LITERARY CRITICISM: TERENCE KILLEEN reviews 'Ulysses' in Focus: Genetic, Textual, and Personal ViewsBy Michael Groden University Press of Florida, 245pp. $ 69.95
MICHAEL GRODEN'S 'Ulysses' in Progressof 1977 was a pioneering exploration of the writing of James Joyce's novel: the actual process of its composition and the various changes and choices that Joyce made along the way. Thus, Groden's book was not just a study of Ulyssesbut was also an important stage in the growing awareness that literary texts did not spring fully armed from the brows of their creators but were the outcome – sometimes the tentative and provisional outcome – of a process of composition that could take many twists and turns. Later contributions widened the scope of these studies to include the input of publishers, typists, typesetters, proofreaders etc.
As the importance of this work was further realised, it began to change the way Ulysses was read and understood. Instead of being a static, unchanging verbal icon, Ulysses, and many other literary texts, became an evolving, self-altering process going "from monument to mobile", as Groden puts it in this book, in a phrase that cannot be bettered.
So textual scholarship, which had once seemed terminally boring, began to assume a weight and a significance that nearly compelled at least some engagement.
'Ulysses' in Focusin some ways takes up the subsequent story. The book is a number of things, but it is on one level a sort of history of the textual developments that followed the earlier study. It details such exciting events as the publication of the massive James Joyce Archivebetween 1977 and 1979, and, more recently, the National Library's acquisition of Joyce manuscripts in 2002. Groden, Distinguished Professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, was centrally involved in both events and the latter greatly strengthened his ties to this country.
The book also deals with the major textual controversy of the last 35 years over Hans Walter Gabler's edition of Ulyssesin 1984. This was obviously a difficult experience for Groden, who was associated with the edition but had not made the actual decisions it contained.
The essay in this volume, " The James Joyce Archiveand Hans Walter Gabler's edition of Ulysses" casts a somewhat weary eye back over these matters and takes a more balanced and nuanced approach than was possible in the heat of battle.
But 'Ulysses' in Focusis not just about these textual matters. One name for the kind of thing Groden does is "genetic criticism", meaning that it deals with the genesis and growth of a text from its original (often impossible to trace) impulse.
In this book, Groden literalises this metaphor, and restores it to its more primary sense of a person's or an organism's growth and development. He explores the reasons why this particular novel, Ulyssesby James Joyce, matters so much more to him than any other literary work. This leads him into a fairly personal account of his own background and circumstances – raised in a working class Jewish family in Buffalo, upstate New York – and how Joyce's novel opened up new and rewarding perspectives on what family life, and a person's life, could be.
Nor does the self-exploration stop there. In an afterword Groden, who is married to the poet Molly Peacock, discusses what it is like to have what might have been called his private life exposed in a fairly public way, and again relates this to issues of privacy and openness in Ulysses.
There is more in that vein, including frightening brushes with cancer and years of psychotherapy. While this may all seem very revealing, it is arguable that we actually learn more about Groden the person through the medium of his style, of his writing.
First, there is the meticulous, unobtrusive scholarship: he makes it seem very natural that every claim is backed up by five or six references, though of course it is not natural at all.
Then there is the wry, self-deprecating, understated humour, which plays throughout the work. At times, as in his account of a demented, Nabokovian quest for a single footnote, it becomes the dominant note.
There is also, finally, a very engaging honesty, a willingness, for instance, to admit to previous errors. As with the scholarship, this is something one might imagine to be natural, but experience has shown it is anything but.
Ultimately, this book seems to me to be about biography, taking the word in a very wide sense: the biography of the author, the "biography" of a book called Ulyssesand of the various, manifold effects that this book has had, the biography, also, of that book's author, since Groden carries the idea of genetic criticism of a work in progress into Joyce's own life.
He considers, for instance, whether the things that happened to Joyce while he was writing the book, the events in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, (especially in Zurich) influenced the writing of the novel more strongly than had previously been suspected.
This runs counter to the notion that the only important things that happened to Joyce happened before he left Ireland. What Groden is doing here is the biographical equivalent of his earlier textual work; instead of Ulyssesin progress this is Joyce in progress.
As a book then, this volume, despite its academic origins and credentials, goes far beyond the normal academic paradigm. Among other things, it shows that even textual scholars can have a life – and a very interesting one at that.
TERENCE KILLEENis research scholar at the James Joyce Centre, Dublin
