Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and The Revolution of the Word (1978)

Abstract

In 1968, Jacques Derrida announced in a footnote to a lengthy essay on ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in the avant-garde journal Tel Quel that, ‘of course’, the essay ‘was only a reading of Finnegans Wake’and from the early 1970s Tel Quel itself began publication of a series of significant pieces on Joyce’s work; pieces that then prompted Jacques Lacan to turn his attention to Joyce (indeed, Lacan was to deliver the opening lecture at the 1975 International Joyce Symposium in Paris). lames Joyce and The Revolution of the Word was written in the context of this French interest which stressed the force of Joyce’s project, the revolutionary nature of his writing. The book provided an account of Joyce’s significance (and of his significance today) that served to introduce into ‘Joyce studies’ and the wider English-speaking academic milieu many of the theoretical concepts and issues being raised in France at the time. Welcomed by many of the Joyceans, whose close encounters with Joyce’s writing no doubt left them open to its theses, the book was received more generally by members of the British academic literary establishment as a threat to their certainties of tradition and criticism — not least because of its emphasis on Finnegans Wake as fundamental text (the Wake had long been cast far beyond the pale of that tradition and criticism).