by widening the broader scope of social and economic class, without losing sight of the challenges and difficulties that can afflict the city’s young people at critical moments in their lives, whatever their situations” (16). In Joyce’s next story, “Two Gallants,” “[o]nce again, money will be in the background and yet at the center of a story at the same time,” even as “the characters of Corley and Lenehan belong to the opposite end of the social and economic spectrum from the world of Jimmy Doyle” (16). And, later, she shows that “a closer look reveals that,” with “Ivy Day,” “A Mother,” and “Grace,” “the theme buried under the actions and discussions is once again money” (25).

Norris stresses that “[t]he lives of Dubliners are complicated, and so are the moral judgments confronting” the book’s readers, and that Joyce—as in “The Boarding House”—frequently presents “a challenge to the reader, and this challenge is often ethical, forcing the reader to figure out how to arrive at a fair judgment of the rights and wrongs of a complicated social situation” (18). Similarly, at the end of “Counterparts,” “we are obliged to both judge and question our judgment, to feel sympathy and disgust simultaneously for the same individual, while conceding that unless we have endured similar experiences, we should perhaps not feel entitled to judge—all the while knowing that we must...