This volume attempts nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way that we approach, discuss, and evaluate Joyceâs non-fictional writings . Rather than simply proposing or applying new methodologies, it historicises and reconceives the critical assumptions that have shaped scholarly approaches to these works for over half a decade. More than that, it pays attention to the ways that non-fiction as a categorical distinction, no matter how intuitively sensible it appears, crumbles under closer inspection. Joyceâs non -fiction, precisely as a result of its questionable status both within his wider work and as standalone acts of composition, provides a case study for the re-examination of the ideological forces that shape this distinction. The boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are replaced in this volume by an expanding series of negotiable and fluid formal characteristics; the way that these characteristics interact with and are framed by critical commentary and modes of publication are kept in focus so as not to suppress features that otherwise come to the fore. In this sense, this volume acts not only as a vital reimagining of our critical relationship to Joyceâs non-fiction, but, as we show later in this introduction, as a contribution to similar debates being carried out across the broad range of modernist studies in the wake of copyright cessation in several major territories. As the works of those authors of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s come increasingly into the public domain, scholars face significant challenges that go beyond the traditional questions of attribution and dating. The corpus of these authorsâ words, taken as a whole, is reaching a position of instability and flux that this volume is among the first to consider.
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Attempting to come to terms with Jane Austenâs unfinished second novel, Virginia Woolf responded in a way that readers of Joyceâs non-fiction might recognise:
With the majority of Joyceâs non-fiction coming to public notice in a busy decade spanning the mid-1950s and 1960s, after Joyce was already well on the way to being established as an emblem of an international, humanist , disengagement with political specificity, many readers can be forgiven for responding to Joyceâs non-fiction as if it were an afterthought. An aberrance in the consistent text of his authorial, biographical persona. Whereas a relatively engaged reader might have read (or heardâseveral of Woolfâs most noted critical works were originally delivered as lectures) Woolfâs criticism alongside her novels and Eliotâs alongside his poetry, the majority of Joyceâs non-fiction did not even appear for critical readers (let alone general readers) until almost twenty years after his death. As such, if not always deemed âsecond -rate,â this work has at the least almost always been treated as secondary to and separate from the âproperâ and first objects of our critical attention: Joyceâs fictional output.The second -rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces [sic]. Here [Austenâs] difficulties are more apparent and the method she took to overcome them less artfully concealed.1
As the critical history of Joyceâs poetry has suggested, belatedness is not the only cause of this minor status. Joyce was a published poet before he was a published novelist and before his short stories were available to any but the readers of the Irish Homestead (Chamber Music was published in 1907) and, unlike his Triestine journalism , his poetry was made available to the same audiences that would consume and champion his fiction ââI Hear an Armyâ was published in Poundâs Des Imagistes: An Anthology in February 1914, the same month that the Egoist published the first instalment of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.2 In Des Imagistes, Joyce was sandwiched neatly between William Carlos Williams and Pound himself.3 And yet this simultaneity of poetry and prose did not save Joyceâs poetry from a secondary status. Rebecca Westâs response to Joyceâs poem âAlone,â from Pomes Penyeach, offers an amusing alternative to Woolfâs mode of reading Austenâs âsecond -rateâ work.
And because he had written it I was pleased, though not at all as the mean are when they find that the mighty have fallen, for had he written three hundred poems as bad as this his prose works would still prove him beyond argument a writer of majestic genius [âŚ]. In those eight lines he had ceased to belong to our enemies, the facts we do not comprehend; he had passed over and become one of our friends [âŚ]. For really, I reflected [âŚ] this makes it quite plain that Mr James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.4
Even now, as we rapidly approach two decades since the publication of Kevin Barryâs revised collection of Joyceâs non-fiction and three decades since the Faber Poems and Shorter Writings, what readerâstudent, general, or otherwiseâturns to this material as an object of interest in and of itself? And there are obvious justifications for the sidelining of much of this work. It is notable that, in contrast to Marc C. Connerâs approach in The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered, in this collection no one calls for the blanket reappraisal of Joyceâs journalism as radically undervalued in and of itself.5
Yet, for all this, we see little profit in treating Joyceâs journalism as simply âsecond-rateâ versions of his novelistic masterpieces in the way that Woolf is tempted to do with Austenâs own, admittedly more novelistic, early creations. There is something intuitively absurd about placing all of Joyceâs divergent literary and non-literary productions on a single continuum and assigning the earlier works an uncomplicated teleological function: âThe Motor Derbyâ begets âAfter the Raceâ and thus has meaning in these terms alone. Can we, without significant mental gymnastics, really maintain that âIsland of Saints and Sagesâ and Finnegans Wake were part of a single, unbroken enterprise, the latter fulfilling the promise of the former? Certainly, these works share many features, some of them more obvious than others, that criticism can and should attempt to proliferate and investigate. But to establish Finnegans Wakeâor Ulysses for that matterâas the natural endpoint of Joyceâs non-fiction is as erroneous as severing them entirely. It is to fatally suppress the many variances in their conception, composition, and dissemination.
While we will shortly discuss the role that early Joyce criticism played in this act of severance, we must acknowledge that Joyce himself, as well as the literary milieu of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, shares some of the responsibility for the separation that occurred. When Djuna Barnes met Joyce in 1921, she was âmostly known as the brilliant New York journalist sent by McCallâs Magazine [âŚ] to observe the Left Bank scene.â6 Yet neither she nor Joyce makes any reference to Joyceâs own experience as a jobbing journalist in either of her journalistic treatments of him.7 It is highly likely that despite Barnesâs knowledge of Joyceâs earlier workâwhich she lists in a display of performative fandom in the pieceâshe was unaware that he had written occasionally for a little-known newspaper in Trieste , or as an unsigned reviewer for newspapers including the Daily Express. But she didnât ask and Joyce didnât tell her, even though he offered her the apparently cherished advice that the subject of journalism was the extraordinary, literature the commonplace. She should ânever write about an unusual subject,â he said, âmake the common unusual.â8 Even though Barnes is effectively at this point a journalist talking to an author of fiction (with a history of journalism behind him), this wisdom is delivered and received as being from one writer of fiction to another.
For her own part, the eccentric, bohemian life of Greenwich Village and Paris from the mid-1910s to the 1930s fed into her journalism , but also came to define her critical reception. As Daniela Caselli puts it, Barnes âappear[s] more often in paragraphs than monographs.â9 Whereas Joyceâs journalism appeared as an awkward addendum after his position had been irrevocably established, Barnesâs journalistic work cataloguing the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century had, until a recent upturn in i...