JAMES JOYCE AND “EASTERN EUROPE”: AN INTRODUCTION

Abstract

For a major writer in the English language, James Joyce's acquaintance with what for the moment we shall call Europe is exceptionally rich. For the fact that this relationship remains relatively little known, [i]t seems, as Joyce's Haines would say in Ulysses, history is to blame (U 1.649) - or, more precisely, the long-standing isolation that followed from this region being assigned to the Eastern, Soviet-dominated side of the Iron Curtain after World War II. The much contested concept of whose definition has been at least as variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning (FW 118.22-3) as the many languages within its bounds, did not, of course, exist in Joyce's time, arising ultimately as a result of the Cold War. In spite of this apparent anachronism, this term will here be used to indicate countries that belong geographically to Central, Southern or Eastern Europe, but were fated to fall under Soviet influence after World War II and were known for roughly four subsequent decades as the Bloc. Having lived between 1904 and 1915 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Joyce had of course ample firsthand experience of a state which included territories belonging to and population deriving from several countries later subsumed under the category of Europe - Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Bohemia, Slovakia, as well as Serbia, Albania, Romania, Poland and Ukraine.1Although Joyce's relationship with Eastern European cultures was rich and complex, scholarly explorations of these facets have been relatively meagre. The organizers and sponsors of the 2006 International James Joyce Symposium of Budapest and Szombathely, held for the first time ever behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain, very consciously tried to take a step towards remedying this omission. Bearing the theme of Unions, the symposium took place in a country that, with several other ex-Eastern Bloc countries, had acceded to membership of the European Union two years earlier. With the help of special grants, this conference attracted an unprecedented number of Eastern European scholars. This essay is inspired by and greatly indebted to their contributions. I was stimulated in particular by Marianna Gula's analysis of the youthful Joyce's response to Ecce Homo (1896), a monumental painting by the Hungarian painter Mihaly Munkacsy (1844-1900), Arleen Ionescu's discussion of Joycean influence in the fiction and criticism of the Romanian writer Ion Biberi (1904-1990), Tatjana Jukic's exploration of the fate of Joycean spectres at the hand of the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis (1935-1989) and his critics, and Ferenc Takacs's plenary on the Cyclopean resurgence of nationalism in the region.2In what follows I shall attempt to give a sketch of three major aspects of Joyce's interaction with the region. After briefly summarizing Joyce's encounters with Eastern Europe, I shall discuss a number of common features in the fate of translations and critical responses to Joyce's work in the region. Finally and perhaps most importantly, the workings of some fundamental Eastern European motifs and themes in Joyce's oeuvre will be discussed. Although I draw on the work of many scholars, this introduction has a Hungarian emphasis. This is a natural result partly of Bloom's Hungarian roots, partly of my own limitations. I shall, in particular, be using the figures of the Hungarian Mihaly Munkacsy and the Yugoslav (MontenegrinSerbian-Jewish-Hungarian) Danilo Kis to make sense of some of Joyce's uses of Eastern Europe. As Munkacsy was a painter whose painting provided at least a pretext for the young Joyce to clarify his views on art, and Kis regarded himself both personally and artistically related to Joyce's fiction, a discussion of these two Eastern European artists also stresses the mutual influence between the region and the Irish writer. Relying on the examples of Munkacsy and Kis I shall argue that Joyce's work, especially Ulysses, reflects a grasp of some of the foundational experience of the inhabitants of Eastern Europe. …