Virgil and Joyce: Nationalism and Imperalism in the "Aeneid" and "Ulysses," by Randall J. Pogorzelski

Abstract

Reviewed by: Virgil and Joyce: Nationalism and Imperalism in the "Aeneid" and "Ulysses," by Randall J. Pogorzelski R. J. Schork (bio) VIRGIL AND JOYCE: NATIONALISM AND IMPERALISM IN THE "AENEID" AND "ULYSSES," by Randall J. Pogorzelski. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. x + 178 pp. $65.00. The engine that powers this book is paradox. The author's choice of that critical approach and literary technique makes for dense reading (and sporadic semi-comprehension), with flashes of interpretative ingenuity. Two keynote citations illustrate this situation: the [End Page 710] first is "MacHugh's concerns in his present of late colonial Ireland [in "Aeolus"] condition his reading of Virgil and the politics of land following the triumviral confiscations. Such a reading encourages a reevaluation of the poem's response to the politics of land in triumviral Italy" (18). The second such statement is the following: the novel [Ulysses] both exposes the presence of the classical in the modernist and demonstrates the presence of the modernist in the classical. The resulting readings are not those of Virgil's contemporaries, nor are they readings we could attribute to Joyce. Rather, my readings of Virgil are those made possible through an analysis of Joyce reading Virgil. (40) I parse the first statement as Pogorzelski's design in chapter 1 to look over the shoulder of Joyce contemplating Virgil appropriating Joyce; then the author concludes that he has also detected Virgil appropriating Joyce contemplating Virgil.1 However you catch it, there is an active three-way conversation going on. It is well worth the effort to tune in. First, here are some biographical disclosures that may help orient the bearings of my comment. Pogorzelski is a young classicist who has a professional interest in Joyce's Ulysses; in the works of both ancient and modern authors, he dives deeply into up-to-date matters of political theory and national identity. I am an old classicist with an enthusiasm for Joyce. My take on both his "opera" and those of Virgil could crisply be called "'philological fundamentalism'" (14). I like to hang around polylingual notebook indices or negative epic similes. I personally have zero zest for inquiry into the struggle for Irish independence or the postcolonial dimensions of Ulysses, but I am willing to let others give it a try. Pogorzelski generously and accurately cites my work on Joycean allusions to the text of the Aeneid; I have learned a lot from his exposition of the contemporary bases for and literary forms of nationalism. His synopses are uniformly clearer and more concise that those of his guiding sources. At the same time, it should be obvious that, generally speaking, his James Joyce is not mine, though we would probably settle on a more or less compatible view of the Aeneid. The "Introduction" pivots around the ground-breaking scholarship of Benedict Anderson on the roots and contours of nationalism.2 Discussion of this matrix is followed by cogent reviews of the modern concept of ancient Roman political identity and the impact of Irish nationalism on Joyce's fiction. Pogorzelski wisely indicates that he does not burden his readings of the Aeneid or Ulysses with strict distinctions between allusion, intertextuality, and reception theory (13-16). This section includes a compact preview of the book's structure. Chapter 1 presents the evidence for a comparative reading of [End Page 711] Joyce's "Aeolus" and Virgil's Eclogue 1 as allegories of the politics of land in Ireland. The key click is Professor MacHugh's learned suggestion that Deus nobis haec otia fecit (Ec 1.6, U 7.1056) would be an apt title of the vignette that Stephen Dedalus alliteratively labels "A Pisgah Sight of Palestine" or "The Parable of the Plums" (U 7.1057-58). Here Pogorzelski suggests an extrapolation between Virgil's verses, Augustus's early land policy, and the British parliament's Wyndham Act of 1903 that approved loans so that Irish Land League proponents or strapped tenant-farmers could purchase the land they worked. This bivalent context imparts a political spin to both the Latin poem and to Joyce's Irish application of the Virgilian allusion. I do not, however, see enough supporting parallels to...