JOYCE STUDIES: ADRIAN HARDIMANreviews Dublin James Joyce Journal (No. 1)Edited by Luca Crispi and Anne Fogarty, UCD Joyce Research Centre with National Library of Ireland, 97pp, €10
THIS JOURNAL, a new venue for Joycean criticism, especially (at least in this edition) “by Irish or Dublin-based scholars”, has been awaited for decades. It is a product of the new James Joyce Research Centre at UCD.
Most UCD graduates are aware of the tidal wave of change that has swept over the Belfield-based university under the presidency of Hugh Brady, which rightly or wrongly is thought to have favoured mainly the scientific and business schools. But the Joyce Research Centre is a coup for the humanities, albeit one so long overdue that many wondered if UCD positively wished that the reputation and unique name recognition of its most famous graduate would be appropriated by some other institution.
It is, after all, notorious that the leading journal of Joyce studies is published in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Joyce is a writer whose work, especially Ulysses, is famously rooted in time and place. From Dubliners to Finnegans Wake the place is Dublin. It is appropriate, therefore, that the main focus in this journal is on Dublin and Dubliners, the sources of all the material and historical culture expressed in Joyce’s works.
The first offering is Christine O’Neill’s biographical essay on Niall Montgomery (1915-1987), one of Joyce’s early Irish champions. An architect by profession, Montgomery was detached enough to condemn Joyce’s “architectural insensibility” and his omission of “all the visual elegance” from the city he portrayed. This is an interesting and informative piece which whets the appetite for the same author’s forthcoming edition of Montgomery’s unpublished essays.
There follows a remarkable essay, by Stephanie Rains on ‘Joyce, Araby and the Historical Araby Bazaar, 1894’. Aptly illustrated with contemporary photographs, this well written and scholarly essay could easily stand alone as a valuable study in Dublin social history even without the Joyce connection. As it is, Rains’s study of the institution of the late-19th-century charitable bazaar provides immediate background to the “Araby” story in Dubliners and an invaluable general background to the commodity and consumer culture of Joyce’s time.
Another Dubliners story, After the Race, is the subject of an essay by Prof Cóilín Owens. The race is the Gordon Bennett Cup (motor) race, held in Dublin in 1903. The essay ‘The Charity of its Silence: After the Race and the Emmet Centenary’ views the story as a brilliant fictionalisation of advanced nationalist “characterisation of the Race as a device to camouflage the source of Irish paralysis”. I thought at first that this was an overly simple piece of political special pleading but Owens makes a very strong case indeed based on the route of the race in West Dublin and on an improbable affinity between Emmet’s famous speech and the protagonist Jimmy Doyle’s drunken after-dinner meanderings. The strength of Owens’s feelings lead him into the occasional rhetorical flourish as when he denounces “caddish automobilists”.
Anne Fogarty, Professor of Joyce Studies at UCD, contributes an important study of ‘Stone Hopes: Statues and the Politics of Longing in Joyce’s Work’. The significance of statues both in Portrait and in Ulysses cannot be overlooked. Fogarty’s lucid and well researched treatment of the statues themselves, and of the late-19th-century / early-20th-century, mainly Nationalist statue-erecting craze and the disputes it gave rise to, illustrated by the spot (at the top of Grafton Street) “where Wolfe Tone’s statue is not”, is very striking. But perhaps a non-academic reader may question the utility of academy-speak such as “dissecting and reflecting on the ideological determinants and psychic sub-strata underlying everyday existence”. No-one but an academic writes like that: Joyce certainly didn’t. Prof Fogarty’s brilliant and original piece doesn’t need so peculiar an introduction. Joyce’s jibes at ideology and at “the professors” are too well known to be repeated here, but it is important that no more be done to turn the ordinary reader off Joyce by needless obscurity in critical writing.
Two of the remaining pieces are not without obscurity either: Malcolm Sen on Joyce’s Orientalism and Fintan O’Toole’s ‘“I Suppose They’re Getting Up in China Now”: Joyce, the City, and Globalisation’. The prominence of references to China in what is basically an essay on globalisation in Joyce is perhaps accounted for by the fact that the essay is based on a paper delivered in China. But O’Toole misses, or thinks it better to omit, one of the oddest Chinese references in Ulysses. In Oxen of the Sun the medical students in Holles Street Hospital discuss “the agnathia of certain chinless Chinamen (cited by Mr. Candidate Mulligan) in consequence of a defective reunion of the maxillary knobs along the medial line so that (as he said) one ear could hear what the other spoke . . .”
While O’Toole correctly asserts that the pace of global connections was rapid even in Joyce’s time, he omits the most striking example of this in Ulysses: General Bobrikoff, the Czar’s Governor of Finland, was murdered in Helsinki about 9am on June 16th, 1904: the men assembled in Myles Crawford’s Dublin office talk of the event before noon on the same day. But O’Toole’s contention in this essay that Joyce chose “Dublin over Ireland” is a stimulating one.
Orientalism is of course a staple of contemporary criticism. It is well illustrated in Malcolm Sen’s difficult piece. He concludes that Joyce may have tried to deconstruct the images and symbols of the orient but that “his narrative seems to mimic the very modes of signification of orientalism”. Quite.
Terence Killeen’s essay on ‘The case of Alfred H Hunter’ is only four pages long but it is the piece I shall longest remember in this journal. Hunter is much touted in early works on Joyce as an inspiration for Bloom: these views are summarised and reviewed here. Killeen goes on to rubbish the possibility that Hunter rescued Joyce from an assault in Dublin in 1904 by detailed and convincing research, his own and others’, while offering an assessment of Hunter’s actual significance for the character of Bloom. This is an elegant piece, clear and utterly devoid of jargon. It has something new to say and says it pithily.
This journal will commend itself to all readers of James Joyce, amateur or professional. It is co-edited with Professor Fogarty by Dr Luca Crispi, also of UCD, the most eminent international Joyce scholar based in Ireland. UCD and the National Library of Ireland can be proud of their work.
- Adrian Hardiman, a judge of the Supreme Court, is the author of a recent paper on legal themes in Joyce