Joyce's Revenge: History Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (review)

In Joyce's Revenge: History Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses, Andrew Gibson has written a book to be mined in decades to come for its unique historical insight, its extraordinary attention to detail, and its powerful theoretical grasp. Joyce's Revenge is the kind of rare book one compulsively recommends to students and friends. The text is rich in both specificity and perception, revealing years of intensive study, original research, and imagination. Gibson has an acute eye for the minute, quotidian details through which Joyce makes his most striking social commentary.

Joyce's Revenge investigates the political history available in Joyce's Ulysses. While this approach is found in the work of a number of other scholars (Gibson cites Vincent Cheng, Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, Luke Gibbons, and Emer Nolan among others), it is a relatively recent alternative to the scholarly tradition Ezra Pound initiated when he sought to place Joyce in an international arena of writing unconcerned with the petty issues of nation and politics. Gibson's study provides an invaluable alternative to that convention: carefully researched to provide the kind of specific historical detail that changes a reader's perception of narrative events, it is also framed with a theoretical acumen with which readers of his earlier books will be familiar.

Joyce composed Ulysses during the period in which the two primary public discourses derived, on the one hand, from the British Imperial and closely allied Anglo-Irish Unionist perspectives and, on the other hand, from the oppositional Irish Nationalist view. While Joyce's immediate political sympathies were often with the Nationalists, his cultural tastes and moral vision made him open to the various achievements of the British. Navigating this Scylla and Charybdis inspired the wily styles that make up Ulysses, allowing Joyce to "steer a delicate course between a range of political positions that are finally unpalatable as wholes. In doing so, he produces a complex, ironic composite politics of his own" (56).

Gibson recognizes the Irish bull as a strong influence on the text's negotiated political rhetoric. The bull, the least glamorous of Irish cultural genres, is a comical contradiction or lapse in logical consistency which Gibson argues can "function combatively, as retaliation or defiance" (6). The bulls "momentarily reverse the logic of conquests" (7). Joyce's fascinating lecture on Daniel Defoe, for example, borrows from the rhetoric of the bull by praising Defoe as the writer with whom a truly English literary tradition begins to blossom. But that very tradition, Joyce argues finally, lacks poetry because Defoe's narrative is inseparable from the British imperial drive. This seeming contradiction in his argument allows him both to appreciate Defoe's pioneering novel and to criticize the politics that enabled that literary exploration.

In Gibson's succinct words, then, "in Ulysses, Joyce works towards a liberation from the colonial power and its culture. He also takes his revenge on them. There is a will to freedom in Ulysses, and a will to justice, but also a recognition that the two do not necessarily coincide. Joyce's revenge gets much of its form from the novel's concern with Irish culture as shaped and determined by English cultural nationalism" (13). Ulysses' styles perform a revenge on British colonization, but it is a subtle revenge at odds with the more obvious Irish nationalist alternatives then available.

It would be impossible to replicate here the detail and intricacy with which Gibson discusses the historical play of style against political context. I will focus, therefore on one of the many remarkable chapters. "Waking Up in Ireland: 'Nausicaa'" draws attention to periodic publications, such as The Lady's Own Novelette, The Princess's Novelettes, Pearson's Weekly, and Lady's Pictorial, that were marketed to women at the turn of the century and among the likely reading material (some are explicitly named) of Gerty MacDowell. Gibson considers both the extent to which these periodicals influenced their readers' practices and the...