James Joyce and Education

Schooling and the Social Imaginary in the Modernist Novel

Len Platt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367859664
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000341362
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

James Joyce and Education is the first full-length study of education across the Joyce oeuvre. A new account of how the politics and aesthetics of the Joyce text is informed by historical contexts, it is the latest contribution to the growing contemporary debate about education, late modernism and literary innovation.

This highly original account reads Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in new and challenging ways. It produces the Joyce text as a complex and comic devotion to the representation of schooled education — an exemplification of the elitism that state schooling was historically designed to reproduce and a devastating undoing of the epistemologies it was designed to sustain. Chapters explore a range of themes, including Joyce and radical education, the impact of Nietzsche's writing on Joyce and women and education.

The book will appeal to researchers, scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of literature in education, pedagogy, Joyce scholarship and modernism.

Chapter 1
Contexts and their problematics

Think of the harm Nietzsche could do to the half-informed minds of some of our undergraduates.

Oliver St. John Gogarty, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937)

Literature and education

What is involved in the idea ‘Joyce and education’? The question is not as straightforward as it seems. On the one hand, very little work has been done on the issue of reading literature in the contexts of the structures and technologies in which formal education takes place. Although the history of forms of literature, the novel in particular, has routinely been related to capitalism and the development of the nation-state, questions about the relations between literature and one of the most characteristic institutions of the modern state, the education system, have had very little purchase.¹ It appears that ‘literature’ takes place in one domain and ‘education’ in another, although we know this cannot be the case. On the other hand, the place of literature in the classroom has been much theorized, not only in terms of the effective teaching of reading and writing but also in the development of such high-status but hard-to-define notions as ‘creativity’ and ‘imagination’. Such debates are in turn related to connections sometimes made between literature and what is imagined as the emancipatory impact of education, its capacity for challenging social inequality. Highly contested arguments about the impact of canonical literature on learner confidence and, ultimately, performance and success in the world are part of everyday life and figure regularly in the media. From this perspective, canonical literature in all its variations can be perceived as both an alienating imposition of hegemony and a liberating affirmation. The importance of such positions rests on the idea, also highly disputed and largely untested, that educational achievement is contingent on how modern educational institutions and their pedagogies manage what we now call ‘identity’. We know that students’ ‘backgrounds’ have an impact on their achievement. Sometimes particular backgrounds are considered impairments to educational achievement; sometimes rich heritage to be exploited. How far and in what ways educational institutions can build on opportunity, or address the ‘gaps’, however, is not at all clear.

James Joyce and Education: Schooling and the Social Imaginary in the Modernist Novel is about a writer whose work was and is ambiguously related to ‘literature and education’. In terms of the status of his writing and how it came out of an educational establishment, critical tradition has insisted equally, or at least simultaneously, on Joyce’s radical rejection of orthodoxy and on a Joyce aesthetic informed by the orthodox. In an early piece of Joyce biography/criticism produced in the 1950s – Joyce Among the Jesuits – Kevin Sullivan argued that, however much Joyce’s writing railed against ‘the plague of Catholicism’ (SH, 173), it was somehow condemned to be everywhere instantiated with the signs of a Catholic education. ‘Joyce’s early familiarity with Catholic ceremony and ritual’, Sullivan wrote, ‘so richly invested with symbolic gesture and meaning, constituted a sort of novitiate in which the embryo artist was prepared’.² Some 40 years later, Peter Costello, in his biography of the ‘foundational’ years of Joyce’s life (1982–1915), declared the writing which has become synonymous with radicalism and innovation as being both continuous with literary tradition and an outcome of the Jesuit curriculum. ‘The essential nature of Jesuit education’, he claimed, ‘aside from its system, was its literary nature; it depended on reading and translation from Latin and Greek into English and vice versa. From his earliest days literature became for Joyce the basis of everything’.³ This kind of registration, in which Joyce’s challenging fiction finds itself stamped with traditionalism and clichés sometimes racialized as Irish or Catholic – whether in its revolt, its ‘spirituality’ or its apparent devotion to high-status learning – has figured over and over in Joyce criticism ever since.

More recent approaches to ‘Joyce and education’ have taken position in relation to these orthodoxies. Andrew Gibson’s work (2013) in this field is largely an extension that understands ‘Joyce and education’ in terms of a highly refined temperament struggling to come to terms with the imperative to revolt against Anglicization and colonization. Elizabeth Switaj’s James Joyce’s Teaching Life and Methods (2016) circumnavigates the idea of the classicist Joyce with the manufacture of a Joyce whose aesthetic radicalism is reconvened as a commitment to progressive pedagogy. Ramsey McGlazer’s Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (2020) argues precisely the opposite – that the modernism of the late Joyce text, represented by the late chapters of Ulysses, is characterized by ‘enforced repetitions and formative wastes of time’ constituting a radical appropriation of traditional methods of pedagogy, what he calls a ‘counter progressivism’ deemed, not without difficulty, necessary to proper schooling and formulated against the progressive turn represented by such figures as John Dewey.⁴

In terms of the status of his writing in education, the situation is just as confusing. Joyce’s early fiction frequently appears on school and college curricula. In some ways it is part of the orthodox canon; in other ways not. It is both classical modernism, as it were, and experimental in terms of an aesthetic still frequently conceptualized as a recentring at the decolonizing ‘margins’. It is a current institutionalized orthodoxy and, at the same time, remains radical innovation. The issue becomes even more problematized in relation to Joyce’s later works. The reading of these texts is now substantially located in universities – some would say this is the only place they are read – but neither Ulysses nor Finnegans Wake are widely taught in the modern university, certainly not at undergraduate level. Their ‘difficulty’, their extraordinary performance of ‘complexity’, connects them to the very apex of cultures that have infinite capacities for reproducing hierarchy. Here they have special status and as such are rendered up in profoundly select terms. From this perspective, reading the mature Joyce text is much more than just reading. These works amount to a ‘new times’ fiction that, pace Adorno and Lukács, appears to be neither an assault on the commodification of modern life nor an enactment of its dark meaninglessness. Indeed both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have often seemed so much a flouting of contemporary urban culture – of its energy, its ‘polyphonic’ nature, its ‘carnivalesque’ – that they could be said to be aspiring to a reactionary version of modernity, although Joyce figures most prominently as not just an aesthetic radical but a political one as well, as if the two were somehow interchangeable. Certainly, these fictions are, whatever else, elitist, both by design and in terms of reception, and their status in the world is inextricably tied up with their reserved nature. Those famous Eve Harding photographs of Marilyn Monroe seated on a child’s roundabout in shorts and a brightly coloured top, reading not at the beginning of Ulysses, where so many of us get ‘stuck’, but at its end, makes this point in a kitsch way but with great confidence nonetheless. Reading these texts denotes a connection with contemporaneity, even now, and it denotes membership to a select club. From this perspective, Virginia Woolf’s sense of Joyce as an ‘under bred’ writer, a Shemish figure flaunting himself ‘like some callow board school boy’ has seriously back-fired. The genuine distinction deemed to be possessed by the ‘self-conscious and egotistical’ Joyce text has largely prevailed, and something of its status rubs off on his fans.⁵ The ‘real’ Joyce aficionado – not the everyday reader who has ‘only’ read Dubliners and A Portrait and begun Ulysses many times, but the devotee ‘Joycean’ who has laboured with late Ulysses and the monstrosities of Finnegans Wake, commands a distinction framed by a familiar social logic. This is reproduced both in the work of professional ‘Joyceans’ committed to the decoding of the Joyce text, which inevitably means maintaining its hermeneutic status, and in social hierarchies sustained by education in terms of ‘intelligence’ and differences in intelligence.

The question of the relations between education and emancipation in the Joyce text is framed by parallel contradictions. Their open, polysemic nature rescues them from the authority and authoritarianism of the master reading, but only to those who can read their difficulty in such terms in the first place. More specifically on the matter of schooling and its capacity for emancipation, the early Joyce text in particular is much devoted to schooling. It is sometimes imagined as ‘autobiographical’ in this respect and coterminous with Joyce’s real life, as if it were somehow being written while it was being lived. In fact, it is a representation of schooling, the schooling of elites, written a long time after the event and engaging with the ways in which schooling was culturally reproduced. It draws on forms of radical education also contemporary with Joyce, the terms of which are configured in the dissent of his central character, Stephen Dedalus. It is, in almost all ways, a critique of the modernization of schooling. At the same time, it makes no commitment to the idea of education as emancipation. Indeed, this is one of the central points about the representation of education in Joyce. Its critique is on the grounds of the rights of the individual rather than social good or fairness and it is powered more by egoism than by a sense of social justice. The later texts perform as elitist literature, flouting their own schooled knowledge in such fields as grammar, rhetoric, language, literature, history and made-up subjects like ‘arithmosophy’ and, indeed, in ‘Wakese’ (FW, 134.14–15), effectively a made-up language. The earlier ones re-enact the conditions under which a singular elitist is made, or, perhaps more accurately, tries to make himself.

The impact of these complexities and contradictions and the way we now receive them is partly dependent on the gap between the early 1900s which saw the beginning of Joyce’s publishing life, and now, 2020, a period still centrally framed by the 1960s for people of my generation. Among much else, this was a time when sociology appeared on the point of discovering the workings of power and locating its mechanism in hierarchies of schooling. By the 1960s, schooling was perceived to be everywhere, and it embodied a central contradiction which attracted widespread attention from across the social, cultural and political spectrum. Schooling was held to be a mechanism for promoting social equality and at the same time functioned as the primary mechanism by which social inequality was engineered or ‘reproduced’. In France, that paradox, constructed now not as failure but as structural principle, had a profound influence on the development of new philosophy. It was taken up by Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault and informed the influential sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron. It also shaped the anti-philosophy of Jacques Rancière which, however pitched specifically against the sociologizing of learning, was likewise devoted to an explication of how social cohesion and consent was embedded in relations between schooling and the state.⁶ Unsurprisingly, the same paradox has shaped some of the most central education narratives of our time, including the contemporary narrative that constructs ‘neo-liberalism’ as a rolling back of the radical sixties, or of what some still regard as the post-war settlement.

None of that history was available to Joyce, of course. Schooling in the 1900s, as in the 1930s, was less than a century old and a seriously incomplete project. In the earlier part of the period as in the latter, working-class girls typically were excluded from education, state-funded or not, at any level above primary, as were the vast majority of working-class boys. Intermediate education was the preserve of a gendered elite; university education of an even smaller one. The situation was considerably exaggerated in colonial Ireland but not substantially different. In 1879, just 4,000 students took the Irish intermediate examination; by 1899, the figure had doubled to 9,000, still a very small proportion of 16-year-olds.⁷ The position was not much changed by the formation of the Republic. Not least for this reason of scale, education did not register in the same way as it does now, especially in relation to the issue of social justice. Until the end of the First World War, formal education much beyond 12 or 13 years old, however much it might have been aspired to, was in many ways a novelty rather than an everyday reality. The state’s authority over education’s governance was in its relatively early days. Such facts are not a prelude to an apologist account of Joyce but a simple reminder both that history matters in reading literature and that historical readings are just as problematic and provisional as any other – just as liable to ‘error’.

Education and the modern

Until fairly recently, education featured in the ‘background’ of Joyce studies, as important biographical context and a social reality reproduced in such texts as Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The publication of the books by Switaj and McGlazer changes that. With them, education moves to the centre of the things, which means that education now becomes important to understanding the late Joyce text too, the aesthetic upheaval famously sloganized by Eugene Jolas as ‘the revolution of the word’.⁸ In this sense, James Joyce and Education joins ranks with Switaj and McGlazer. This book also argues for a much more central ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Series editors’ introduction
• 1 Contexts and their problematics
• 2 ‘Pinocchio! Oh Pinocchio! You’re a boy! A real boy!’ – boyology and stories of childhood in Pearse and Joyce
• 3 ‘Is it with Paddy Stink and Mickey Mud?’ – systemization and portraits of the artist as schoolboy
• 4 Early Joyce and radical education
• 5 A Portrait of the Artist and the cultural politics of the public-school novel
• 6 Education and the social worlds of Ulysses
• 7 Ulysses and the age of informatics
• 8 Joyce and the textbook – ‘Oxen of the Sun’ and ‘Eumaeus’
• 9 ‘I’m not so ignorant’ – women and education
• 10 ‘Come si compita cunctitititilatus?’ – education and Finnegans Wake
• Bibliography
• Index