Under West(ern) Eyes: Rebecca West Reads Joyce

Abstract

shut the door behind me and walked slowly down the street that leads from the Odeon to the Boulevard St. Germain in the best of all cities, reading in the little volume which had there been sold to me1: such are the first lines of The Strange Necessity, Rebecca West's 1928 essay, in which the writer represents herself leaving Sylvia Beach's in Paris with Joyce's Pomes Penny each in her hands. Although West notes that what brought Ulysses to her mind that day a pure accident, [it] was my passing of Sylvia Beach's bookshop (Strange Necessity, p. 189), an attentive reading of the essay suggests that the relationship between the and her meditation on Ulysses is not altogether accidental. On the contrary, it could be part of West's strategy to withdraw the novel from the male modernist exegesis ? based largely on the classic Greek and Latin tradition ? and to reconduct it within a women's modernity. Beach's bookshop, in fact, is the place where the tra? ditional critical history of Joyce originated with Valery Larbaud's lecture on 7 December 1921, in which Larbaud presented the novel to literary Paris and for the first time pointed out publicly the close parallelism between the Odyssey and the Joycean novel.2 Joyce himself describes the particular atmosphere of the French city in those days as charac? terized by the presence of a group of male intellectuals working under the banner of the Homeric father: Odissey very much in the air here. Anatole France is writing Le Cyclope, G. Faure[,] the musicianf,] an opera Penelope. Giraudoux has written Elpenor (Paddy Dignam). Guillaume Apol? linaire Les Mamelles de Tiresias... Madame Circe advances regally towards her completion after which I hope to join a tennis club.3