James Joyce: A Literary Companion by James F. Broderick (review)

In this slim volume, James F. Broderick opens up the writings of James Joyce to a new generation of readers, clearing a path through what he deems the overcomplicated glut of critical commentary generated by scholars of the Irish modernist. Broderick, an Assistant Professor of Journalism and English and the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction, has not previously published on Joyce. He therefore approaches Joycean scholarship as a bemused outsider, referring warily to the obsessive and sometimes off-putting "zeal" of "academic dons" who "pore over every scrap of Joyceana" (3, 5). With his accessible, sometimes humorously colloquial language, streamlined plot outlines, and an undeniably contagious enthusiasm for Joyce, Broderick offers himself as a lively traveling companion for novice readers, deftly navigating the broad contours of the Joycean oeuvre. Broderick's guide is in no way comprehensive, nor does he make such claims. The book is under two hundred pages, and its formal discussion of Joyce's major works, including Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as the epic Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is compressed to under one hundred full pages. After a brief introduction, Broderick progresses to a biographical timeline of the Irish writer, synopses of the major works, a rather random collection of selected Joycean topics in his "A-Z Literary Companion," an "Appendix A" which includes an annotated bibliography of an admittedly idiosyncratic selection of eighteen works of Joycean scholarship, and an "Appendix B" which summarizes six filmic interpretations of Joyce's writing.

In his "Introduction" (3-8), Broderick announces that the aim of his book is to "provide something of value to everyone interested in Joyce—no matter the degree of familiarity—offering an overview of Joyce's life and works helpful to those encountering Joyce for the first time as well as information and interpretations for those readers more conversant with this enigmatic Irishman" (1). The audience for Broderick's text, however, is primarily the lay reader and undergraduate. Broderick does indeed provide "something of interest" with his straightforward summaries interwoven with some useful biographical details and snippets of historical context. But, overall, the guide offers very little interpretive commentary, too often focusing on the raw scaffolding of plot and structure, while frequently smoothing over the quintessentially Joycean complexities and ambiguities of language and meaning. In his introductory blurb on Ulysses, Broderick acknowledges that "I have generally tried to avoid treading over interpretive ground—that's a pleasure for every individual reader" (56). Yet this sidestepping of exegesis in deference to the rather flattening chronicling of plot has its limitations, especially when such concerns recede to the background in Joyce's later works.

In the introductory paragraphs to Broderick's chapter on Dubliners, the standard frameworks for the short stories are provided. The overarching theme of paralysis is usefully, if somewhat simplistically, fleshed out. Joyce's deployment of the stages of life as an organizing principle for the collection is described (with stories arranged progressively, narrated from the perspective of childhood through adolescence and maturity and then to "public life"), and the tumultuous publication history of the works is duly noted. Broderick also includes a discussion of Joyce's concept of the secularized epiphany that caps many of the tales' most climactic moments, where a character experiences a transformative moment of self-revelation or unintentional self-exposure. Broderick writes that "the stories of Dubliners are filled with epiphanies, moments of stark and bitter realization among the characters that sometimes strike with the force of a hammer blow" (14). Approaches that center the interpretive task around deterministic "epiphany hunting" are certainly passé.¹ Nevertheless, the epiphanies undergird much of the deep architecture of Joyce's writing, especially in Dubliners, Stephen Hero, and A Portrait, and remain crucial to an understanding of the character's self-awareness or lack thereof. In his analyses of the short stories, Broderick's identification of the epiphanic moment is often...