Useless Joyce: Textual Functions, Cultural Appropriations by Tim Conley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Useless Joyce: Textual Functions, Cultural Appropriations by Tim Conley Eleni Loukopoulou (bio) USELESS JOYCE: TEXTUAL FUNCTIONS, CULTURAL APPROPRIATIONS, by Tim Conley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. viii + 189 pp. $55.00 cloth, $54.95 ebook. Despite the provocative characterization “useless Joyce” in the title of his book, Tim Conley sets out to explore the usefulness of Joyce’s texts. As he argues, Joyce is “a most ‘useful’ writer to examine in a discussion of what it means to assert that a text is useful or that a reader ‘uses’ a text” (6). Thus, he approaches the question of use in Joyce’s work through diverse ways and offers a coherent narrative. The first part of the book, titled “Textual Functions,” engages with the genre of self-help guides and the processes and challenges of editing, translating, and annotating Joyce’s works. The second part investigates how Joyce can be viewed as a “‘self-help’ author” (139) who guides us through multifarious aspects of our lives ranging from public speaking to diet and dating. In fact, Conley stresses the parallels between the rise in exegetical Joyce studies, that is, the so-called Joyce industry, and the popularity of self-help publications. He has even compiled a list cataloguing indicative and often best-selling books from these two ostensibly incongruent genres (147–52). Presented in the appendix, this list offers fascinating reading itself and illuminates further Conley’s arguments in the first chapter of the book, which begins by exploring how the difficult modernist texts of the first part of the twentieth century should not be considered as mere reactions to the “self-improvement creed of Victorianism”; on the contrary, Conley argues, modernism as a movement should be regarded as a “remodelling of this impulse,” and he notes the preoccupation of a number of modernist texts with guidance, mapping, annotating, and historicizing (31). Conley links the element of guidance in modernist texts, and in Joyce’s work in particular, with that of usefulness and observes that “Bloom’s heroism in Ulysses lies in his wish to be of use to others” (34). He also draws attention to the fact that the “Aeolus” episode indicates that Bloom’s dream role in a newspaper would be that of the advice columnist. In “Ithaca,” Bloom uses the term “selfhelp,” and Conley contextualizes this in relation to the emerging ethic of self and mutual improvement through a variety of guides, the most popular of which was Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance.1 The proliferation of such guides coincided with the growing need for democratization of education in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Conley outlines the history of the self-help movement in England and notes its difference from the subsequent commercial versions that promoted the image of the self-made man (39–40). By the 1920s, the industry of advice literature had become as popular as that of films (40). Strikingly, as Conley observes, guides to the ostensibly difficult [End Page 461] modernist texts started to emerge in that decade. Joyce responded to such concurrent cultural phenomena—that is, to the publications that offered critical interpretations of his work and the popularity of self-help guides—in Finnegans Wake.2 Conley closely reads passages from the Wake but also from A Portrait and Ulysses, which he analyses by skillfully bringing into the discussion the views of both Joyce critics and cultural theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, among others.3 The second chapter deals with the way readers use Joyce’s texts when they quote or misquote from them, but Conley notes that misquotations saturate Joyce’s own books, too (48–53). Bloom’s mis-remembering of songs and other instances offers Conley the opportunity to interpret a number of puzzling extracts from Ulysses, while his analysis of the references to Euclidean geometry in Finnegans Wake prompts him to conclude that “[a] misquotation is a sort of eclipse, in which a form is repeated while it is simultaneously obscured” (52). Further focus is on the quotations that are used out of context and those whose authenticity has been questioned, including...