Joyce's Non-Fiction Writings: "Outside His Jurisfiction" ed. by Katherine Ebury and James Alexander Fraser (review)

In a field as well populated as Joyce studies, it can feel futile for a critic—especially one early in a career—to aspire to say something genuinely novel. In the absence of fresh archival material, the long-awaited new volume(s) of letters, and a more cooperative Estate, the prospect of offering anything beyond a fresh lick of paint on a few well-worn themes or a presentist affirmation of a modish political or cultural concern is daunting, to say the least. As a colleague rather bluntly put it to me recently, "does the world really need another volume of James Joyce and …?"

It is reassuring, then, to say that Joyce's Non-Fiction Writings: "Outside His Jurisfiction" shows that such decadent prognostications over the fate of Joyce studies are greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the most enlivening and productive aspect of Katherine Ebury and James Alexander Fraser's refreshing and informative volume is the renewed sense it offers scholars of the breadth of the Joycean corpus. As essay after essay attests, Joyce was not, as received wisdom would have him, simply the author of four classics of modernist prose, several volumes of questionable verse, and a pseudo-Ibsenite play; he was a journalist, a travel writer, a political commentator, a reformer, a historian, a critic, an aesthetic theorist, and a self-promoter. Whatever his relative success in each of these vocations, Joyce's Non-Fiction Writings argues, they must inform our sense of Joyce's career and his body of work. In stating this case, the volume deftly navigates the Scylla of balkanization and the Charybdis of teleology, bringing Joyce's early journalism, criticism, and commentary into conversation with his better-known work without reducing them to the status of mere juvenilia or draft material for the masterpieces that followed.

The text most consistently illuminated in the process is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.¹ The novel's avant-textes ("A Portrait of the Artist" and Stephen Hero²) have been much discussed but seldom read on their own terms. Terence Killeen attempts to remedy this by restoring to readers an uncluttered sense of the provocative tone, experimental form, and revolutionary politics of the 1904 "A Portrait" essay. Situating the essay in the modernist tradition of the manifesto, Killeen proceeds to demonstrate the ways in which "A Portrait"'s radical (albeit somewhat opaque) political agenda inscribes itself in the lexicon of its novelistic namesake.

More provocatively, Hans Walter Gabler argues that, in its straightforward efforts to narrate "the real-world empiric" (56), the surviving fragment of Stephen Hero constitutes not an abandoned draft of a novel but a piece of life writing that is "in essence non-fictional" (56). Gabler contends that Joyce apprehended all sensory and experiential data "in reading mode" (60), processing it as a form of text. By comparing the ways in which such "perception texts" are transcribed and reformulated as epiphanies, in Stephen Hero and in A Portrait, Gabler offers a sense of how Joyce achieved the "transubstantiation" of transcribed experience into "self-referential literary composition" (60, 65).

While Gabler's process-oriented approach yields rich insights into Joyce's working methods, the generic and contextual ramifications of his recategorization of Stephen Hero are left tantalizingly undeveloped and invite further critical interrogation. It is intriguing to speculate about what a more historically grounded study—one that situated Stephen Hero (and, indeed, A Portrait itself) in relation to the broader terrain of turn-of-the-century Irish life-writing—and other examples of what Ronan Crowley has dubbed the "Revival roman-à-clef" might reveal about the young Joyce's cultural and aesthetic politics.³

These emerging critical and political investments are traced in essays by Emer Nolan and John McCourt. While perhaps more useful as a primer for the uninitiated, Nolan's "James Joyce as Cultural Critic" (111-25) offers a persuasive portrait...