Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce

David P. Rando

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350236547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

Hope and future are not the terms with which James Joyce has usually been read, but this book paints a picture of Joyce's fiction in which hope and future assume the primary colours.
Rando explores how Joyce's texts, as early as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, delineate a complex hope that is oriented toward the future with restlessness, dissatisfaction, and invention. He examines how Joyce envisions alternatives to the prevailing conventions of hope throughout his works and, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, develops formal techniques of spatializing hope to contemplate it from all sides.
Casting fresh light on the ways in which hope animates key aspects of Joyce's approach to literary content and form, Rando moves beyond the limitations of negative critique and literary historicism to present a Joyce who thinks agilely about the future, politics, and possibility.

1 Without Paralysis: Hope, Hunger, and Spiritual Liberation in Dubliners

Hope, as articulated in the work of Ernst Bloch, is a historical, forward-looking process, open to possibilities not necessarily imaginable in advance, resistant to apotheosis, and linked to the socioeconomic conditions of hunger. Through this lens, this chapter departs from both classical and post-structuralist “paralysis” readings of Joyce and reconceives the politics of spiritual liberation in Dubliners as a dialectic between hope and hunger. It argues that the many moments of humiliation and defeat in Joyce’s Dubliners are also moments in which characters hope for something better than is offered by the present world. It dissociates epiphany from both the classical function of narrative closure and the post-structuralist model of textual impasse and argues for the productive role of simony in mediating between the material and spiritual worlds. Finally, it concludes with a new view of spiritual liberation in Dubliners, one that envisions the “journey westward” as a searching, restless, and future-oriented negation of received and prevailing utopias of liberation.

Dubliners depicts characters in states of paralysis: this is perhaps the only idea in the critical history of Joyce’s stories to have endured virtually every shift in methodology. Whether through attention to the stories’ formal patterns or structures, their gaps and silences, characters’ psychology, or through depictions of Irish culture and history, readers with many different critical allegiances have variously affirmed a fundamental paralysis at the heart of Dubliners.¹ Early in the critical tradition, for example, Hugh Kenner argued that Dubliners presents characters in a state of “living death.”² Later, Morris Beja found a formalist pattern of “bondage and escape” in the stories, emphasizing “the frustration and fears, as well as the hopes”³ of the characters. More recently, Trevor Williams, looking through a political lens, views the hopelessness that derives from Ireland’s domination by England and the Catholic Church as leading to “the way of paralysis.”⁴ Luke Gibbons, from an Irish historical perspective, connects the early twentieth-century discourse of post-Famine Irish “enervation” to paralysis in Dubliners.⁵ And in their introduction to Collaborative Dubliners, a recent collection of critical essays on the stories, Vicki Mahaffey and Jill Shashaty argue, “readers of Dubliners are asked to join the author in a scrupulous analysis of the paralysis—rooted in hopelessness—that precludes characters (like many of the readers they mirror) from seeing themselves accurately, and from acting with a greater degree of freedom.”⁶ Although recent scholarship reflects a vast range of concerns, these pursuits are often built on the bedrock of paralysis.

Such consistency across critical periods and methods suggests that the paralysis thesis is probably here to stay in some form. Joyce himself, in a letter to his reluctant publisher Grant Richards, described Dublin as Ireland’s “centre of paralysis.”⁷ Nor is this view perversely to be discredited, as each of the mentioned readings accesses something true about the stories. But paralysis is only part of the story of Dubliners and to overemphasize paralysis is to distort the stories. For the situation has always been most complex. For one thing, as Anne Fogarty reminds us, although Joyce’s authorial comments about Dubliners in his letters to Richards have been made to carry considerable critical weight in Joyce studies, the extent to which they reflect what Joyce intended has probably been inflated in critical practice.⁸

In addition, even when we entertain them in context, Joyce’s authorial pronouncements still imply a mode of reception whose operation is far from self-evident. For instance, Joyce refers to Dubliners as the “first step towards the spiritual liberation”⁹ of Ireland, suggesting that his stories could have a salutary effect on the population about which he wrote. But how are we to move from literary text to spiritual liberation? To Richards, Joyce offers only metaphor: “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”¹⁰ But how can a literary reflection move Irish readers toward spiritual liberation? Are readers supposed to absorb the paralysis depicted in the stories, identify with it, and then reform their lives? Stage a rebellion? The mirror is foggy at best. Critics of Dubliners have thus always been called upon to square representations of paralysis with hopes for spiritual liberation via an implied theory of literary representation or reflection, a challenge that goes to the heart of the way we view the spiritual and political meaning and operations of literature.

When Joyce evokes spiritual liberation, he signals that paralysis exists in a dialectical relationship with three categories that have too often gone unrecognized in the critical history of Dubliners: hope, wish, and future. All critics agree that paralysis exerts tremendous pressure in the stories against any trace of hope, wish, and future: characters lose and then lose some more. Their hopes, wishes, and ideal futures are dashed with sometimes cruel swiftness. Yet we miss something crucial about Joyce’s textual politics and his sense of spiritual liberation if we dismiss the wishful side of this dialectic. To understand Dubliners through a dialectic of paralysis with hope, wish, and future is to open a political alternative to a whole spectrum of conclusions about Dubliners that range from the early days of Joyce criticism, when Joyce was styled as an apolitical aesthete or as a political defeatist of the “We-can’t-change-the-country-Let-us-change-the-subject” variety,¹¹ to the more recent tendency to see Joyce’s work as directed against and politically subversive of specific oppressive authorities.

Exemplifying the latter view, Mahaffey and Shashaty argue that Dubliners invites readers into “frustrated, paralyzed lives in order to bring the psychic, social, and political structures of frustration and paralysis to light. The hope is that understanding may produce motivation: the motivation to try to dismantle such structures—not in the fictional world, but in the reader’s.”¹² This approach is fairly typical of the way Joyce’s textual politics were understood to work during the post-structuralist era. The then-dominant model of how Dubliners might achieve a spiritual effect was through subversive representation. Although the exact mechanism of subversion varies from critic to critic, the consistent idea is that while Joyce’s stories depict paralysis, they also function textually to undermine or resist the colonial, political, or religious authority that causes paralysis.¹³ A critic might read the stories as representing characters paralyzed by ideological and institutional oppression, but he or she might also argue that because of the force with which Joyce depicts paralysis the stories take on political, subversive potential against these oppressors.¹⁴ Or, more subtly, a critic might demonstrate that the gaps and indeterminacies of the stories train readers to brush the texts against the grain and to distrust the authority of the narrative voice. In this way, the text passes on oppositional and potentially subversive modes of thinking to the audience. Here, the argument is that Dubliners makes rebels out of readers.¹⁵

It would be incorrect to suggest that there is nothing subversive in Joyce or that these views do not capture something typical of him. After all, the modernist aesthetic itself is premised at least in part on subverting earlier aesthetic ideologies and taboos through innovation and formal defiance, and Joyce often approaches literary, religious, and colonial authorities critically, or even with an irreverence that in Finnegans Wake he calls “general thumbtonosery” (253.28). However, as Enda Duffy observes, in Joyce’s critical history the subversive hand has been overplayed. As noted in the introduction, Duffy calls subversion “that much overused term in Joyce criticism,” and argues, “It is not that Joyce’s excessive language in itself … is political because it is somehow (for example, satirically) subversive; rather, it is his moments when he strives to let us see through the intensity of his words that, for a politically active aesthetic, are key.”¹⁶ As the preoccupations and modes of reading associated with post-structuralism continue to wane in literary studies, we have an opportunity to reassess basic assumptions about the ways in which Joyce’s texts function politically and spiritually. Specifically, it is a ripe time to rethink the connection between Dubliners and spiritual liberation, especially the politically active literary mechanisms through which we imagine that liberation might be achieved. How might our sense of Joyce’s innovations and operations in fiction expand if we begin, for instance, with the premise that paralysis and subversion are only parts, more modest than previously thought, of the larger political operation of Joyce’s texts?

Such a shift would reveal a Joyce whose relationship to future possibility is richer than previously understood. Fritz Senn suggests something of this possibility when he argues that Dubliners derives its complexity through “unforeseen augmentations that can be disruptive and unsettling.”¹⁷ In Joyce, the future hardly ever arrives in the manner predicted or in the political form desired in advance. Instead, the kind of futures that Dubliners implies are unpredictable ones that are born from daily wishing, changes of habit, redirections of hope, and from Joyce’s resilient sense of the profound openness of the future. Joyce’s hope is rooted in the material conditions of daily Dublin life, especially in the conditions of poverty and hunger. In Dubliners Joyce creates characters whose lives are saturated at all points with hunger and hopes, hopes that are usually poisonously vain or fatally misdirected. Yet Joyce’s posited vision of the future in Dubliners is one in which characters and readers recognize the unpredictable and productive power of rechanneling self-destructive hopes in new directions. For Joyce, the future will not arrive down a political and spiritual path of the already-known, but rather by directing wish toward unknown or even unnamable political and spiritual paths. In this view, Joycean liberation is less a matter of naïve hope or doomed hopelessness, salvation or subversion, but more one of struggling to imagine forms of liberation that have yet to be imagined, which therefore can only be mediated through fiction in relation to the future as a state of emergence.

Two Hungry Gallants

For Bloch, hope is an expectant emotion born from hunger, which he posits as the fundamental human drive of self-prese...