Preface

Abstract

Preface Philip Sicker and Moshe Gold Two of the incisive essays in this 2011 volume of Joyce Studies Annual might be said to illustrate Wolfgang Iser's observation that "indeterminacy is the fundamental precondition for reader participation." However, as Kimberley Devlin demonstrates in "Rereading Ulysses: Indeterminacy, Error and Fixing the Past," the hermeneutic scrutiny that Joyce's novel demands often leads interpreters to resolve textual gaps "without acknowledging readerly inference." Citing Bloom's familiar thought, "Could never like it again after Rudy," Devlin notes that the statement lacks an identified subject (she, I, or we) and turns ambiguously on the unspecified pronoun "it." How readers fill in these absences shapes their understanding of the extent to which Bloom and Molly have suspended sexual relations after Rudy's death and which partner is to blame for weakening their relationship. Devlin demonstrates that these unresolved questions of cause and effect are compounded by inconsistencies in Joyce's calculation of ages, dates, and places of residence. In particular, conflicting references to the couple's succession of lodgings in Dublin between 1893 and 1895 only deepen confusions about precisely when and why the Blooms' marriage began to unravel. Given this unreliable fictive data, Devlin cautions against "fixing the past" in Ulysses too insistently and reminds us that "some textual indeterminacy will remain in the land of speculation—an intriguing albeit labyrinthine place to visit." J. Stephen Murphy illuminates another source of textual incertitude in his genetic study "How Geen Is the Portrait: Joyce, Passive Revision, and the History of Modernism," which focuses on Joyce's curious failure, in reviewing the Portrait typescript, to restore the word "geen" (Stephen's lisping mispronunciation on the first page) in place of the apparent misprint "green." Murphy argues that Hans Walter Gabler's restoration of the fair copy manuscript "geen" in his 1993 edition reflects a misunderstanding of Joyce's changing approach to revision. Challenging the conventional "centripetal" idea of modernist revision, advanced by Flaubert, [End Page ix] Pater, and Pound, as the scrupulous reduction of language to some formal essence by an author-god, Murphy contends that in transforming Stephen Hero into Portrait, Joyce cast off this aesthetic along with the Stephen Dedalus who embraces it. In the process, Joyce discovered an alternative "centrifugal" approach to revision that would characterize his later work on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, one that regards texts as "palimpsestic," dynamic, and contingent and that eschews the formalist ideal of authorial control. In allowing "green" to stand in the published text, Murphy suggests, Joyce practiced a creative form of "passive revision," one that implicitly recognizes that literary texts contain no enduring formal structures and that "they can emerge at any moment in new forms." While revision and rereading both enrich and destabilize Joycean texts, Julieann Ulin's provocative study of "Famine memory" in Ulysses, "Famished Ghosts," reveals that there are still important allusive patterns in the novel that generations of readers have overlooked. Just six decades after the Famine, the Dubliners of 1904 are haunted by both personal and cultural recollections of the catastrophe, and Joyce repeatedly invokes the years of starvation, paralysis, and homelessness through iconography preserved by its witnesses and their descendants. The Famine asserts its terrible legacy most powerfully, Ulin suggests, in the Irish burial fetishes on display in "Hades." The mourners' insistence on elaborately ritualized funerals serves as a defense against traumatic memories of the Great Hunger: flimsy coffins overturning or breaking open, exposed bodies in mass graves, cannibalism, and "the desecration of the dead by dogs and rats" (evoked in Stephen's image of the ravaging fox). Bloom, as an outsider who has not directly inherited these cultural anxieties, can contemplate the decay of corpses without recourse to the historical and political nightmare that so afflicts Powers, Cunningham, and Simon Dedalus; and his well-intentioned suggestions for more efficient and sanitary funerary practices are registered as an "offense" to Famine memory. Yet, as Ulin notes, Bloom's potato, given by his Irish mother, is a talismanic reminder of the Famine that he tries to fathom, and his "Circe" fantasy of saving hungry, evicted tenants reflects his desire both to participate in collective memory and to atone for his...