James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (review)

Abstract

A book about Joyce, modernism and the therapeutics of reading, Jean-Michel Rabaté's James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism questions Umberto Eco's account of modern fiction's "ideal reader." Rabaté notes that although Eco in The Limits of Interpretation "admits that the 'ideal reader' of [Finnegans] Wake could indeed be described as a 'deconstructionist reader,' for whom texts are inexhaustible, for whom any true interpretation is a creative misprision, and in short for whom there can only be an 'infinite series of original re-creations,'" Eco shies away from the implications of the paradigm: "'It is impossible,'" Eco writes, "'to say which is the best interpretation of a text, but it is possible to say which ones are wrong . . . How to prove that a given interpretive conjecture is . . . at least an acceptable one? The only way is to check it against the text as a coherent whole. . . [it] must be rejected if it is challenged, by another portion of the [End Page 573] same text. In this sense the internal textual coherence controls the otherwise uncontrollable drift of the reader'"(197-8). 1 For Rabaté, however, this last qualification misses the point of Joyce's work, especially that of FinnegansWake, where Joyce strives to leave behind the dead hand of any authority and to create what a telling notebook entry calls: "revolution of the word / manage- / burial of old sense" (208).