James Joyce and the politics of egoism (original) (raw)
and the politics of egoism / Jean-Michel Rabaté. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. - (pbk.) . Joyce, James, --Political and social views. . Politics and literature-Ireland-History-th century. . Joyce, James, --Views on egoism. 4. Difference (Psychology) in literature. . Joyce, James, --Ethics. . Modernism (Literature)-Ireland. . Hospitality in literature. . Egoism in literature. . Self in literature. . Title. . Ј.-dc hardback paperback Contents Preface page vii List of abbreviations ix Après mot, le déluge: the ego as symptom The ego, the nation, and degeneration Joyce the egoist The esthetic paradoxes of egoism: from negoism to the theoretic Theory's slice of life The egoist vs. the king The conquest of Paris Joyce's transitional revolution Hospitality and sodomy Hospitality in the capital city Joyce's late Modernism and the birth of the genetic reader Stewardship, Parnellism, and egotism Notes Bibliography Index v Après mot, le déluge: the ego as symptom On July , , the editorial board of the Modern Library, a division of Random House-a jury made up of ten writers, critics and editors, among whom were A. S. Byatt, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Shelby Foote and Christopher Cerf-revealed to the public the list they had drawn up of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century. Joyceans from all over the word could rejoice: Ulysses came up first, soon followed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the third position. More unexpected but quite as heartening for fans was the fact that Finnegans Wake had found its way into the list as number seventy-seven. No doubt Joyce would have loved the elegant numerological progression: --. As a new century begins, perhaps the time has come for another assessment: will Joyce's stature still tower above the English-speaking world in the twenty-first century, or was this critical acclaim just a way of leaving behind us an embarrassing literary monument? In , moreover, the backlash was immediate, the ten jury members were denounced as elitist and sexist by disgruntled cavilers. Had they been twelve, they might have been identified with the apostles of a new Joycean creed-as the famous collective study Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination of Work in Progress launched the ironical concept as early as , just before the world economy collapsed and Joyce's personal life became fraught with difficulties. Readers of the American press, for the majority of whom the best novel of the twentieth century would obviously not be Ulysses but The Great Gatsby, perhaps The Fountainhead if not Atlas Shrugged (I have not referred to Ayn Rand at random, as will become clear in the second part of this chapter), had been prepared for Joyce's triumph by the issue of Time magazine date June , . There, under the general heading of "Hundred Artists and Entertainers of the Century" one observed the figure of Joyce looming large among "geniuses" like Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky, Bob Dylan, and Elvis Presley. In this issue, Joyce was the only novelist to whom four pages of text and several photographs were devoted. The presentation by Paul Gray 1 wryly concluded on the obscurity of the Wake: "Today, only dedicated Joyceans regularly attend the Wake. A century from now, his readers may catch up with him." This echoed, consciously or not, the famous opening of Richard Ellmann's biography, that was to enshrine Joyce's life for so long: "We are still learning to be James Joyce's contemporaries." (JJII, )-while confirming the hope expressed by its author that Finnegans Wake was in advance of its times. When he had to defend the seeming madness of his project, Joyce defiantly stated: "Perhaps it is insanity. One will be able to judge in a century" (JJII, ). The current tendency, however, would be to consider Finnegans Wake less sub specie aeternitatis than as a product of its own times, to see it as a book that is typical of the thirties, of a moment when experimental writing in an international and multilinguistic context could appear as the only logical outcome of Modernism. Before the term Post-Modernism had even been invented, most Modernist writers felt caught up in a sweeping movement that led to a rejection of parochialism and pushed to a generalized "Revolution of the Word." Like most revolutions of this century, this too would fail-or at least be met with incomprehension from the audience, while attracting cult-like followers enamored with obscurity itself. Work in Progress, in spite of the numerous allusions to contemporary events scattered by Joyce in his literary maze until the completion of the book in the late , has still today the reputation of being isolated from politics, ethics, and broader cultural concerns that ought to dominate in dark times of war, crisis, and dire survival. This has been triggered by the undeniable difficulty of deciphering the topical echoes and allusions in the obscurely punning polyglottic prose of Finnegans Wake. Was this a writer's blindness which could be blamed on the spirit of the times, or should one recall Joyce's gnawing awareness that he had to publish his last novel before another world war started, otherwise it would simply disappear? I would like to suggest here that Joyce's ultimate literary gamble, a gamble that might have to be left to this century's close to be assessed fully, has to do with a collective utopia blending language and politics, a radical utopia with avant-gardist and anarchistic overtones shared by the transition group led by Eugène Jolas. This is why I have chosen as an epigraph for this first chapter a limerick written in honor of transition's editor, a homage to the publication of Jolas's polyglottic poems James Joyce and the politics of egoism entitled Mots Déluge. In "Versailles ," Joyce also puns on his own name that he uses as a verb: So the jeunes joy with Jolas Book your berths: Après mot, le déluge!