Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces by Gerry Smyth

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce: Joyces Noyces by Gerry Smyth Annika J. Lindskog (bio) MUSIC AND SOUND IN THE LIFE AND LITERATURE OF JAMES JOYCE: JOYCES NOYCES, by Gerry Smyth. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 268 pp. $90.00. Before James Joyce settled on becoming a writer, he was drawn to music and considered a career as a singer. This passion is evident in his writing in many different ways, starting with the rhythms of Chamber Music and on to "The Lass of Aughrim," which so shakes Gretta in "The Dead"—"Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter"1—and the experimental "ear" episode in Ulysses, "Sirens."2 In another way, music is omnipresent in Joyce's writing in the prosody of his language and his perceptiveness to sounds. In the words of Clive Bell, who was not a particular fan, Joyce wrote a kind of "jazz prose," one of the first critical comments on the musical aspects of Joyce's works.3 Music in Joyce's works has since drawn considerable critical attention, with studies by Zack Bowen, Jack W. Weaver, Matthew Hodgart and Ruth Bauerle, Brad Bucknell, and Michelle Witen, which is just to scratch the surface.4 With his latest study, Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce, Gerry Smyth again adds to what he himself specifies as a "subfield" within the Joyce critical industry that was there from the start (66). I write "again" since this is not, in fact, Smyth's first foray into musical Joyce; his Celtic Tiger Blues: Music and Irish Identity has several chapters on Joyce's Chamber Music.5 He has also written essays on other aspects of Joyce, most notably on betrayal, and widely on Irish literature and music.6 Do we need another book on Joyce and music? I am not fully convinced, even though Smyth writes well and interestingly on almost all topics he approaches. He is not particularly explicit about what he brings to the conversation; while he spends some thirty pages on previous criticism of musical Joyce—a huge favor to any future critic venturing into this field—he never really positions his own work vis-à-vis this scholarship. As he himself acknowledges, his study offers "no specific 'thesis' to bring to bear other than its focus on JJ's response to music as both a personal predilection and a professional opportunity" (91). Much as Smyth makes "thesis" sound like a bit of a dirty word here, this is a fair description of his study, in which he does not present a unified picture of music in Joyce's works, but rather dips down a little here and there, as he pleases. This approach works mostly well and enables Smyth—especially in the second half of the study—to offer more sustained analysis of some of Joyce's "noyces" rather than to give a more cursory account of the whole. At times, though, I wish that Smyth would help his readers more; he sometimes neglects not only to offer any thesis but to tell us what he is about at all, which makes for difficult reading. This is the [End Page 369] case with the fragmentary and confusing "Three Lives" (4) that opens the study and offers three brief biographical sketches of Irish musicians (Edward Ceannt, Ina Boyle, and John McCormack). Apparently, the chapter reflects "issue[s] bearing upon Joyce's musical imagination" (3), or so the abstract in the electronic edition informs me—the text itself does not explain how or even mention Joyce, except in the last sketch, where Smyth notes that "JJ's profuse admiration for McCormack . . . remained tinged with jealousy" (7). McCormack is also the only musician of the three who reappears in the study. "Three Lives" opens the first of two larger sections in the text, which is called "Reading and Writing" (1). Here, Smyth discusses various topics that are sometimes related to Joyce but at other times delve more into the musical context of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For example, Smyth considers whether Joyce could have become a composer (possibly), his...