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

Abstract

Reviewed by: James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination by Michael Patrick Gillespie Robert A. Volpicelli James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination, by Michael Patrick Gillespie, pp. 192. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2015. $74.95 Exile is written plainly onto the surface of James Joyce’s writings. In the final pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen Dedalus calls upon “silence, exile, and cunning” as the means by which an aspiring poet will gain independence from family and fatherland. The passage conjures the parallel trajectory of its author, who inscribed his own flight from Ireland into the novel by dating the final page: “Dublin 1904 / Trieste 1914.” And yet, for all the frankness with which Joyce presents such departures, Michael Patrick Gillespie’s latest book shows how the familiar concept of exile contains within it unfamiliar complexities—and how our readings of Joyce acquire a new richness when we seek to position both him and his writing in the space between, say, Dublin and Trieste. Critics have long noted that Joyce’s critical stance toward Ireland and his decision to leave home are closely intertwined. According to Gillespie, however, stopping here merely reinforces the reductive portrait of exile that appears in Joyce criticism as well as in Irish studies more broadly. Placing Joyce in a larger tradition of exiled writers (including Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Beckett, and Edward Said), Gillespie’s introduction outlines how exile, whether self-imposed or externally mandated, impacts the aesthetic imagination. In many cases, this experience of displacement introduces into an author’s work an exilic style capable of oscillating between antithetical emotions—detachment and longing, hostility and nostalgia, rancor and sentimentality—when directed at the idea of a lost home. Notably, the emphasis here does not fall on any of exile’s particular emotional states, but rather, on the fact of oscillation itself, which then can be read across Joyce’s entire career in ways that challenge conventional interpretations of his texts. Gillespie’s first chapter is an overview of Joyce’s time abroad that makes strong use of documents like personal letters to show how the Modernist writer saw exile not just as a means of disassociating himself from his homeland, but also as a mode of engaging with it. While acknowledging that Joyce openly denounced Irish institutions like the Catholic church or the Yeats-led Irish Literary Revival, Gillespie primarily seeks to illustrate how attending to the exilic experience in greater detail reveals the “dual, conflicting impulses shading Joyce’s accounts of Ireland and Irish life.” The next chapter fleshes out this claim in readings of Dubliners (1914), a book that Joyce began writing only a few months before he left Ireland, in the summer of 1904. It is easy to read this collection’s final story, “The Dead,” as an apologia for the rest of the book’s harsh treatment of bourgeois Dublin life; yet Gillespie sees that a more nuanced view exists from the start. For example, in a reading of the collection’s first story, “The Sisters,” Gillespie uncovers the mixture of pain and sympathy that undergird [End Page 155] the narrator’s perspective as he stares up at the “faintly and evenly” lit window of the story’s dying priest. The moment is significant, for just when we might expect the priest—a metonym for the church—to find more of Joyce’s contempt, a glimmer of tenderness shines through. It is in dealing with subjects like sympathy, though, that Gillespie’s study could benefit from drawing on a vocabulary tied either to the philosophy of emotion (Adam Smith’s treatise on sympathy immediately comes to mind) or to recent writing on affect and the body (by theorists like Sara Ahmed, Brian Massumi, and Patricia Clough). Emotion, in general, might be a stronger thread in this book, especially since the British often leveraged the Celt’s apparent sentimentality into a justification for imperialism. Yet pointing to this potential area of development should not take away from Gillespie’s consistently counterintuitive and instructive readings, such as those contained within his third chapter on Portrait. Starting with Stephen’s stanch disavowal of his nation at...