James Joyce's America by Brian Fox (review)

The Irish, it seems, enjoy all the privileges. James Joyce laced his books with little in-jokes that only a native gets on a first read. Who is the droll poet anyway, and why is he wearing the borrowed cloak of a Milesian?¹ What is a Milesian for that matter? The ineluctable solidity of Irish fact has given folks like Enda Duffy, Emer Nolan, Anne Fogarty, and others a leg up on the likes of me.² It has taken a lifetime of study and compensatory travel for me to catch up to what every decent Irish scholar knows by the time she takes her Leaving Cert.³ American readers of the JJQ will swell a bit when they learn that Brian Fox comes just shy of asserting that Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake not for Irish, but for those American readers (155). This particular point depends upon the Boston Letter in I.5, which, following Mikio Fuse, Fox reads as a synecdoche for the whole Wake.⁴ "[T]he production and consumption of Joyce's final work," Fox reasons, "is signaled in the text to be markedly connected to America" (155).

The consumption of Finnegans Wake is connected to America. Does that connection go so far as to privilege American readers? Fox is a bit equivocal. What Fox proves explicitly—and he does so convincingly—is that the United States was a lot more important to Joyce than any of us has admitted. That goes equally for American critics who (presumably) might take it as a point of pride to exaggerate rather than diminish the importance of their own nation. Fox takes up that psychological anomaly in his final pages. Americans adopted Joyce after World War II, and those first manufacturers in what Europeans pejoratively labeled the American "Joyce Industry," men (they were almost all men) like Richard Ellmann and Hugh Kenner, were eager to "rescue the humanist content of European modernism after the Holocaust" (199).⁵ The idea is that the "indifference" American critics displayed towards "significant facets of American history and culture that Joyce's writing touches upon" was necessitated by the Cold War agenda of American universities and then by habit (199). Americans just did not notice all the references, and when they did perceive a few of them they did not think the aggregate amounted to very much.

No one reading this book will ever think so again. The accumulation of detail—the sheer volume of it—explodes any notion that Joyce was slightly amused and slightly annoyed by America. The first purpose of Fox's book is to persuade us that "America is more important in Joyce's writing than has been acknowledged" (200). In this sense, he is completely persuasive and has achieved what few critics ever do. Henceforth anyone discussing how America might figure in Joyce's imagination will have to read and respond to this book.

So far as foundations go, we could hardly have asked for better. Fox insists that his book "does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of every last allusion to America in Joyce's works" (200). Fair enough. James Joyce's America is not meant to be used as a reference, like one might employ Weldon Thornton's Allusions in "Ulysses": An Annotated List.⁶ Thornton's index, which contains thirty-one pages of double-columned citations, notes but one allusion to America and none to the United States. New York, Boston, Mississippi—none of them appear, which seems to confirm the curious inability of American critics to hear Joyce when he talks about America. Not surprisingly, Thornton does not appear in Fox's index. Fox did not get much help in compiling material for his study. I imagine he must have spent years assembling his own lists. He does not provide the list, but he has done his homework, and the details that make it into the volume range far more widely than one would imagine. But if compilation is not...