Who Reads Ulysses?

The Common Reader and the Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars

Julie Sloan Brannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136711343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Julie Sloan Brannon examines the Joyce Wars as a fascinating nexus of the conflicts between scholars and ordinary readers, and one that illuminates the existence of ulysses -and by extension, Joyce-as an example of Lyotard's differend, an icon that exists simultaneously in two separate yet contradictory discourses, each of which silences the other. The Academic Joyce is radically different from the Public Joyce, and yet neither could exist independently. Tangled up in this conflicted space are the interests of the common reader, a nebulously defined entity, and the continuing controversies illustrate the strange relationship between academics, readers, and editors. Who Reads Ulysses? calls for us to look not only at questions of authorship raised by editorial theory, but to look carefully at who reads ulysses -and why they read it. This volume provides fruitful ways to explore the subversive nature of text for readers, both in and out of the academy.

CHAPTER ONE

JOYCE’S CANONIZATION,
in which
THE PROFESSORS ARE KEPT BUSY

After all, to comprehend Ulysses is not among the recognised learned professions, and nobody should give his entire existence to the job.

—Arnold Bennett

“The Joyce Industry”: this is the self-applied name for the post-1960 boom in Joyce criticism. The first issue of The James Joyce Quarterly in 1963 inaugurated the arrival of Joyce studies as a full-scale critical field in its own right, and forty years later this journal is still at the center of that field. Simultaneous with this recognition of Joyce studies as a legitimate field of inquiry, the biannual International James Joyce Symposia grew from a fairly small gathering of seventy-five scholars in 1967 to a gathering of well over 250 participants from countries spanning the globe at the present time.¹ From the introduction of Ulysses to the wider American literary scene through the famous Woolsey decision of 1933, Joyce went from being a peculiar and obscure Irish writer (often alluded to as obscene but, as in the case of most censored writers, rarely actually read) to a major literary giant in a span of less than ten years, and the center of that activity has been in the United States—a country in which Joyce never set foot.

Ulysses continues to sell upwards of 100,000 copies a year worldwide.² Some of these copies, undoubtedly, are sold to students in the university system; but the book is also stocked on the shelves of commercial bookstores like Barnes & Noble, B. Dalton, and Waldenbooks. The university, then, plays a role in Joyce’s reputation, but there are other forces at work, many of which have to do with the publicity machine which thrust Ulysses into the public’s eye over eighty years ago. Joyce’s reputation rests in part on the academic machinery which created the Joyce Industry as we know it, and the process which canonized his works produced a particular kind of Joyce, one which serves the needs of the academic institution which created him. This academic Joyce diverges from the general public’s Joyce, a dichotomy I will examine more closely in Chapter Two; but the image of an iconoclastic author whose works are impossible to comprehend without critical intervention finds its roots in the academic Joyce and the critical machinery which supports him. The oft-repeated quote about keeping the professors busy has become a Joycean cliche, and functions in part to imply that Joyce wrote specifically for the professors rather than a broader reading public. The context of the quote, however, is a humorous one which undercuts the surface meaning; Jacques Benoîst-Méchin, the young man who translated “Penelope” into French for Valery Larbaud’s reading in 1921, had begged Joyce for the scheme of the book. Joyce only gave him parts of it and said: “If I gave it all up immediately, I’d lose my immortality. I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality” (Ellmann 521). Joyce’s view of “the professors” was a wry (although ironically prescient) one. But the effect of this quote, offered ad nauseam and out of context in both scholarly and popular articles as a serious comment on Joyce’s intentions, reinforces the academic Joyce who wrote for the professors. And for the last fifty years the professors have, indeed, been busy.

INTRODUCING JAMES JOYCE

Through literary reviews and book salons in Europe, then through the efforts of Pound, Eliot, Beach and others, Joyce’s reputation spread to the United States and the rest of the world. It should also be noted that these efforts to spread Joyce’s work were spurred in no small way by Joyce himself. From the beginning, the censorship of Ulysses allowed it to find an audience only through smuggled copies and reviews by fellow writers. It was through Valery Larbaud, Stuart Gilbert, and Frank Budgen that Joyce made sure people understood what Ulysses was about, helping Larbaud coin the term “interior monologue” and providing unlimited assistance for Gilbert’s 1931 James Joyce’s Ulysses and Budgen’s 1934 The Making of James Joyce’s Ulysses.³ But even at the beginning of his writing career he was concerned about reaching a reading public, as shown in his correspondence with publishers about Dubliners.⁴ Peculiarly, though, many critics tend to focus on these letters only as illustrations of Joyce’s fight to keep his work intact and free of censorship, a reading given credence by Ellmann’s treatment of these skirmishes. And yet this reading ignores the fact that, like any writer, Joyce wanted to be published and read, and his correspondence with publishers shows a willingness to make concessions (see Letters I, 56; 59–63). Joseph Kelly, in Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon (1998), describes Joyce’s target audience for Dubliners as specifically Irish, and Joyce’s letters support Kelly’s argument. In a letter dated June 23, 1906 to Grant Richards on his reluctance to publish Dubliners, Joyce wrote: “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass” (Letters I 64). Kelly cites Joyce’s oft-quoted “paralysis” statement to Constantine Curran which has guided critics in their analysis of these stories, and takes critics to task for applying this paralysis as “a moral or spiritual failing general to humankind and the world” (16). Kelly specifies the paralysis Joyce wished to portray in Dubliners as being unique to Ireland, and even more narrowly to a specific class of people living in Dublin at the turn of the century; by “globalizing paralysis,” critics deny “any real possibility of curing the disease” (16). By reinserting Joyce’s political life into discussion of Dubliners, Kelly offers us a view of Joyce at odds with the main body of criticism which surrounds Joyce’s works. Kelly places the shift from the political to the aesthetic squarely on the shoulders of Ezra Pound:

Not only did Pound get Joyce published and into the hands of readers, but he also readdressed Joyce’s early fiction to an audience vastly different from the Irish middle class. Pound de-Irished Joyce’s reputation, and, in the process, stripped his early fiction of its political force. What originally had been intended to criticize middle-class, Dublin Catholic society became a general comment on the universal human condition in the modern age. (63–64)

Pound’s influence on the fortunes of the modernist movement cannot be overestimated, and Kelly makes a strong case that, because of Pound’s aesthetic aims, Joyce’s work (along with others gathered by Pound who are now considered the core of modernism) became linked with the elitist modernism of Pound’s program. The price of being published under this program was that the works would reach a limited cognoscenti rather than the wider, particularly Irish audience that Joyce originally intended for his stories. Indeed, H.G. Wells’s review of Portrait specifically located Joyce’s work in the tradition of Irish literature: “Like so many Irish writers from Sterne to Shaw Mr. Joyce is a bold experimentalist with paragraph and punctuation” (“James Joyce” 23). This review was extremely influential, coming as it did from a respected English writer, and it helped spread Joyce’s reputation as a young Irish writer to watch. But, as Kelly points out, Pound’s reviews pulled both Dubliners and Portrait away from Ireland and Irish politics into a more universalized mode (76–77); of Dubliners, Pound wrote: “[Joyce] gives us things as they are, not only for Dublin, but for every city” and says that “It is surprising that Mr Joyce is Irish” (Pound/Joyce 28–29). Pound wrote of Portrait that Joyce belonged in the company of Flaubert and Dostoyevsky, and more pointedly the newer writers like T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis; he placed Portrait on a world stage by saying that “it will remain a permanent part of English literature—written by an Irishman in Trieste and first published in New York City” (Pound/Joyce 88–90). Pound’s other writings on Joyce further remove Joyce from a specifically Irish context. In “The Non-Existence of Ireland,” appearing in The New Age on February 25, 1915, Pound wrote that Joyce “fled to Trieste and into the modern world … He writes as a European, not as a provincial” (Pound/Joyce 32–33). The first readers of Ulysses were the subscribers to Pound’s serial The Egoist, which had also published Portrait serially and then subsequently became a press and brought it out in book form. The Egoist Press also acquired the rights to Dubliners from its publisher Grant Richards in 1921, and so Pound became the sole outlet for Joyce’s works prior to Sylvia Beach.

Pound helped ensconce Joyce firmly in the Continental literary scene, and Pound’s connection with the American editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap enabled the first five chapters of Ulysses to appear in serial form in a decidedly avant-garde outlet, The Little Review. Ellmann describes Pound’s relationship with The Little Review as primarily part of his program of ‘making it new’: “Pound was then in the course of shifting his … American allegiance from Harriet Monroe’s Poetry to the Little Review … which was more avant-garde in its interests and which intended to print chiefly prose” (421). And so Joyce became an international modernist rather than a specifically Irish writer intent on social change in his home country; instead of creating the conscience of the Irish, Pound moved Joyce into creating the conscience of the modernist literati.

ULYSSES‘ EARLY RECEPTION

Joyce’s growing reputation notwithstanding, getting Ulysses published proved to be as arduous a task as Odysseus’s voyage itself (a detailed publishing history of Ulysses is found in Chapter Three). As Ulysses was serialized in the Little Review it was subject to the censorship laws in the United States; Heap and Anderson went to trial in 1920 over the “Nausicaa” episode and lost. Its reputation grew based on reviews of the serialized episodes; its reputation also grew as a notoriously obscene work. The reviews from Continental writers and critics like Valery Larbaud helped boost subscriptions for the first printing. The suppression of Ulysses in the English-speaking countries gave the work (like all censorship does) a tantalizing aura which, in addition to its revolutionary method of narration, made Ulysses a cause celèbre. Morris Ernst, the lawyer who successfully defended Ulysses in the famous censorship trial of 1933, wrote, “the more our postal and customs officials burned copies, the greater the inducement for smuggling and bootlegging. It became a vogue to own one of those blue-paper-jacketed copies of Ulysses from Paris—a vogue that soon led to prices in the hundreds of dollars for one such copy” (“Four-Letter Words and the Unconscious” 33). When the ban was lifted by Judge Woolsey in 1933, Ulysses had a ready and waiting audience eager to see what the fuss was about.⁵ This phenomenon played a large part in Joyce’s public reputation (see Chapter Two), but to see how his works became entrenched in the academy requires us to look at the classification of Ulysses as a “difficult and literary” work during the trial, in conjunction with the growth of the academy after World War II and the turn of literary criticism into an academic enterprise.

THE TRIAL

The story of Ulysses cannot be told without understanding the dynamics of the trial which allowed it to be published in the United States. The decision of Judge John Woolsey was groundbreaking, and relied heavily on the kind of evaluations already in place for the work. As Kelly states,

Joyce gained and lost with Woolsey’s decision. He gained the right to be published and distributed. But that right was predicated on his failure to move people. Woolsey’s decision marked a capitulation to the “literary world,” which produced guides to help readers interpret Ulysses in the detached method Eliot and Pound approved. (83–84)

The defense’s strategy was simple: to claim that Ulysses was a serious and classic piece of literature and therefore by definition could not be obscene. Ernst offered carefully chosen excerpts from reviews by Rebecca West, Arnold Bennett, and T.S. Eliot which portrayed Joyce as a literary genius and, under a sort of literary noblesse oblige, they claimed that a genius could not write anything obscene at all: the work was honest and artistic rather than disgusting or prurient. Even if some portions of the book are pornographic, they argued, the total effect was artistic and therefore the book’s literary value outweighed any particular instances of obscenity. Under the auspices of Bennett Cerf of Random House, the defense team surveyed librarians around the country as to the book’s merit, and received mostly favorable responses; but as Kenneth Stevens writes, “the replies from librarians demonstrated that acceptance of Ulysses was significantly more subdued outside literary circles … Generally, however, the library responses were what the lawyers wanted. [The responses] revealed that patrons who most often asked about the book were college students and faculty, a social group which a judge might be less likely to consider smut-seekers” (“Ulysses on Trial” 62).

Judge Woolsey agreed with Ernst’s characterization of Ulysses as a literary classic too difficult for the uneducated or young to understand, and declared the book a “tour de force” and a “sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind” (Moscato and Le Blanc 38). Bennett Cerf decided to include Woolsey’s...