Afterword

Margot Gayle Backus, Department of English, University of Houston

“Making Joyce Studies Safe for All” – An Afterword.

2/2/24

James Joyce was acutely aware of modern, literate societies’ rigid, hierarchical division of all human experience into either publicly-acknowledged (print) discourse, or into “unofficial” oral networks that simultaneously hide and informally adjudicate unspeakable matters on a case by case basis. In the course of his protracted literary campaign to break through this ethically and epistemologically distorting division, Joyce made extensive use of resources gleaned from many ancient and modern oral traditions, including those of the Irish bardic tradition. In particular, Joyce clearly admired the formidable satire wielded by the formally-trained fili to enforce “noble norms of comportment” on the part of their “elite patrons across Gaelic and gaelicized Ireland and Scotland.”^[1] Joyce would also have understood satire’s role in maintaining the powerful position of Irish poets themselves. In medieval and early modern Ireland, where honor was “understood . . . to reside in one’s good name,” satire represented a powerful weapon, the very threat of which could recall to their social responsibilities patrons who were neglecting either the welfare of their society, or their customary obligation to support the poets whose work upheld and renewed the Irish social order.^[2]

Joyce, that is, understood that the forces of modernity were concentrating the wealth, power, and status crucial to literary production and dissemination in the hands of elites whose interests were inimical to his own. In the early chapters of Ulysses, Joyce emphasizes the Irish poet’s culturally-disenfranchised position; we see Stephen Dedalus adrift in an Irish social order, without any means either to influence Ireland’s direction, or to prevail on any figurative “leader” — British print capitalism, the Irish Catholic church, or the Irish Revival — to recognize and support his work. To those at the pinnacle of any of print capitalism’s various hierarchies, it will seem self-evident that some subjects–those deemed odious by their own senior members, and by any institutions or constituencies to which they are beholden–violate fundamental (if unspecified) rules dictating which aspects of life are authorized, or fit for publication, and which unauthorized, and thus relegated to informal “whisper networks.” Seen from this angle, Joyce’s career trajectory was propelled by his determination to break into authorized (print) discourse on his own terms, and thereby publicly advance alternative perspectives that no established elite would authorize.

As the “Making Joyce Studies Safe for All” (MJSSfA) roundtable makes clear, the silenced and disenfranchised position of junior women and gender nonconforming scholars in Joyce Studies resembles the position from which Joyce himself launched a decades-long campaign to breach the unspoken but unbending rules that divided authorized from unauthorized representations of Ireland. Moreover, the strategies the roundtable’s organizers and participants adopted to make visible the usually invisible systemic exclusion of certain experiences from public consideration bear a noteworthy resemblance to those Joyce used in his scabrous 1904 satire, “The Holy Office.”^[3] Both Joyce and the “Making Joyce Studies Safe for All” participants combined cultural resources drawn from both sides of the oral/written divide to sidestep their communities’ gatekeepers. Both brought unsavory material usually consigned to subterranean “whisper networks” to public attention, using specific, authorizing oral forms to publicly address their respective communities. The MJSSfA roundtable participants used the widely-recognized conventions of the online academic roundtable to publicize otherwise unauthorized experiences and perspectives, thereby asserting the right of all scholars addressing matters of professional concern to a fair and respectful hearing. Joyce, likewise unable to get a fair and respectful hearing using any existing means, drew from the Irish oral tradition the conventional use of satire as a devastating weapon of last resort, available to poets when a leader has willfully ignored all other wise counsel, producing a poem that both describes and displays the relationship between authorized and unauthorized experience that had, at this point, driven his own work, and a great deal of Irish life, into subterranean channels.

Joyce originally wrote his scathingly scatological attack on the elders of the Irish Revival and the version of nationalism their work underwrote in 1904. He would elaborately complete this project of satirical excoriation in Ulysses, in which we witness Joyce simultaneously plotting (in the thoughts of his 1904 self-caricature, Stephen Dedalus) and, as mature artist, enacting the satirical retribution “The Holy Office” initiated. In this characteristically enraged and exuberant denunciation/celebration Joyce describes his position in the Irish symbolic order, immobilized at the crossroads of the speakable and the unspeakable. As Joyce saw it, the Revivalists responded to his efforts to broaden their reductive, idealized version of Irish society by silencing him, thereby turning him into an involuntary repository for everything early-twentieth-century Ireland designated as filthy.

Joyce printed this deliberately offensive screed on broadsheets, bypassing any established editorial review, to ensure that its ordinarily unprintable contents would circulate publicly. In it, Joyce metaphorizes his abject position in the broader Irish cultural/intellectual community as that of a sewer for Irish society’s discarded by-products. And he sarcastically celebrates the beneficial service that he – like the Joyce Studies whisper network – provides.  As “the sewer of [the Revival],” Joyce’s writing carries off “[the Revivalists’] filthy streams,” freeing “all these men of whom I speak” to carry on “their dreamy dreams.”^[4] Joyce is calling attention to, ridiculing, and railing against his community’s tacit distinctions between the authorized and unauthorized.  Yet even as his scabrous allegory uses a raft of unspeakable images to metonymically make its point—that is, that Joyce is left dealing with his community’s unresolved shit–the point itself acknowledges the young writer’s failure to break through the blockages that rendered certain aspects of human experience unspeakable.

Joyce’s self-appointed task was to disrupt the strictures that confined sex and shit to informal oral whisper networks. During this period, such networks were expanding, as the Catholic Church assumed a defining position at the center of an otherwise disjointed nationalist front. Joyce holds the Revivalists particularly accountable for this period’s proliferating categories of unspeakability, by presenting specific contemporary poets and authors as adopting tortured, self-contradictory positions. He ridicules easily-identified Irish Revivalists such as Yeats, who is consoled “when he whinges / With gold-embroidered Celtic fringes,” for contorting Ireland and Irishness beyond recognition to conciliate the ever-vigilant Catholic Church.^[5]

Indeed, by expressing his grievances at having been silenced through a range of unspeakable metaphors, Joyce’s poem stages the double-binds that use even public utterances calculated to challenge the rules of unspeakability to further reinforce those rules. In seeking to publish the fruits of the labors that as Joyce saw it, Ireland’s growing prohibitions were forcing upon him, Joyce found himself punished for having even attempted to bring unspeakable matters to the public’s attention. He was punished professionally when he found himself unable to find outlets for his literary writing, or, eventually, even for his book reviews. And he was publicly stigmatized as though he himself had produced all the offal he had set out to decontaminate and demystify. These officially disavowed but self-evident punishments reversed the intended effects of Joyce’s efforts, serving as object lessons reinforcing the inviolability of the tacit rules that everyone knew. Thus, Joyce describes himself as buried under the torrents of shameful filth cultural nationalists were excluding from their own productions, and which the community at large disclaimed. Joyce was fine with letting the Revivalists maintain their preferred ethos of purity and nobility, because he believed he could create an alternate and more aesthetically and morally compelling ethos by using as his raw materials aspects of Irish life his elders shunned. Yet, as the Revivalists and the Catholic Church made common cause against any art depicting Ireland or the Irish too comprehensively, Joyce found himself wrongfully blamed for, and disgustingly burdened with, the very super-concentrated filth of his nation that he had set out to transform into and recirculate as aesthetically, epistemologically and ethically illuminating art.

The 2023 Making Joyce Studies Safe For All roundtable and discussion represents a necessary and shameful modern-day reprise of “The Holy Office,” with the panel participants and all the silenced stories their individual accounts represent in the position of the young Joyce, calling out an entrenched leadership who have chosen to maintain a conflict-free, comfortable professional world instead of an open and meritocratic one. Junior scholars, especially women, seeking to enter Joyce Studies have found themselves, like Joyce, the unwilling repositories of disgusting particulars that the larger intellectual/creative community declines to know about itself.

By the time I entered Joyce Studies in the mid-aughts, Ulysses, in particular, had long been critically celebrated for its meticulous transgression of every unspoken rule of social respectability, taste, decorum, religious prohibition, moral proscription (excluding, I would argue, those against cruelty), ethno-political loyalty, literary convention, and the law. As a mid-career Irish studies scholar, I had habitually stretched my research and writing time by avoiding Ulysses. However, now established in Irish studies and specializing in literary modernism, what had been a pragmatic labour-saving strategy was becoming a professional embarrassment. Worse, as the only professor teaching British and Irish modernism in my R1 department, I discovered to my horror that I was incapable of quietly mastering Ulysses on my own. Perforce, this situation propelled me – established scholar of Irish and British modernism and frightened first-time Ulysses reader – into the Joyce community. In the Ulysses seminar that initiated me into that community, I found the circle of scholars into which I had inveigled myself wonderfully generous, supportive and collaborative. Even at the time, I knew that what I was learning was changing the course of my career.  I was, and remain, deeply grateful for that. This quick account of my own initiation into the Joyce community is meant to describe how those who occupy secure positions in Joyce Studies wind up unthinkingly embracing communal blind spots or taboos that leave newcomers, particularly graduate students, adjuncts, and others who lack a secure berth in academia, systemically vulnerable to sexualized abuse and humiliation: the overlooking of these transgressions has been, I would argue, the price of inclusion in this community.

My goal in spending the better part of a summer reading, discussing and researching Ulysses was, in effect, to internalize an epistemological lens defined by a range of critical and ethical coordinates on which the majority of reputable Joyceans were in agreement at that moment. As Richard Ellmann observes in the first sentence of his famous biography, “we are [always] still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries;”^[6] that is, the meaningful coordinates that make up the Joycean epistemological/ethical lens and their agreed-on significance keep changing over the course of Joyce Studies. Yet, as we seek to make sense of an object of study that reveals more as we ourselves learn more, those who are entering this multi-generational critical/philosophical/ethical project must have some secure handholds from which to start. Every first-time reader of Ulysses, that is, needs the help of other, more experienced readers, who can give them a sense of the current consensus concerning some among many genuinely ambiguous questions: why is Leopold Bloom “Jewish,” and if Joyce wanted a Jewish Irish protagonist, why is Bloom also definitively not Jewish? To what extent is Stephen Dedalus James Joyce’s fictional alter ego? Are Bloom’s womanliness, masochism, and empathy contemptible, or admirable? Are Gerty McDowell and/or Molly Bloom primarily objects of contempt, celebration, or empathy? The presumed answers to virtually all such questions have changed repeatedly over time. This makes what is the central task for anyone entering any new community–the internalization of a preliminary framework capable of accommodating new information–both more difficult, and more crucial for new Joyceans. Certainly, upon entering for the first time into the generationally bourgeoning conversation encircling the seemingly impenetrable wilderness of words that is Ulysses, the neophyte Joycean has no choice but to adopt on faith a series of normative evaluations and critical interpretations in order to gain enough traction in the text to produce their own independent insights. New Joyceans are not only spurred by necessity, however; they also find themselves drawn forward by newfound joy. Once a reader of Ulysses has their bearings, and has their own experience with any one of the novel’s polysemic tropes as these send out ripples of association and connection across the text, they typically experience an intensely pleasurable sense of discovery and insight–of epiphany– that represents a symbolic entry into this wider community of Ulysses readers. Thus, the process of initiation into Joyce Studies takes place under conditions that both facilitate and reward the internalization of communal blind spots.

As I was thinking about Joycean initiation, in a world where vestiges of meritocracy are dissolving along with financial support within and beyond the academy, I was also reading New York Times journalists, Jodi Kantor’s and Rachel Twohey’s She Said, the 2019 account of their extended and laborious efforts to find women willing to speak on the record about Harvey Weinstein’s reign of sexual terror at Miramax. One quote from an anonymous source brilliantly suggests how egregious patterns of abuse can get lost in a high-prestige, intensely intellectually- and creatively-stimulating work environment, where the whole community’s focus is collectively trained on every new achievement, and the promises of greater ones to come: “[Miramax] was an environment where you could have a real impact on the culture as a whole, have incredible, life-changing experiences, and be abused and traumatized, all in the same day.”^[7]

What follows is a memory of one moment in my own initiation into Joyce Studies, intended to illustrate the process whereby shared speech prohibitions, which contribute to group cohesion in all communities, have been accepted and internalized in Joyce Studies, despite our community’s fundamental consensus that articulating the unspeakable is an a priori artistic and social good. I should have known better. We should know and do better.

By the time I was first reading Ulysses among Joyce scholars, I had a well-established scholarly interest in incest and sexual abuse, so I was keeping an eye out for, among other topics of interest, possible references to incest. In “Proteus,” I felt sure that Stephen’s musings about Richie Goulding’s marriage to a wife who Stephen disparagingly nicknames Chrissie, and who he thinks of as “Papa’s little bedpal. Lump of love,” was invoking language suggestive of incest to convey Stephen’s general uneasy aversion to these people.^[8] I noted that “Papa’s little bedpal,” in particular, with its child-like language and its description of a husband as “Papa” and a wife as “little bedpal,” is surely invoking incest for some reason. When I raised this point, multiple seminar members turned to me as one and informed me, in a way that was completely different from the ordinary weighing and sifting with which we met any interpretation: “No. That isn’t right.” No alternative interpretation was proposed. The conversation just stopped. As a disciplinary outsider, it was clear to me that I had transgressed an unspoken rule. At an earlier point in my career, when I was at a different place in my own trauma recovery, I would have left Joyce studies rather than accept incest as a “no go” area. Instead, I moved on, clear about what had happened, but unwilling to put up the kind of relentless, bull-headed fight that Joyce’s work itself represents. Within this community, which represented to me a living connection to the literary and social world that Joyce had captured in Ulysses, I felt connected to the whole ongoing living project that is not only Joyce’s writing, but its ongoing critical elaboration. What we were doing there together felt too fulfilling to give up, and, after all, this was only a question concerning a critical reading, and by that time, I knew that every community has no-talk rules.

In Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas compellingly set forth how such blind spots, or taboos, play a constitutive role in all communities.^[9] I find Douglas’ schema helpful for an understanding of the complicated involutions of visibility/invisibility and speakability/unspeakability that Making Joyce Studies Safe For All brings into sharp focus. Douglas views any culture as a vast, complex, and intricate network of similarities, distinctions, and oppositions – as an approximation of the world that must ultimately place its own internal cohesion ahead of unfailing fidelity to the ontology it maps. Thus, categories that cannot be accounted for without disrupting the patterns on which the system relies for its comprehensibility become lacunae in the symbolic order – hard to see, and difficult or impossible to refer to. As Douglas explains, within the symbolic order these blind spots represent unwanted excess; they are associated with dirt. I am prepared to accept that such lacunae may be inevitable in any community, but not that a community that studies how words operate symbolically would not acknowledge the existence of such blind spots. Speech taboos are common, and by their nature, inaccessible to reasoned argument. Clearly such lacunae can be and have been used to harm and coerce people within our shared space. For Joyce Studies as a community to persist in protecting these rules at the expense of the flesh and blood colleagues who assure us that they have experienced harassment, bullying, and assault, and that this abuse is getting worse as their professional prospects diminish, represents an especially spectacular kind of bad faith.

In “Scylla and Charybdis,” the fundamental tableau described in “The Holy Office” is invoked in a bit of dialogue, when Thomas Lyster excitedly describes A.E’s planned “gathering together of a sheaf of our younger poet’s verses,” from which Stephen’s work is to be excluded. Joyce flags the significance of this moment, and its inclusion in Ulysses, by having Stephen bitterly instruct himself to: “See this. Remember” (U 9.294). Thus, as Joyce repeatedly reminds us, in Ulysses, insofar as one is reading it in published form, he has at last successfully broken through the rules of propriety, of decency, and above all, of expediency, that had, by 1904, so antagonized him as to make him wish he had the powers of the ancient Irish bards, to have at his disposal a recognized and authorized poetic genre capable of compelling his elders to put the interests of their whole community, and the ongoing renewal and health of their cultural tradition, ahead of their own social and emotional comfort. My comparison of the Revivalists’ silencing of Joyce to leaders in the Joyce community silencing and ignoring accounts of junior Joyceans being abused by senior Joyceans breaks down, however, because Joyce was, so far as we know, stirred into a state of decades-long fury because his senior colleagues – those who should have supported and facilitated his work – had instead done their utmost to stymie his art and to drive him from his chosen field of endeavor. For this analogy to be more complete, Joyce would also have to have been raped by Oliver St. John Gogarty, and silenced and blackballed by Yeats when he tried to object.

Go to:

Editorial Page

Introduction by Jonathan Goldman and Cathryn Piwinksi

Transcript of the James Joyce Society Welcome Address

Personal Statements by Katherine Ebury, Casey Lawrence, and Sam Slote

Roundtable Transcript

Anonymous Open Discussion Transcript

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Sources

Feature Image Credit: Stefano Guidi/Getty Images

^[1] Sarah E. McKibben, “Bardic Close Reading,” in Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods and Perspective, eds. Sarah Covington, Valerie McGowan-Doyle, and Vincent Carey (London: Routledge, 2018), 96.

^[2] McKibben, “Bardic Close Reading,”106.

^[3] James Joyce, “The Holy Office,” Poems and Exiles, ed. J.C.C. Mays (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 103-106.

^[4] Joyce, “The Holy Office,” 107.

^[5] Joyce, “The Holy Office,” 106.

^[6] Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 3.

^[7] Jodi Kantor and Rachel Twohey, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement (New York: Penguin Books, 2019), 192.

^[8] James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 3.88. All future references cited parenthetically.

^[9] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).