James Joyce and After: Writer and Time ed. by Katarzyna Bazarnik and Bożena Kucała (review)

When James Joyce decided to expose Leopold Bloom’s consciousness—presented as what the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) called the “endless flow” and “fluid mass of our whole psychical existence”¹—to the “prize titbit: Matcham’s Masterstroke. Written by Mr Philip Beaufoy” (U 4.502-03), he would hardly have thought that this rather random conjunction between a Bergsonian flow of internal duration and the ripples that Beaufoy’s text caused in it had an unlikely factual parallel. As John Simpson has recently discovered, the French philosopher and Nobel-prize-winning author of L’évolution créatrice was, in fact, a brother of the English writer Philip Beaufoy (1871-1947), prize-winning author of several short stories for the popular magazine Tit-Bits, and model for the fictional Mr. Philip Beaufoy of “Playgoers’ Club, London” (U 4.503).² While the biographic link between the French philosopher and the English author was revealed too late to be examined in James Joyce and After, the comic passage in “Calypso” about Bloom’s use of the periodical still provides a convenient constellation for many of the themes discussed in Katarzyna Bazarnik and Bożena Kucała’s volume (U 4.500-37). These include disjunctions between story time and narrative time; shifts between objective time and subjective time and between the present, the future, and the past; literary exploitations of the author’s past (where Joyce’s own former submission to Tit-Bits is recycled as part of Matcham’s Masterstroke); and the interconnectedness of space and time and of writing and reading (Beaufoy’s writing time, transformed into the textual space of the story, generates as well as measures Bloom’s reading time).

Although there have been numerous studies focusing on Joyce’s narrative techniques, and several on his treatment of time, critical work on Joyce and temporality—a perspective that seems as daunting as it is fundamental—has by no means been exhaustive.³ It is one of the strengths of the current volume that the recurrence of specific temporal concepts and phenomena such as the ones mentioned above creates a mesh of connections between the fifteen research articles and helps to unify the collection.

The first of nine Joycean studies in the collection, Laurent Milesi’s “FUTURUS/FUTUTUS: Future Perfect and Preterition in Finnegans Wake,” is a stimulating and wide-ranging text. Extending his previous arguments on the Wake’s sexual grammar and its integration of contemporary discourses on time (such as those of Bergson or Wyndham Lewis),⁴ Milesi uses close readings, as well as psychoanalytic and meta-psychoanalytic insights, to investigate “syntactically dense and puzzlingly non-linear configurations [of] the three major tenses that shape the course of human action,” ultimately identifying a “shift from an original confidence in the power of interpreting, hence recovering, a ‘lost’ past Urszene to the traumatic reinscriptions of the ceaseless failures of its ‘intrepider[s]’ (FW 467.05)” (8, 14).

In a somewhat Orphic text entitled “Finnegans Wake, Featuring Time,” the Polish Wake translator Krzysztof Bartnicki challenges the quasi-divine status of the book and its author and stresses the freedom of readers to interpret the Wake in ways that “Joyce himself might have never intended” (19). While Bartnicki’s own numerological observations on the standard pagination of Joyce’s text may indeed seem like illustrations of this category, his points about the basic linguistic interconnectedness of temporal and spatial expressions and the spatial nature of books are well worth keeping in mind.

Izabela Curyłło-Klag’s “‘So Eminent a Spacialist’ Versus ‘The Time-Mind’: Lewis, Joyce, and the Modernist Debate about Time and Space” creates a smooth transition from Wakean studies to Ulyssean ones by tracing the development of the Joyce-Lewis relationship in the years between the two books. Curyłło-Klag complements existing literature by focusing on an array...