Joyce & Betrayal

James Alexander Fraser

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137595874
• eBook ISBN: 9781137595881
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura general

This book offers a fundamental and comprehensive re-evaluation of one of Joyce's most pervasive themes. By showing that betrayal was central to how Joyce understood and depicted the difficulties and terrors at the heart of all relationships, this book re-conceives Joyce's approach to history, politics, and the other. Leaving behind the pathologizing discourses by which Joyce's interest in betrayal has been treated as an 'obsession,' this book offers a vision of Joyce as both dramatist and theorist of betrayal. It demonstrates that, rather than being compelled by some unconscious urge to produce and reproduce textual betrayals, Joyce had a deep and hard-won conception of the specific dramatic energies wrapped up in the language and structures of betrayal and repeatedly found ways to make use of this understanding in his work.

© The Author(s) 2016

James Alexander FraserJoyce & Betrayal10.1057/978-1-137-59588-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

James Alexander Fraser¹

(1)

University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

End Abstract

Betrayal: The Great Donnée of Joyce Studies

Even the most cursory reader of James Joyce is likely to pick up on his interest in betrayal. After all, this is far from a silent presence in his work, from Dubliners through to Finnegans Wake. Yet while his more committed readers—the writers and critics who have contributed to the already monumental body of commentary and exegesis that has built up over the last century—have similarly acknowledged this interest, there has been relatively little attempt to explain it critically. It is for this reason that I suggest that betrayal is one of the great données of Joycean criticism. It has become a “given” in the most problematic of senses—so much of the work that has been done on Joyce’s oeuvre over the last century has placed at or near its centre the assumption that Joyce was “obsessed” with betrayal. When James Fairhall suggested, in 1995, that “the theme of betrayal runs throughout Joyce’s writings,” he did so with the apparent certainty of someone not so much stating a position as acknowledging a fact.¹ The idea was an old one 35 years earlier, when William York Tindall, with a similar sense of treading on old ground, suggested that “betrayal…was one of Joyce’s central themes.”² Neil Davison, shortly after Fairhall, displayed the curious mix of insistence and unease that crops up time and again in discussions of Joycean betrayal: “The very idea of betrayal,” Davison suggests, “became, of course, a preoccupation of Joyce’s adult life”—the “of course” is significant.³ It seems that by the mid-1990s (if not earlier), it was no longer acceptable to speak of betrayal in Joyce’s work without apologizing to the reader for what was, the writer was keen to stress, a digression into “well-known” territory. This deferral of argumentation is important, since while it is rarely made clear to what seminal, conclusive critical study we owe this knowledge (that Joyce was obsessed by betrayal), we are encouraged to see it as a matter more or less closed for discussion. The work has already been done, but it’s never quite clear precisely where or precisely when. What we can say with certainty, it seems, is that it was done long enough ago as to be common knowledge. Since the reader is assumed to know everything there is to know on this subject, then, it is seen as best for the critic to move on quickly to matters that are seen as more novel and, therefore, more worthy of critics’ and readers’ time. This book is, in a sense, an attempt to reverse this trend, to draw attention to Joycean betrayal while making no apologies for doing so: for choosing to linger on its intricacies and its indeterminacies, to unravel the significance of a topic that has been seen, paradoxically, to be too central to Joyce’s thought to be worthy of further study.

The complacency within Joycean studies on this issue is evident from the language that has been adopted to discuss it. While Tindall’s suggestion that betrayal was one of Joyce’s “central themes” leaves open the question of what this centrality might mean, he also makes use of a quite different, more problematic register: “[B]etrayal, [is] one of the most evident [themes] in Exiles, and if we may judge by its presence in A Portrait and Ulysses, one of Joyce’s obsessions.”⁴ Davison, after speaking more coyly about Joyce’s “preoccupation” also describes it as an “obsession.”⁵ The linguistic shift that occurs here is telling, since both “preoccupation” and “obsession,” rather than offer an explanation or description of Joycean betrayal, attempt instead to pathologize it. When we speak of prevailing motifs and “central themes” we are speaking of a predominately volitional interest, but “obsession” suggests that this interest is so extreme in type and/or extent that it moves beyond the normal range of explicable action. In using the language of compulsion, we tacitly accept that this aspect of Joyce’s writing is, fundamentally, inaccessible to analysis (except, perhaps, psychoanalysis). There have certainly been (problematic) attempts to analyse Joyce as a product of his “obsession” with betrayal,⁶ but more commonly this pathologization merely allows for betrayal to be set aside altogether. Once we have acknowledged its importance, we can safely ignore it. The question of the how, why, and what for is answered by its own circular logic: Joyce writes about betrayal because he is obsessed by betrayal, he is obsessed by betrayal because…The only possible continuation of this line of thought is an unsatisfying recurrence or a psychoanalytic foray into the author’s unconscious mind. So totemically incontrovertible is Joyce’s “preoccupation” with betrayal, I suggest, that it has shut off potentially fruitful avenues of exploration. We might forgive Andrew Gibson for engaging this language when he claims that Joyce was “obsessed by betrayal. He was obsessed with it in personal, historical and political terms.”⁷ In this case, Gibson’s intention is to shake up, with typical rhetorical adroitness, a stagnating field of study. In calling on the force of “obsession,” Gibson can bring home to his reader just how central betrayal was to Joyce’s thinking and writing. But while his intentions are laudable, it isn’t clear that appealing to the very language that typifies the critical complacency surrounding the subject is an effective way to combat it. The effect, intended or not, is to cast Joyce’s exposure of betrayal in the same murky light as the “cloacal obsession” that H. G. Wells identified and named. As with those “[c]oarse, unfamiliar words,” the theme of betrayal “seems to be deliberately obtruded.” By pathologizing it, and apologizing for it, Wells denudes Joyce’s carefully constructed unseemliness of its power and interest.⁸ The damage is done not by Wells’s disapproval, but by his insistence that the matter was “by the way…The value of Mr. Joyce’s book has little to do with its incidental insanitary condition.”⁹ This is the power of pathologizing critical discourse: it asserts the centrality of some element of the text under discussion even as it insists that that element is entirely incidental (since sourced in some authorial quirk). We can see that this is precisely the opposite of what was intended by Gibson (among others), but there is a danger implicit in this pathological language that has come to fruition, I suggest, in the strange lack of direct studies on this matter over the last century of criticism.

It isn’t just that this is the first book to set its stall out as a study of “Joycean betrayal,” but that betrayal has been oddly overlooked as an object of critical inquiry even in those studies that place it at or near the centre of their conception of Joyce’s work. We can get a sense of this oversight by looking at the indexes of the books that have been written on Joyce’s work. While problematic as an absolute measure of the nature and extent of the work contained within a book, an index must, if it is to have any value, offer some considerable insight into the contents of the book it indexes. Even if compiled by a neutral party with no expertise in the field, an index responds to the stress placed on themes and issues within the text itself. In all cases it carries with it a strong indication of what is considered “of interest” to the author; what the author of the text expected her readers to find interesting; and, in some cases, what the publisher and/or editor deemed worthy of reference. It is striking then that so very few books from any period of Joyce studies should choose to index betrayal. This is as true of biographies and general investigations of Joyce’s work—such as Steven Connor’s James Joyce,¹⁰ Lee Spinks’s James Joyce: A Critical Guide,¹¹ Morris Beja’s James Joyce: A Literary Life,¹² Sydney Bolt’s A Preface to James Joyce,¹³ Stan Gebler Davies’s James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist,¹⁴ Mitzi Brunsdale’s James Joyce: A Study of the Short Fiction,¹⁵ and Richard Ellmann’s The Consciousness of Joyce ¹⁶ and Ulysses on the Liffey ¹⁷—as it is of more targeted investigations. Books with clear reason to discuss Joycean betrayal do not acknowledge this in their indexes. Bernard Benstock’s The Undiscovered Country, which deals directly with Joyce’s “exilic condition,” does not index betrayal;¹⁸ Sheldon Brivic’s Joyce Waking Women,¹⁹ which deals directly with female entrapment and liberation, most relevantly in reference to adultery among other things, does not; Lucia Boldrini’s Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations ²⁰ does not; Joseph Valente’s The Problem of Justice ²¹ does not; Sean P. Murphy’s James Joyce and Victims ²² does not. Joyceans are not alone in taking Joycean betrayal lightly. An ambitious recent collection, Playing False: Representations of Betrayal, which seeks to “gain a fresh perspective on betrayal” makes no reference to Joyce at all, despite giving time to Dante, Chaucer, Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, Leonard Cohen, and Anatole Broyard, to name only a very few.²³ Joycean betrayal, it seems, is that which falls through the cracks; it is everywhere and nowhere; at the centre and at the periphery. In many of these cases, the problem is that, even when the authors are discussing issues of great importance to Joycean betrayal, they tend to shy away from tackling these problems head on. But other texts discuss betrayal more clearly and yet do so with a reticence that is worrying. Zack Bowen’s Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce ²⁴ does not index betrayal, yet there are clear references to the topic on pages 32, 104, 215, 312, 313, and 315. Bowen is informative on the subject, yet betrayal does not stand out for him, even though it acts as a unifying theme behind many of the allusions he lists. Len Platt similarly discusses betrayal informatively at several points in James Joyce: Texts and Contexts,²⁵ yet does not allow these discussions to coalesce into either an index entry or a more general discussion. This is not merely the complaint of a former graduate student who has had to go the long way round every obstacle, stumbling blindly and without a road map. This tendency in Joyce studies to push betrayal to the edge of discussion is not only suppressing new answers to an old question, it is allowing an imperfect and at times contradictory model of Joycean betrayal to harden ever further. Joycean betrayal is so rarely indexed because until now it has not been clear who precisely would be looking for it: Why search for something that is both everywhere and common knowledge?

The sense of ennui around this topic (the sense that everything there is to be said has already been said) seems to have set in sometime shortly after the publication of Richa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Writing Drama, Writing Betrayal: Joyce’s Triestine Non-Fiction
• 3. “Boyhood” as “Death”: Betrayal in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• 4. “A nation exacts a penance”: Platonic Betrayal and Heroic Return in Exiles
• 5. “Like thieves in the night”: Sexual Betrayal as Dispossession in Exiles
• 6. Betrayal, Stagnation, and the Family Romantic in Ulysses
• 7. Betraying Bloom
• 8. Sexual Betrayal in “Penelope”
• Backmatter