Joycean Legacies ed. by Martha C. Carpentier (review)

In her introduction to Joycean Legacies, Martha C. Carpentier catalogs numerous scholarly explorations of influences on James Joyce’s writing. Arguing that the approach has become quite common, she describes how this new collection of essays aims to fill in a gap in scholarship; while Joyce’s literary inspirations have been well documented, she argues, only a small number of scholars have investigated the ways Joyce himself influenced his literary descendants. Joycean Legacies collects twelve essays that each focus on a different author’s work and show how it reflects Joyce’s influence. The essays range from Irish authors, such as Kate O’Brien and Brendan Behan, to British writers, such as George Orwell and J. R. R. Tolkien, to authors farther afield, such as Derek Walcott and Sadeq Hedayat. The collection shines most when it illuminates unknown connections or focuses on interpreting the implications of an influence; most of the essays shed new light on Joyce and each author, while some succeed better at going beyond a mere comparison between the two writers. Overall, the book is a welcome addition to Joycean scholarship that may start a trend of exploring in more detail how Joyce’s influence echoes in the works of others.

Joyce’s large literary shadow has definitely been something that many contemporary authors have noted, whether positively or negatively. In his foreword to the collection, Derek Attridge cites several examples of authors responding to Joyce, including Eimear McBride’s inspiration from Ulysses reflected in her book A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing: “‘I started reading the book, got off at Liverpool Street, and just thought: that’s it. Everything I have written before is rubbish, and today is the beginning of something else” (vii).¹ On the other hand, he gives examples of authors who resent Joyce’s impact on literature, such as Roddy Doyle, who infamously quipped that “‘Ulysses could have done with a good editor’” (ix).² After discussing Joyce’s ineluctability, Attridge outlines four categories of responses to Joyce and his work: “the assertion, the nod, the echo, and the counter-signature” (ix). The “assertion” is a writer’s “explicit comment, outside the work of literature on Joyce and Joyce’s legacy” (ix). The “nod occurs when, in fiction, a writer makes an overt acknowledgement of Joyce or Joyce’s writings in passing” (x). The “echo” happens when “the work in question establishes a link with the precursor through some type of similarity” (xi). And “[t]he literary work that countersigns another work according to this [Derridean] model has to be more, then, than a nod to it or an echo of it. It must in some way take on board what is singular about the work it countersigns, and re-imagine what that singularity could become in different hands and in a new context” (xiv). The essay collection as a whole explores these four categories; Carpentier describes the overall approach in her introduction:

Each essay begins with a discussion of … the assertion: the writer’s explicit positioning of him- or herself in relation to the professed Joycean legacy. Then contributors proceed to analyze those moments in the creative work in which mere mimicry, parody, or allusion becomes conjoined with original expression to create a new form; that is, to explicate the varying degrees of nod, echo, and counter-signature.

(3)

The essays are most successful when they follow this rubric, though some of them only flirt with interpreting the latter categories and remain more focused on comparing the authors’ works or on the initial “assertion.”

I will concentrate for the rest of this review on the essays that succeed the most in illuminating something new about both authors and their works. The collection begins with an insightful essay by Elizabeth Foley O’Connor on Kate O’Brien in which O’Connor traces Joyce’s influence on O’Brien’s portrayal of women and their sexuality, arguing that O’Brien “was one of the first to speak out against the repression and powerlessness...