"Ulysses" In West Britain: James Joyce's Dublin and Dubliners by Michael Murphy

Abstract

Reviewed by: "Ulysses" In West Britain: James Joyce's Dublin and Dubliners by Michael Murphy Marian Eide (bio) "Ulysses" In West Britain: James Joyce's Dublin and Dubliners, by Michael Murphy . Brooklyn, New York: Conal & Gavin, 2018. 235 pp. $34.95. I confess I quite like Michael Murphy's book, in spite of its author's best efforts to alienate this and most other contemporary, professional readers of Ulysses. "Literary criticism of Joyce," he opens by [End Page 178] informing his readers, "has largely devolved into literary appreciation or even adulation" (11). I acknowledge that I am one of his lamented "hagiographical critics" (97)—even if this phrasing may contain a contradiction in terms, I own it as accurate about my own thinking—in Joyce's thrall and unable to perceive the weakness in Ulysses as a narrative and intellectual project. I freely admit that I have a St. James complex; when I need a patron saint, Joyce's books are where I turn. Murphy is decidedly not of this school; his book reads in some cases more like a review in a contemporary publication, pointing out weaknesses in story or style. One of the episodes whose experimentation with time and space I find most compelling, "Wandering Rocks," Murphy lists as a failure "because while several concurrent events can be suggested successfully in a split-screen modern film or on the same panel of a painting … this cannot be done with modern printed words, which are irredeemably linear" (89). He admits that he generally ignores the headlines in "Aeolus" and concludes that "the biggest bag of wind of all is a book the size of Ulysses filled by a man who was bit by a bellows as a child, in Rathmines or thereabouts" (110). Equally surprising is Murphy's central argument that Joyce had more allegiance to the British empire than to Irish nationalism, that his treatment of Dublin and its residents is not sympathetic but scabrous. "Ulysses is not a salute to Joyce's native city or its citizens, nor a cry de profundis for its release from colonial oppression, but mostly a subversive satire laced with mordant humor" (11). The characters in Dublin, he observes, "are reluctant but impotent citizens, not of Ireland but of West Britain, a term proudly acknowledged by those loyal to the English Crown; for patriotic Irishmen, however, to be termed a West Briton [sic] was an insult" (12). He dismisses Joyce's claim for Dubliners that it was written as "'the first step toward the spiritual liberation of my country'" (13). 1 If a reader finds a counterargument to the West Briton charge by combing through Joyce's fiction or his letters, Murphy cautions, the evidence will be implicit and one may have "imposed" rather than "detected" it (45). Because Joyce was critical of the present state of Ireland during his lifetime, Murphy dismisses the critique of British imperialism explicit in his Trieste lectures, arguing that the author had reversed course by the time he completed Ulysses. While sometimes relying on Stanislaus Joyce's memories of his brother, 2 he dismisses as "preposterous" the younger brother's recollection of his sibling's love of country and city (35). For evidence, Murphy notes that "Ulysses has been successful in subverting the fatherland, the mother country, the Mother Church," that he chose two English expatriates for his early commentators and biographers, 3 and that he accepted a grant from the British government and the patronage of a British editor (35). He is particularly offended by Bloom's passing gas while remembering [End Page 179] Robert Emmett's last words. That pairing is evidence of Joyce's lack of respect for leaders who gave their lives for an honorable cause. "Among commentators on this scene, Patrick Parrinder, an English critic, is one of the few I know of whose response to this farting passage is even remotely adequate in understanding its deliberate offensiveness to Irish patriotic feeling" (96). 4 Murphy is unimpressed with the standard postcolonial understanding of Ulysses. Observing Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan as they are nonplussed by Haines's studied use of the Irish language in the opening episode, Murphy notes: "Mother tongue...