Archival Joyce

BoingBoing links today to the Atlantic Monthly, who has entered the 21st century by making its digital archive available for free.

Here's Harry Levin's 1946 review of Joyce's collected works:

"Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things."

I had initially thought that I would be able to find HG Well's famous review of Portrait in the archives, but it turns out that that was in the New Republic, not The Atlantic Monthly. That review is now also available on line here. The Wells review is a much more interesting document because it captures the tides of modernism in the moment rather than upon its demise. Wells' comment that "Mr. Joyce has a cloacal obsession," is no doubt one of the pithiest lines in the critical literature on Joyce (as well as somehow prescient of the new academic interest in "excremental postcolonialism" [I swear I didn't make up that tag]). But the most famous part of this review is Wells' characterization of the Irish hatred of the British:

And a second thing of immense significance is the fact that everyone in this Dublin story, every human being, accepts as a matter of course, as a thing in nature like the sky and the sea, that the English are to be hated. There is no discrimination in that hatred, there is no gleam of recognition that a considerable number of Englishmen have displayed a very earnest disposition to put matters right with Ireland, there is an absolute absence of any idea of a discussed settlement, any notion of helping the slow-witted Englishman in his three-cornered puzzle between North and South. It is just hate, a cant cultivated to the pitch of monomania, an ungenerous violent direction of the mind. That is the political atmosphere in which Stephen Dedalus grows up, and in which his essentially responsive mind orients itself. I am afraid it is only too true an account of the atmosphere in which a number of brilliant young Irishmen have grown up. What is the good of pretending that the extreme Irish "patriot" is an equivalent and parallel of the English or American liberal? He is narrower and intenser than any English Tory. He will be the natural ally of the Tory in delaying British social and economic reconstruction after the war. He will play into the hands of the Tories by threatening an outbreak and providing the excuse for a militarist reaction in England. It is time the American observer faced the truth of that. No reason in that why England should not do justice to Ireland, but excellent reason for bearing in mind that these bright-green young people across the Channel are something quite different form the liberal English in training and tradition, and absolutely set against helping them. No single book has ever shown how different they are, as completely as this most memorable novel.

Joyce Industry

Gerry Canavan has a nice post up quoting a 1946 Atlantic Monthly review of James Joyce's major works, Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake:

Those who confuse a writer with his material find it all too easy to make a scapegoat out of Joyce. They make Proust responsible for the collapse of France because he prophesied it so acutely; and, because Joyce felt the contemporary need to create a conscience, they accuse him of lacking any sense of values. Of course it is he who should be accusing them. His work, though far from didactic, is full of moral implications; his example of aesthetic idealism, set by abnegation and artistry is a standing rebuke to facility and venality, callousness and obtuseness. Less peculiarly Joycean, and therefore even more usable in the long run, is his masterly control of social realism, which ingeniously springs the varied traps of Dublin and patiently suffers rebuffs with Mr. Bloom. The heroine of Stephen Hero, who has almost disappeared from the Portrait, says farewell after "an instant of all but union." By dwelling upon that interrupted nuance, that unconsummated moment, that unrealized possibility, Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things.

It seems to me that this post contradicts Gerry's approving citation of Stanley Fish's invective against the humanizing effects of education in the humanities. I think it's odd how Joyce is always held up as a paradigm of everything beautiful and great about everyday Life (even by post-humanist-minded professor-types), and yet asked to bear the weight of contemporary theory's sharp turn away from such saccharine notions of literature's ability to ennoble the soul. My personal feeling is that Joyce does the former much better than the latter, and perhaps the best argument against Fish is that the professional critics he cites as exemplars of literature's moral inefficacy are not average readers because they read with ill intent--to gain professional knowledge, as he says. But isn't that the hubris of the academy--to presume that everybody reads like professors, thinks (or should think) like professors, and that they have a monopoly on real truth? While I acknowledge my own indebtedness to Fish (he practically made the department in which I now study), I can't help but dismiss him as a curmudgeonly old coot whose own sense of intellectual heartburn discredits any and every pronouncement he makes about literature. That's not to say that I think we should indulge the kind of idealism of the above reviewer too deeply; everything depends on how we appropriate (or fail to appropriate) literary text--on how they are taught. But giving up on Joyce's ability to teach us something about how to live, about the intricate and mundane beauties of the everyday, of what Werner Herzog would call "ecstatic truth," is to relegate Joyce to the margins of the canon. And no matter how often a Fish attempts to discredit the ability of a Joyce to do this kind of work, Joyce continues to assert itself for just that purpose. And it is in this light, I think, that the 1946 review above seems not so antiquated as it does continually relevant.

Bloomsday foods

We're just days away from Bloomsday, and that means that this is the best (and only) time of year to see the culinary oddities from Ulysses making their appearance in the real world.

For example, at the Greenmarket in New York, you can get your hands on "Bloomsday cheese."
(It's not the food that just most readily to mind from the book, but Bloom does eat a cheese sandwich in "Lestrygonians.")

Here's a short article from 2002 (in pdf) of someone who ate a Bloomsday diet for two weeks, including Leopold Bloom's famous pork liver breakfast cooked in butter.

Some events worth seeing, if you find yourself in one of these cities:

Kansas City -- Bloomsday Books. They don't have any of the info for this year's festivities on line, but in years past they have done a multifaceted event with reading, performances, and lots of drinking.

New York -- The New York James Joyce Society has a celebration every year where they read the entirety of Ulysses. I think they get famous people to do it. Anyways, it's in Manhattan, and supposed to be a really fabulous time.

Austin, TX - The University of Austin is hosting this year's North American James Joyce Conference, which I attended a few years ago. What's nice about this kind of event is that it's an academic conference with the levity and wit of a night at the pub. (If anyone is going to this, I'd like a conference poster!)

Philadelphia -- This is another big celebration, like New York, with signing, reading, etc. It's held at the Rosenbach Museum, which houses one of the best manuscripts of Ulysses.

Erin

Kendra and I just got back from seeing The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a movie about the Irish war for independence and the subsequent civil war.



There are a number of things I really like about this movie.

First, this isn't a story that we as Americans often hear, and I'm glad that this movie will, at least in part, bring that to those who see it. But the story aside, the director does an excellent job veering away from triumphalism. It's one thing to show the way the Irish were brutalized by the British, but it's quite another to tell only that story. Ken Loach, the director, does a good job showing the perspective of the rank and file British soldiers, allowing the viewer to sympathizes with them as well as the Irish, while keeping the film centered squarely on the Irish cause. Further, this film does not end with independence, as an American film might. Rather, 1922 is just one plot point of a much broader interrogation of the way a good fight gets muddled. In the end, the conflict between the Irish Free State and the Irish Republican armies is more important to the film than the fight against British. Loach doesn't allow the viewer to feel for either side of the civil conflict, creating a sense of disaster at least as profound as the disaster of hundreds of years of imperial violence. Even in the way Loach frames shots and choreographs speeches, we are always under the impression that we are watching Irish peasant soldiers--not orators, or actors. There are a number of moving speeches--about independence, sovereignty, sacrifice--but these speeches don't carry the kind of practiced bravado that we might expect a less able director to allow.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is playing at both the Galaxy in Raleigh and the Chelsea in Chapel Hill.

Apparently you can watch a good part of the movie on Youtube. Here's part one.