James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination by Michael Patrick Gillespie (review)

Abstract

GILLESPIE, MICHAEL PATRICK. James and Exilic Imagination. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015. 192 pp. $74.95 cloth. Perhaps not all contemporary explorations of authors and exile in twentieth century begin with Edward Said, but a quick perusal of will prove that many do, including Michael Patrick Gillespie's excellent work on James Joyce. Gillespie, who has also edited Foundational Essays in James Studies (2011) for same series (The Florida James Joyce), follows other critics exploring curious case of exile in modern world by quoting Said (here, from Mind of Winter: Reflections of Life in Exile, Harper's, September 1984, 49-55) early on: homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience (6). Gillespie is interested, predominantly, in two facets of exilic experience: primarily, but also modern (post-Enlightenment era) condition more generally. He seeks to understand the parameters of material world out of which these authors wrote and...the hardships of world they felt forced to leave in order to continue to write (9). Naturally, and as Gillespie understands, there are endless variables in play for any particular exiled individual. For Joyce, living in Ireland (from which exile is an all too common experience...for at least fifteen hundred years [16]), exile all but inevitable. Gillespie agrees with prominent biographer Richard Ellman and others that Joyce's exile was of his own volition (20); even so, Joyce felt, with absolutely no hesitation, that irremediable social, cultural [including religious, of course], and creative conditions compelled him to leave. In chapter 1 Gillespie explores these conditions, from Joyce's brother Stanislaus's influence to cultural and artistic milieu in which Dublin and Ireland existed in beginning of twentieth century. He is wise, however, to keep this exploration short, as it has been gone over already, instead focusing his inquiry into five subsequent chapters of close reading and discussion: Dubliners: The First Glimpse of Ireland from Abroad; Stephen Dedalus's Lifelong Exile; Re-Viewing Richard: Nostalgia and Rancor in Exiles; Ulysses: Exiles on Main Street; and Finnegans Wake and Exile's Return. We all know that Dubliners is Joyce's first book-length published work, and yet it is not a novel (and, thus, perhaps, not focus of this journal). But because of Ulysses, this little book (its publication so complicated and controversial in its own right) is often overlooked as something of a warm-up in supposed lesser genre of short story. I don't share this impulse, and, thankfully, neither does Gillespie. He starts this chapter with that famous line from Dead--The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward (35)--as a way of having a little fun, for left Ireland in 1904 and went progressively farther east. …