James Joyce

Introduction

James Joyce is a fascinating writer, but he can be a most difficult author to teach.  In her dissertation, Lynn Bongiovanni brings a recent viewpoint – empire theory – to bear on this most singular author, and finds an interesting paradox. While Joyce inveighed against imperial rule – in this case, Ireland’s “colonization” by the British – he was capable of celebrating the fruits of empire in his writings.  Just as you and I may deplore the consequences of what might be called the modern technology “empire,” even as we happily use our refrigerators and computers, Joyce had his own conflicted attitude towards empire.

In this brief excerpt from Prof. Bongionvanni’s full dissertation¸ and in her interview, the author begins to set out the structure and overview of Joyce’s conflicted politics.  In the later parts of her dissertation, she goes into detail, using specific passages from Joyce’s prose to illustrate her thesis.

Interview with Lynn Bongiovanni
07/2011

 

An author as rich as Joyce is seen in a different light by each new generation.  What new do you see in him?

Joyce famously promised that he would keep scholars busy for centuries, so it is not surprising that readers are always discovering new and exciting aspects of his work.  A large part of Joyce scholarship of the past few decades has focused on Joyce as a political writer, which is important, but I think that most readers of Joyce understand the dangers of labeling him in a particular way.  His work is so multi-faceted and complex that it becomes impossible to reduce to any particular school or movement.  How we read Joyce at any given time probably reveals more about us than about Joyce himself.  I’m not quite sure what the next step in Joyce scholarship will be, but I’m sure that it will be exciting both in terms of finding new ways of reading Joyce and uncovering what this new approach reveals about changing trends in scholarship.

 

You mention two schools of thought (among others) regarding James Joyce.  The first that he is a postcolonial writer—specifically an Irish writer reacting to Britain’s domination of Ireland, a “defining voice of Irish independence.”  The second is that he is a universal writer, reacting to the modern age.  How do you see him?

As a developing artist, Joyce walked a tightrope between his own keen interest in Irish politics—he was nine years old when he wrote a poem detailing what he saw as the unforgiveable betrayal of Charles Stewart Parnell—and his desire to become a respected “European” author, free from the nationalism and cultural specificity that was disdained by the ideals of High Modernism.  Joyce refused to make any overtly political public statements, but this reveals less about his own private political positions than his strong desire to present himself in the role of international exile.   After Dominic Manganiello’s Joyce’s Politics (1980), it became impossible to read Joyce as an apolitical figure, and scholars began examining how Joyce’s Irishness, and his feelings about Ireland’s political situation, shaped him and his art.

 

Was Joyce the product of a particular time and place, or was he unique—a talent who could have emerged in any era?  How might he have written if he had been born fifty years earlier, of fifty years later?

Like all of us, Joyce was absolutely a product of his time.  I think that his basic concerns—the individual’s struggles against social pressure, the celebration of quotidian experience—speak to artists of any era, but his work is greatly influenced by the particular time and geography of his birth.  It is important to remember that Joyce was born not even fifty years after the worst years of the Great Hunger, and at a time of great political upheaval and uncertainty in Ireland.   He was acquainted with such diverse figures in the Irish independence movement as William Butler Yeats and Arthur Griffith.  His artistic concerns would have been completely different had he been born fifty years earlier or later.

 

What are your favorite examples of imperial imagery in Joyce’s writings?

I always come back to the figure of Old Gummy Granny in the Circe episode of Ulysses; she wears a “sugarloaf hat” and bears “the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast.”  This image suggests Joyce’s awareness of the tragic consequences of Ireland’s consumption of goods harvested in the colonies of the New World: the country’s overreliance on the potato contributed to the Great Famine, and its appetite for sugar works to support the very imperial system that oppresses it.

 

Did images of empire find their way into Joyce’s contemporaries?  How did those differ from the images in Joyce’s writing?

Joyce’s Irish contemporaries—I’m thinking especially of Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde—certainly considered issues of empire, but in strikingly different ways.  Stoker’s Dracula can certainly be read politically, as the Count’s journey to London uncovers deeply rooted English anxieties about the consequences of immigration from the outer edges of the Empire, and Wilde’s lush descriptions of oriental décor in The Picture of Dorian Gray speak in part to the author’s aesthetic theories.  But Joyce’s work seems somewhat unique in its attention to the almost symbiotic relationship between Ireland and England, a complex interdependence that complicates for Joyce the question of Irish nationalism and independence.

 

Two of his contemporaries, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, see British society through an upper-class lens.  How large a factor is Joyce’s working-class perspective in the enduring popularity of his work?

Whenever people who are intimidated by the idea of reading Joyce ask me where they should begin, I send them to Dubliners, exactly because of the ways that Joyce’s exploration of the city’s working classes makes the collection so accessible to general readers.  I also find it interesting, though, that Joyce makes clear in “The Dead” that the social paralysis he depicts in Dubliners is not limited to the working classes, but extends to all aspects of Dublin society.

 

In which 20^th century artists do you see the influence of Joyce?

I laughed when I read an interview with Frank McCourt in which he said that he could not make a career of writing until he stopped trying to imitate James Joyce.  Joyce still casts a long shadow, especially for Irish writers.  That said, I think that Joyce would have loved the portrayal of Irish childhood in Angela’s Ashes as well as in Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.  Were he alive today, I think he would appreciate contemporary Irish writers like Colm Toibin and Colum McCann, who explore Irish identity in a global context.  I believe that Joyce also would have enjoyed Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which pays tribute to Joyce’s Ulysses as it chronicles a day in the life of one person.

 

It certainly seems like a powerful parallel to today when you write about Joyce’s characters who protest the English occupation yet “turn a blind eye to the fact that their own consumption of British imperial goods increases the exploitation of other colonies.”  Do you see similar imagery in today’s literature?

This examination of the complex relationship between Ireland and Empire still resonates in contemporary literature.  When I read Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way (2005), which looks at the experience of an Irish soldier serving in the British Army during World War I, it occurred to me that Barry asks some of the same questions Joyce does in Ulysses when he examines the role of Irish soldiers in the Boer War.

 

You write about the images of high empire, specifically the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibit of 1851, and how they created a “promise of abundance” which offsets the negative impact of imperial society.  Are there similar images in today’s stories?  Where do we see them?

There is a striking scene in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible in which a character who grew up in Africa visits an American supermarket for the first time and faints at the sight of the multitude of goods on the shelves.  Joyce plays with this same idea in Ulysses, particularly in his description of the “superabundance” of the Dublin market that appears in the Cyclops episode.  Both Joyce and Kingsolver seem to be interrogating the ways that political systems use propaganda to create a connection between surplus and power.

 

What do you mean by Joyce’s “Oriental” views?

Joyce’s work is filled with visions of the East, which we are compelled to read today through the lens of what Edward’s Said describes in Orientalism.  But I am not convinced that Joyce’s attention to European dreams of the exotic and voluptuous Orient is merely an appropriation of Eastern culture; I also see how Joyce uses these stereotypical images and fantasies of the Orient to highlight the ways that Dubliners like Stephen Dedalus, who dreams of flying away on a magic carpet, indulge in Orientalist fantasies as a means of escaping, if only in their imagination, from the oppressive control of church and state.

 

Joyce opened one of the first movie theatres in Ireland.  What did he like about movies?  What would he think of movies today?

I really cannot imagine Joyce lining up at the cineplex on a Saturday night to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster, but he was indeed very interested in film, mostly because of its potential to capture the experience of consciousness in ways that the written word cannot.  Joyce strove to capture the reality of experience and our inner lives, but because thoughts resemble images more than words, he felt constrained even by his stream-of-consciousness technique.  I think that Joyce would have been especially fascinated by montage, and I always think of him when I see the christening scene in “The Godfather,” where Coppola is able to present a number of events occurring simultaneously, a feat that Joyce attempts in the Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses.

 

Excerpt

James Joyce’s portrayal of Ireland and its relationship with England has been the subject of much scholarly speculation. Early readings of Joyce, such as those by Stuart Gilbert, Frank Budgen, and particularly Richard Ellmann, emphasize the international appeal of Joyce’s art, which was so rooted in universal themes that it was thought to transcend all political concerns and national boundaries. But beginning with Dominic Manganiello’s seminal study of Joyce’s Politics (1980), a project that was initially conceived as a dissertation directed by Ellmann, critics began to understand that it is impossible to separate Joyce from his native country. Despite his self-imposed exile, Joyce could never really leave Ireland behind, and it remained the subject of all of his fiction. To suggest that Joyce is not at all engaged with the political conditions in Ireland, and particularly those of the city of his birth, is to neglect perhaps the most compelling aspect of Joyce’s work: his incisive depiction of the economic and social forces at work in Ireland that shaped him as an artist.

Contemporary literary scholarship has almost completely discarded the reading of Joyce as an international symbol of High Modernism, placing his work instead fully within the context of Ireland’s colonial history. With Manganiello’s study serving as the foundation for these political readings of Joyce, critics like Vincent Cheng and Declan Kiberd position him as a postcolonial writer whose fiction always responds to Ireland’s experience in empire. More recently, though, projects by Emer Nolan and Enda Duffy seek to claim Joyce not only as an Irish nationalist, but as a defining voice of Irish independence who went so far as to endorse political terrorism for the cause of Ireland’s freedom.

Although this focus on the political dimensions of Joyce’s work is valuable in that it rescues Joyce from what Cheng calls the “sanitized” world of High Modernism and recovers the astute political observations that characterize his work, any attempt to categorize Joyce’s political leanings is fraught with the danger of oversimplification. Throughout his body of work, Joyce appears, at times simultaneously, as both a great champion of Irish freedom and a harsh critic of the republican movement. Even though he chronicles Stephen Dedalus’s staunch refusal to serve his English master and depicts the depths of Irish suffering under England’s imperial rule, he is also quick to viciously satirize both the Irish Revival of W.B. Yeats and his circle and the dangerous Fenianism of bigoted thugs like the citizen of the Cyclops episode.

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Joyce … was a defining voice of Irish independence who went so far as to endorse political terrorism for the cause of Ireland’s freedom.

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Joyce is always aware of the intricacy of the Irish question, but his clearest expression of what he saw as the impossibly complex and symbiotic relationship between Ireland and England is located in the multitude of colonial commodities that color the landscape of Joyce’s fiction, particularly in Ulysses (1922). The Dublin of 1904 that Joyce portrays in the novel is littered with myriad tantalizing goods that have been gathered by England during its imperial campaigns and introduced to the Irish market, including tea from both Ceylon and China, ginger, sugar (refined, crystallized and Demerara), olives, oranges, almonds, saffron, pineapple rock, apples from Australia, spices from Jaffa, cloves, chocolate, mustard, and Spanish onions. When Leopold Bloom recalls that even the potato, the culinary symbol of Ireland and the basis of its diet, “was brought from the new world by Sir Walter Raleigh,” Joyce underscores the irony that Ireland’s culture and economy, and increasingly its way of life, are utterly dependent on the imperial system that oppresses it. At the same time that figures like the citizen rail against the British occupation of Ireland, they avidly (and hypocritically) enjoy, and even depend upon, the fruits of England’s imperial campaigns that stretch across larger oceans.

It is this hybrid colonial resistance and complicity that fosters both Joyce’s reverent fascination with and contempt for his homeland, particularly the cosmopolitan marketplace of Dublin, and discourages his hopes for the future of an independent Ireland. Men like Simon Dedalus become teary-eyed at patriotic songs that protest the English occupation, but they turn a blind eye to the fact that their own consumption of British imperial goods increases the exploitation of other colonies. Joyce emphasizes Ireland’s hybrid identity as oppressed and oppressor in Circe, when Stephen sees the image of Old Gummy Granny (an extension of the Irish milkwoman in the opening episode of the novel who seem to embody the spirit of the nation for both Stephen and the Englishman Haines) sitting in a “sugarloaf hat” with “the deathflower of potato blight on her breast.” In this instant, Joyce conflates the nightmare of Ireland’s history under British rule and the nation’s apparent indifference to, and even contribution to, imperial abuses in other nations. Not only does what Joyce labeled a land of traitors and betrayers, or “the old sow that eats her farrow,” prey upon its own, but it also feeds upon other colonies. For Joyce, as long as Ireland continues to do so, it will remain enslaved to the English imperial project.

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This dependence on England is not only rooted in Ireland’s devouring of the material commodities of colonial trade, but also its consumption of the images that advertise the promotion of English capitalism and the advancement of empire.

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In addition to calling attention to Ireland’s consumption of the commodities of New World trade, namely the potato and sugar, Joyce also examines the significance of the Irish appetite for the tea and spices introduced to Ireland as a result of the British conquest of India. Not only does the Irish participation in the exploitation of the subcontinent further expose the hypocritical impulses inherent in Irish nationalism, but the emulative gesture of drinking tea only forges closer ties between the Irish and the imperial system they purport to resist. Irish Nationalists may voice their desire for independence, but Ulysses exposes how these assimilative habits, particularly the act of drinking tea, estrange Ireland from other oppressed colonies, particularly India, and foster an identification with England that weakens the cause of Irish independence.

This dependence on England is not only rooted in Ireland’s devouring of the material commodities of colonial trade, but also its consumption of the images that advertise the promotion of English capitalism and the advancement of empire. While critics like Garry Leonard and Jennifer Wicke have used work by Raymond Williams and Franco Moretti to investigate Joyce’s attitude towards commodity culture and advertising in general, Ulysses seems far more concerned about the effects of imperial propaganda on the Irish middle class, which falls victim to the lure of the commodity culture used by the English crown to further the exploitation of its subjects. Joyce’s employment in Ulysses of the images and rhetoric Great Exhibition of 1851, with its Crystal Palace that served as a shrine to the magically endowed commodity, calls attention to the efforts of the British Empire to placate its colonials with promises of abundance that would distract them from their resentment of imperial rule. By buying into the empty promises of commodity culture, Irish consumers confirm Joyce’s fears that the Free State would simply reproduce the same capitalist and imperialist system that had victimized Ireland for so long.

Even more troubling for Joyce, though, is the effect on the Irish of Victorian advertising campaigns that exploit the notion of racial difference to market English commodities throughout England and Ireland. Bloom’s recollection of the advertising jingle for Pear’s soap invokes the company’s campaigns that sought to convince consumers that buying a particular brand of soap guaranteed participation in the civilizing mission of British imperialism. But while a good many Irish were apparently swayed by the advertisements that encouraged them to marvel at the brutish savagery of the Africans who did not even recognize the tools of British hygiene, they were oblivious to the ways that English racial theories positioned them beneath even some of the Africans in the advertisements. With its multiple references to the Boer War, Ulysses illustrates the impact that the consumption of these images of Africa had on the Irish, who objectified their African counterparts to such an extent that many of them took up arms in the defense of the imperial interests that exploited them.

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Joyce could never really leave Ireland behind, and it remained the subject of all of his fiction.

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Ulysses also calls attention to the problematic nature of Ireland’s consumption of images of the Orient. While a number of prominent Irish, including Joyce himself, promoted a theory of Irish genealogy that locates the origins of Irish culture in ancient Oriental civilizations, even Joyce seems aware of the dangers inherent in such Orientalist views, which only serve to appropriate Eastern culture in order to advance European goals. Despite this knowledge, Joyce is often unable to resist the lure of the Orientalist motifs that proliferate not only Ulysses, but also in Dubliners (1914), particularly in the stories of childhood that form the first section of the collection. While he signals his awareness that the European vision of the Orient is a fictional construct based on the projection of European desires, he also demonstrates the potentially transforming power of Oriental fantasies, especially for the Irish, who often seek refuge in their dreams of a place of exotic freedom that stands in stark contrast to Dublin’s atmosphere of corrupt repression. Ultimately, though, Joyce suggests that these Oriental fantasies provide the Irish only a temporary escape from the overbearing control of church and state, and one that comes at great expense. Not only do these dreams of the Oriental Other distract the Irish from their own marginalization within empire, but they also reproduce the same imperialist discourse that oppresses them. Once again, by consuming the products of the colonial system, the Irish increase their own subjugation to imperial power.

It is this particular Irish place in the colonial economy that prevents Joyce from articulating an unqualified subject for Irish nationalism. While he recognizes that Ireland has suffered for centuries under the English occupation, he also understands that the Irish appetite for colonial products, whether material or imaginary, supports the imperial exploitation of other countries. The ubiquity of the colonial commodity in Ulysses exposes this blind spot in Irish nationalism; even as men like the citizen rally for Irish independence, they fail to recognize how Ireland’s taste for its favorite goods, namely potatoes, sugar, and tea, supports the very system it struggles against.

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[Joyce’s ] public silence on Irish politics does not signal his indifference, but rather his belief that Ireland was too entangled in the imperial system to extricate itself easily …

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Generations of scholars have struggled to arrive at a consensus about Joyce’s political positions, but it is this kind of reductivism that Joyce always tried to avoid. Always aware of the complexity of his country’s colonial history, which was marked by both a struggle for independence and a tendency to betray its national heroes, Joyce rejected all political positions that offered an easy solution to the Irish question. His public silence on Irish politics does not signal his indifference, but rather his belief that Ireland was too entangled in the imperial system to extricate itself easily, if at all. Joyce may not have voiced this impression in his public life, but his depiction in Ulysses of the role of the colonial commodity in Irish history reveals his understanding of the ways that Ireland both consumes the spoils of empire and is consumed by them, a relationship that for Joyce complicates and undermines any expression of Irish nationalism.

End of excerpt. The full dissertation is available on this web site.

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Lynne Bongiovanni earned her Ph.D. from Fordham University and currently teaches at the College of Mount Saint Vincent. She is a member of the International James Joyce Foundation. Among her recent publications is “‘Turbaned Faces Going By’: James Joyce and Irish Orientalism,” in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature (October, 2007).

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POSTSECONDARY LEVEL

L E S S O N   P L A N    T O   A C C O M P A N Y 

“James Joyce and the

Consumption of Empire”

JOURNAL OF EMPIRE STUDIES SUMMER 2011

 

 

1. What is the author’s thesis?

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2. Who was James Joyce? Where and when did he live? Is that important to understanding his fiction?

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3. Joyce is somewhat famous for using a stream of consciousness writing technique. It can be difficult to understand. Here is an example:

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave-clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him.

Please use this same weird style to describe your morning (you are the protagonist, not Stephen).

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4. According to the author, what did James Joyce think of the British? How do we know what he thought?

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5. According to Lynne Bongiovanni, Joyce displays a split or conflicted attitude towards the British Empire and its benefits. What is that conflict?

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6. How did James Joyce earn a living in real life? Did elements of his working life find their way into his fiction?

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7. George Orwell is another writer who, like Joyce, has deep suspicions about the British empire. Please read his essay “Shooting an Elephant” (http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/) and compare his writing to James Joyce’s. How are their writing styles different? Which one hates the British more? Which will you remember a year from now?

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8.  The Modern Library recently voted James Joyce’s Ulysses as #1 on a list of the 100 Best Novels of the last century. Do you agree? What would your #1 novel be? Why?

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9. The Lord of the Rings is on that list, but Harry Potter is not. Agree or disagree? Why?

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