- Preface
This Joyce Studies Annual volume begins with a literary detective mystery as Hans Walter Gabler investigates the strange temporal hiatus in Chapter V of A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. What transpires, Gabler asks, between the time Stephen enters the National Library on a March afternoon and the moment he leaves the building a few hours later? Rather than taking the reader inside the Library, Joyce inserts Stephen's villanelle of the temptress, achronologically, between these narrative "bridge-heads." Using genetic documents to trace the compositional history of the elided scene, Gabler theorizes that what "could have happened" inside the Library in A Portrait is disclosed in the same location in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses on another fictional day: Stephen's performance of his Hamlet theory. Gabler notes that Joyce's final composition of A Portrait in Trieste in late 1912 and early 1913 coincided with his preparation of twelve public lectures on Shakespeare, and he argues that these works (now lost) formulated the aesthetic theory that Stephen was originally meant to advance in A Portrait, but which he presents only later in the ninth chapter of Ulysses. Gabler finds support for this instance of a "material vestige overflowing from the Portrait workshop" in Joyce's offer of a pre-existing version of his "Hamlet chapter" to Ezra Pound in spring 1917. This "pre-publication promise" of the novel-in-progress came at a time when the opening chapters of Ulysses were still incomplete. Instead of incorporating this salvaged material from Portrait into the Telemachiad, as he originally planned, Joyce decided to move the Library lecture to "the central position" in the novel's structural design in order to make Stephen "his spokesman" for "expounding the artistic credo" of Ulysses. Gabler notes that this "modernist manifesto" of literary creation, which so disarms the Dublin literati, could not have been expressed by the immature Stephen of A Portrait whose Aristotelian and Thomistic conception of art clashed with Joyce's [End Page ix] own more advanced aesthetics, inspired by "the sirens song of Shakespeare." Thus, Gabler demonstrates, the unused material from A Portrait paved the way for the avant-garde course that Joyce charts in the Library in "Scylla and Charybdis" and steers throughout the second half of his experimental odyssey.
Stephen's lecture is also the focus of Jason Ciaccio's article, which explores the Library scene through the lens of Walter Benjamin's concept of "Romantic irony." In his dissertation, Benjamin argues that this particular effect arises not from a narrative's self-referentiality but rather from dialectical relations among its diverse formal elements. Ciaccio notes that "Scylla and Charybdis," a hybrid chapter combining fiction and literary criticism, is "heavily informed" by a juxtaposition of styles, voices, and shifting points of view that create a "tension" between "showing and telling," between drama and narrative. This destabilization of form is entirely appropriate in a chapter built around Stephen's interpretive act, Ciaccio argues, because, for Benjamin, irony and criticism are closely related: They share a "destructive element." Both reflect "incompletion and incommensurability," and both permit "further negation" because they "can never finish the last word" on their subjects. Buck Mulligan, whose entrance interrupts Stephen's interpretive performance, functions as an exponent of this disruptive irony: His playful "insults, blasphemies, and profanities" echo Stephen's "internal skepticism" about the truth of his reading of Shakespeare and reflect the chapter's formal disjunctions of style and shifting "mimetic modalities." In mocking Stephen's paradoxical attempt to prove "the presence of Shakespeare in his plays through his absence," Mulligan highlights what Ciaccio regards as another dialectical opposition in the chapter, and one that undergirds the practice of criticism: the antipodes of irony and belief. Ciaccio notes that, for Stephen, the truth claims of literary interpretation "strongly resonate with belief as demanded in Catholicism." However, as a "post-lapsarian critic" who promptly renounces faith in his own Hamlet theory, Joyce's protagonist reveals that he is "a believer in neither domain." Thus, Ciaccio concludes, if the Library chapter, with its ironies of form and meta-referentiality, does not mock the entire "enterprise of literary...