The Event of 1907; or, James Joyce, Artist

Abstract

In the history of modernism, the year 1907, like 1922, represents an underappreciated annus mirabilis, a year of miracles. Among the many artistic events to occur that year, perhaps none is more significant than James Joyce's completion of what would become the final story in Dubliners (1914) and a work Richard Ellmann describes as ‘his first song of exile’, ‘The Dead’. ‘The Dead’ achieves the indispensable breakthrough of bringing to a close Joyce's initial project and inaugurates an unparalleled process of experimentation and invention that will extend through the rest of his career. At the heart of Joyce's experiment stands the figure of Gabriel Conroy, the story's prosperous and self-satisfied protagonist. Joyce diagnoses Gabriel's condition, and by extension that of all of Ireland's middle class at this crucial historical juncture, by staging a series of encounters that bear out Gabriel's failure to become a subject in all four of what Alain Badiou terms the conditions of truth—love, politics, science, and art. In this way, Joyce breaks through to a new mode of literary presentation, and hence an alternate pedagogy of desire—a form of the quintessential modernist operation the Russian Formalists name estrangement. A version of this practice is already at work in Gabriel's climactic realization of the full extent of his failure, and this paradoxically ends ‘The Dead’ on a cautious note of hope. Whether Gabriel achieves a remaking of his life beyond the story's conclusion, we have no way of knowing; however, we do know that in Joyce's case at least, it is precisely such a passage that enables him to become a subject, an artist, who continues to transform in unexpected ways our very sense of the possibilities of language. The approach I outline in this paper not only promises to transform how we understand Joyce's individual artistic development, but also, more generally, the trajectory of modernism, or, indeed, of any period of dramatic cultural change.