30 September 2022
David P. Rando, Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)
100 years after the first publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), David P. Rando provides an analysis of Joyce’s oeuvre centring on a theme that has not just for a long time remained mostly neglected in Joyce scholarship, but even stands starkly at odds with its general tendency: the theme of hope. By providing innovative analyses of Joyce’s major works, Rando traces the various paths that hope takes in order to present a future-oriented understanding of Joyce that is grounded in ‘socioeconomic material conditions,’ significantly characterising hope by ‘restlessness’ and ‘dissatisfaction’ (p. 1). As such, Rando complements and recontextualises, rather than fully rejects, analyses focusing on hopelessness and pessimism, proposing a dialectical relationship between a capacity for change, and material conditions, in a way that understands Joyce’s work as one large project aimed at the conceptual development and eventual expression of hope. This angle results in a convincing argument for the relevance of hope both to interpreting Joyce, as well as to understanding the act of reading Joyce itself, conceptualising reading communities’ utopian impulses as responses to those seen within Joyce’s work.
In the first chapter, Rando provides an analysis of Dubliners (1914) that is typical of his engagement with Joyce scholarship, subverting considerations of the text in terms of paralysis and hopelessness into a reading based on hope as a ‘historical experience’ (p. 47) that instrumentalises Ernst Bloch’s notion of the Not-Yet-Become. By doing so, Rando highlights a wishful impulse that is undifferentiated in nature. Continuing onto A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), the second chapter turns against a traditional reading of the novel as Künstlerroman. Instead, Rando utilises Bloch’s distinction between the detective novel and the artist novel, presenting A Portrait (1916) as a hybrid between the two that values both detection and creation, and transforms anxiety into possibility. The third chapter continues the thread into Ulysses (1922), arguing that it contributes a spatial dimension to the temporal one already established. As such, it shows the limited quality of the present hope, suggesting that there are unimagined possibilities lying undiscovered. This interpretation argues that Ulysses’s (1922) treatment of hope radically broadens the productive scope of the imagination.
Concluding the main argument, the fourth chapter considers Finnegans Wake (1939) in order to subvert its traditional readings as representations of (night)dreams and the past into an expression of daydreaming and the future. The trajectory of Joyce’s work culminates here in the realisation of the material dreams that made themselves visible throughout his oeuvre. Finnegans Wake (1939) presents the act of writing as the creative space ‘of being present at the utopian moment itself’ (p. 131), portraying hope as intertwined with the act of writing in a way that can be seen to usefully, though possibly unintentionally, elaborate Colleen Jaurretche’s argument for the novel’s power of language existing through an amplification of ‘emotion and poetic expressiveness.’[i] In doing so, this final novel explicates the proposed dialectic of hope in its full complex negotiation with ‘the materiality of historical conditions’ (p. 131).
Rando concludes his book by turning towards ‘the wishful communities of Joyce’s readers’ (p. 22), viewing these as responding to the tendencies of hope in Joyce’s work. Instigating newness in expression through its innovative style, and by extension innovating ‘forms of knowledge’ and even ‘constructions of reality’ (p. 148), Joyce’s work urges its audiences to join it in a search for the unknown through reflection and experimentation. This is especially valuable in light of the nature of community having been radically altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Hopefully, Rando’s understanding can inject this alteration with a utopian creativity, that can both let our own interactions be rethought through Joyce, and also can build on this newness in our subsequent interpretations of Joyce, giving a new creative impulse to the hermeneutics of Joyce and his readerly communities.
Thoroughly grounded in Bloch’s philosophy, Rando’s timely book stands at the forefront of a trend within modernist studies to analyse it with more optimism, looking towards the future and towards possibility. Published only months before the ‘Hopeful Modernisms’ conference, it manages to incorporate a widely-shared need for optimistically looking forward in Joyce scholarship, one echoed particularly strongly in Eret Talviste’s presentation, which argued for optimism by reinstating modernist enchantment through writing a way out of its narrative of disenchantment.[ii] This project, relying on an altered focus of the writing, seems to productively work together with Rando’s interpretation of Finnegans Wake (1939) to understand the act of writing as a hopeful one, highlighting respectively a shift in focus and a renewed understanding of the practice itself. Moreover, Talviste’s incorporation of Cixous’s écriture féminine in this context shows another potential for Rando’s text to further modernist practices; namely, by understanding writing communities in terms of their acts of writing as well, and the potential for reconceptualising their acts as expressions of rebellious hope.
While the dialectical thread running through Rando’s argument could have benefited from being made more explicit because of its value in pulling together Joyce’s oeuvre as a whole, which is arguably one of the main feats of Rando’s book, Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce manages, by thorough engagement with established literature in the field, to put forward an innovative and subversive theory. As such, it does not just make a productive contribution to Joyce scholarship, but also attests to the importance of this field at large, providing an encouraging look forward into ‘something definite yet still unknown to come’ (p. 153), in which Joyce and his readers can collaboratively participate.
Sources
[i] Colleen Jaurretche, Language As Prayer in Finnegans Wake (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020), p. 1.
[ii] Eret Talviste, ‘Thinking with Hélène Cixous: Enchanted Modernities and Anti-Oedipal Modernism’, Modernist Review, 41 (2022), <https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2022/08/05/thinking-with-helene-cixous-enchanted-modernities-and-anti-oedipal-modernism/> [accessed 28 August 2022]
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