Courtney McGrailJackson Voices on Joyce
Edited by Anne Fogarty & Fran O’Rourke
(UCD Press €50.00 hb)
John Wyse
‘Everything should be read with “re” in mind: repeating, rehearsing, reviewing, rewording, rewriting, revising, rethinking, returning, rereading and revisiting to name just a few.’
2004 was the centenary of the year in which Ulysses was set. To commemorate the fact, a group of scholars connected to UCD delivered a series of talks in the gothic Old Physics Theatre in Newman House where James Joyce used to attend lectures – or not as the whim took him.
More material
This book gathers these talks together, and the editors have added a good deal more material gleaned from the intervening 10 and a tilly years (longer than Joyce spent actually working on the novel).
The words quoted above refer to Finnegans Wake, but they might equally be applied to Voices on Joyce. They come from an essay in these pages by Daragh O’Connell, which may or may not have been part of the original 2004 lecture series, and some of which has already appeared in another academic volume, Beyond Catholicism: Heresy, Mysticism, and Apocalypse in Italian Culture, edited by Fabrizio De Donno and Simon Gilson (Palgrave Macmillan, £59.50 hb), published two years ago in New York.
Similarly, a luminous and wise essay here by Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us, prefigures his excellent 2009 book of the same name. This confused lineage inevitably gives several of the inclusions here something of a reheated taste. Joycean scholarship has been in full flood for two generations and more, and it is unreasonable to expect very many earth-shattering revelations.
That said, this book offers enough new research (properly annotated) to pique the most jaded palate, and its fresh insights, particularly into many historical aspects of the Dublin Joyce knew, make it richly rewarding to explore.
I was delighted with James Pribek’s essay on Joyce and Cardinal Newman, whom he considered, it seems, ‘the greatest writer of English prose’. Notable too is an impressive discussion by Richard Kearney of the philosophical, psychological and theological implications of Joyce’s idiosyncratic use of the ‘epiphany’.
Perhaps most memorably of all, scattered through the pages, are thirty examples from a suite of Dublin photographs by the great American photographer, Lee Miller. She took them in 1946 to illustrate a Vogue article about Joyce written by Constantine Curran, then perhaps Joyce’s closest surviving friend.
I myself have tried to photograph various remnants of Joyce’s Dublin; the images here, beautifully composed and balanced, make me wonder why I ever tried.
Great photography is truly a great art form.