Multiple Joyce: One Hundred Short Essays about James Joyce’s Cultural Legacy by David Collard (Sagging Meniscus, 358pp, £19.99)
James Joyce Remembered: Edition 2022 by CP Curran (UCD Press, 224pp, €25)
People devised different ways of staying sane during endless lockdown: listening to the complete works of Mozart, for instance, or reading through À la recherche. The solution adopted by David Collard, described at the back of this book as “a writer for print and online publications”, was to trawl the internet for references to James Joyce, of which there are quite a few, and to jot down some reactions as they came to him, sometimes just three or four short paragraphs, sometimes more, but never more than a couple of thousand words. These eventually came to 100 items, hence the title.
Collard sets out his method with admirable clarity in the introduction: he cheerfully accepts that Multiple Joyce “won’t much appeal to the purist or the doctrinaire” (you know who you are). Indeed, he glories in that condition: it’s part of the whole point. (The obvious pun in the title, incidentally, is quite deliberate, since the book ends with an entertaining multiple-choice quiz regarding the authors of various comments on the book’s ostensible leading figure.)
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I say “ostensible” because some of the essays are not about Joyce at all: one of the longest is devoted to Moby-Dick, another largely to T S Eliot; Auden, Burgess, Borges and Beckett also feature quite heavily, sometimes in vague relation to the core subject, sometimes not. It is not surprising that one of the longest pieces is largely about the author himself, though he does eventually get around to Joyce in the course of it.
The result is a scattergun collection that sometimes makes shrewd points. It is interesting occasionally to read the views of a self-professed outsider on some of the more controversial areas of Joyce studies, for instance, on the vexed issue of the text of Ulysses.
Here Collard is suitably unimpressed by the dogmatic and hubristic tone of many of the participants. (However, his ultimate conclusion that the authority of the Gabler edition was indeed destroyed is not where the scholarly debate has come to rest — he has been over-persuaded by some media reactions.) It is also good to read a piece about the dire situation of the house of The Dead on Usher’s Island ( “The Fall of the House of Usher”).
There is a valuable discussion of films based on Joyce’s work — this is an area where the author seems to have expertise. There is a certain grim inevitability to the ultimate appearance of Bono, on this occasion holding forth at the unveiling of a plaque in Nice. How could the book be complete without him?
Unfortunately, many of Collard’s more valuable apercus are undermined by sheer sloppiness: a mild critique of some aspects of a Ulysses reading course run by the Museum of Literature Ireland is completely undone by his announcement that the Museum’s acronym — MoLI — is a play on Molly Bloom’s surname. Even non-purists and non-doctrinaires might be a trifle annoyed at that. Similarly in another essay he credulously reports on a gathering where a woman informed him that she was Harriet Weaver’s granddaughter: even a quick glance at the internet, at which he is so adept, would show him that she wasn’t.
The signifier “James Joyce” now covers such a multitude that in itself it is almost meaningless — it needs some context in order to be comprehensible. This book is testimony to that diffusion and is an interesting symptom in that respect. It is also entertaining and even enlightening in places, mostly places on the Joycean periphery. (Though can we talk about “centre” and “periphery” any more?) The bittiness of the book’s form well reflects the extraordinary diversity of its subject’s cultural impact.
A very different Joyce emerges from the pages of CP Curran’s James Joyce Remembered. This is a person who lived and breathed, and “once walked round Dublin” — and many other cities. Constantine Curran’s memoir, first published in 1967, is an affectionate portrait of the young artist he first encountered in University College Dublin in 1899.
He was inclined to be dismissive, in the memoir, of some of Joyce’s fears over persecution and the necessity of exile; it does not seem that he communicated much of this to Joyce in his lifetime. He was also the recipient of some important letters setting out Joyce’s artistic credo and some essential personal material.
This reissue of his book, edited by Curran’s granddaughter Helen Solterer (a real granddaughter this time) with Alice Ryan, is accompanied by very valuable essays by Hugh Campbell, Diarmaid Ferriter, Anne Fogarty, Margaret Kelleher and Solterer responding to and reconsidering Curran’s testimony, as well as discussing aspects of his life apart from the Joyce connection. There is also an account of the very important Curran papers collection held at UCD.
This handsome volume is, obviously, very much a UCD “in-house” production. But they are entitled to blow the trumpet occasionally about their most famous graduate (as well as to mark the importance of Curran’s role both in Joyce’s life and in his own right). There were many years when the trumpet was blown only very faintly, if at all.
Terence Killeen’s Ulysses Unbound has recently been published in a new edition by Penguin Books
