Illicit Joyce Of Postmodernism: Reading Against The Grain

306 Pages·1996·3.08 MB·English

by  Kevin Dettmar

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The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism
Reading against the Grain
Kevin J. H. Dettmar
The University of Wisconsin Press

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The University of Wisconsin Press
114 North Murray Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53715
3 Henrietta Street
London WC2E 8LU, England
Copyright © 1996
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dettmar, Kevin J. H., 1958
The illicit Joyce of postmodernism: reading against the grain /
Kevin J. H. Dettmar.
292 pp. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-299-15060-7 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-299-15064-X (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Joyce, James, 18821941Criticism and interpretation.
2. Postmodernism (Literature) I. Title.
PR6019.09Z5296 1996
823'.912dc20 96-1194

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For my wife, Robyn, constant source of inspiration, strength,
and encouragement; and for our children, Emily Susan, Audrey
Elizabeth, Esther Katherine, and Colin Adam, whose love bears all
things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Few other scholars can count so many tangible blessings on the
fingers of one hand.

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The work of commentary, once it is separated from any ideology of totality, consists precisely in manhandling
the text, interrupting it.
Roland Barthes, S/Z
My ideal, when I write about an author, would be to write nothing that could cause him sadness, or if he is
dead, that might make him weep in his grave. Think of the author you are writing about. Think of him so hard
that he can no longer be an object, and equally so that you cannot identify with him. Avoid the double shame
of the scholar and the familiar. Give back to an author a little of the joy, the energy, the life of love and
politics that he knew how to give and invent.
Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues
The works of Joyce, Duchamp, and Satie in different ways have resisted the march of understanding and so
are as fresh now as when they were first made. I don't know how many books on Hamlet there are that set out
to elucidate its mysteries, but there is beginning to be a very large number in relation to the work of Joyce and
the work of Duchamp. I prefer the ones that pay attention but stop short of explanation.
John Cage, "James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet"

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Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xv
1. The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism 3
2. Theorizing Postmodern Stylistics 12
3. From Interpretation to "Intrepidation": "The Sisters" 51
4. The Dubliners Epiphony: (Mis)Reading the Book of Ourselves 76
5. Dedalus, Dead Alas! Dead at Last 106
6. Toward a Nonmodernist Ulysses 137
7. JJ and the Carnivalesque Imagination 174
Afterword: On Ignoring Finnegans Wake 209
Notes 221
Bibliography 255
Index 269

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Preface
In his provocative essay "Against Ulysses," Leo Bersani muses on what a naive reading of Ulysses might be like. 1
Well, it's been twenty years now, but I still remember mine: something of that first experience is, I suppose, what I'd
like The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism to capture, or recapture. I first read Ulyssesmy first encounter with any of
Joyce's writingduring the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school; I was a tender fifteen at the
time. I had no idea that the novel was based on correspondences with the Odyssey; indeed, I did not know, even after I'd
finished it, that the book recounted one day in the life of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. I read the book because
I was gaining a reputation amongst my teachers as something of a "literary critic," interested in modernist literature (I'd
done a term paper on The Waste Land); Ulysses was suggested, by some perverse soul, as a logical next step. And that
first reading gave me, like Eliot, ''all the surprise, delight, and terror" I required.
I couldn't make heads or tails of the narrative, but I was bowled over by the stylethe styles. The abundant, joyous,
excessive, rambunctious, irresponsible carnival of styles. And I decided that one day, I'd have to read it againwith help.
Fortunately for me, that help came in the person of Sandra Gilbert, who taught Ulysses as part of an undergraduate
course on the modern British novel at UC Davis. Professor Gilbert's approach to the text was, if I remember it correctly,
to emphasize the intuitive rather than the allusive; I remember, for instance, her likening the Sirens of chapter 11 to the
two women who ran the bakery near her home in Berkeley. After the course was finished, I still didn't know precisely
what the "ineluctable modality of the visible" was, but I did feel that Ulysses was a book I could handle.
My earliest attempts to write about Joyceagain, if my memories are clear, and not simply dictated by the desire to tell a
good storywere essentially attempts to figure out what Hugh Kenner and Richard Ell-

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mann would have written about passages that they had, for some inexplicable reason, passed over. But then a funny
thing began to happen. In attempting to out-Kenner Kenner, to out-Ellmann Ellmann, I began to grow weary of the
conclusions to which I was, by the force of my (unarticulated) critical premises, driven. In my analyses, Joyce's texts
came to look as ordered and regular as the "clipped privet" Thomas Kinsella writes about in "Nightwalker"; and my
essays had all the excitement and unpredictability of a Danielle Steel novel. My experience of Joyce's texts, thoughwhat
first piqued my interest, and what after twenty years has kept me coming backwas their luxuriant wildness. It was this
wildness, I decided, that I should like to celebrate.
The party favors for that celebration I found in postmodernism. Not postmodern theorythough that has often been
helpfulbut primarily postmodern fiction. Again, though, you will not find many postmodern novels cited in the analysis
that follows; for postmodern fictionto which I was, effectively, introduced in graduate schoolhas shaped the way that I
read Joyce in a global, rather than any specific, way. Returning to Joyce by way of Beckett's trilogy, for instance,
caused a critical paradigm shift for mewithout any conscious effort on my part, I began some time ago to read Joyce
through postmodern glasses. What I saw thrilled me: not the staid, imperturbable, omniscient, omnipotent Joyce of
modernist criticism, but rather a playful, rambunctious, anarchicand considerably less godlikewriter. This is the Joyce I
will hope to highlight in the pages that follow: the illicit Joyce of postmodernism.
This book, like Ulysses, works (in Joyce's description) "by different means in different places." There's no single
sustained argument, no single sustained mode of attack, but various incursions. In other words, the approach here is
postmodern, as I attempt to define it in chapter 2: grounded in local rather than global strategies, and less interested in
philosophical consistency than in discovery and delight. I hope that it will provide you with both in good supply.

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Acknowledgments
Surely the most enjoyable aspect of finishing a long-term project like this one is the opportunity now to thank those
friends and colleagues without whose help it could not have been done. My heartfelt thanks go out to:
Cal Bedient, whose passion for intelligent and sensitive criticism has set a standard of critical and artistic integrity
that continues to inspire me;
Jennifer Wicke, the most generous Joycean of them all, for her unstinting help and her rich, rich laugh;
Michael Seidel, myriadminded man, who gives and gives and doesn't count the cost;
Bill and Esther Richey, for hospitality, love, encouragement, and patient indulgence;
Michael North, mentor and now friend, the most knowledgeable student of modernism I know;
Tom Burkdall, whose concern and gentle criticism often helped get my writing back on track;
John Alberti, for helping me keep it all in perspective;
Steve Watt, for believing in me when I needed it;
Pat McGee, for liking what I'd done and wanting it to be better;
Eloise Knowlton, for teaching me how politely to disagree with one's elders and smarters and betters;
Derek Attridge, for discovering the direction in which Joyce criticism must go, and then leading the way;
Jack Kolb, erse solid man;
Chris Mott, for teaching me about postmodernism while humiliating me on the racquetball court;
Susan Friedman, for support above and beyond the call;
Michael Andrew Jackson, far more challenging and demanding than any high-school English teacher had a right to
be;

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my anonymous press readers, without whose keen criticism this would all make less sense;
Kerri Hamberg and Ross Wagner, for their eagle eyes and diligent good cheer;
Susan Tarcov, gracious and intelligent editor;
Allen Fitchen, for his infectious belief in and unwavering commitment to this project;
and my students over the past ten years at UCLA, Loyola Marymount University, and Clemson University, whose
fresh and unembarrassed responses to Joyce's texts acted as a corrective to my own conditioned, jaded, "scholarly"
readings.
My most considerable debtindeed, one I am literally incapable of repayingis reflected in the dedication.
Portions of chapters 3 and 6 have previously been published. I am grateful to Western Illinois University for permission
to reprint "'From Interpretation to 'Intrepidation': Joyce's 'The Sisters' as a Precursor of the Postmodern Mystery," which
appeared in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. Ronald G. Walker and
June M. Anderson, University of Western Illinois Essays in Literature Book Series, 1990; and to the University of
Michigan Press for permission to reprint "'Working in Accord with Obstacles': A Postmodern Perspective on Joyce's
'Mythical Method,'" from Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism, University of Michigan Press, 1992.

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