The publication of this collection of Joyce's "occasional" writings is very welcome. These pieces, although much discussed, have not been easily available. Most of them appeared in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, edited by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann and published, in an edition which is long out of print, in 1959.
These writings fall into three main categories, with something of a joker in the pack at the end. There are, first, the early writings, pieces which are continuous with the "Stephen Dedalus" persona that Joyce was consciously forging at the time.
These include such works as "Drama and Life" and the essay on James Clarence Mangan, a fine illustration of Oscar Wilde's dictum on the importance of seeing the object as in itself it really is not. Joyce needed a safe precursor figure, a prophet, and Mangan conveniently filled the bill. These pieces need to be read in conjunction with Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man: when they are, they fit in perfectly. They are a continuation of fiction by other means.
The second and least interesting category is the collection of book reviews that Joyce wrote for the Daily Express in Dublin during his first sojourn in Paris in 1903. Joyce was a hopeless reviewer, a consoling thought for those charged with reviewing books by and about him. Even when the subject is Aristotle or Giordano Bruno, on whom one might expect him to shine, he has little of interest to say.
The main impression is of a determined withholding of personal involvement, a refusal to engage with the works under review. Only a volume of Irish tales as recounted by Lady Gregory excites him, giving him an opportunity once again to take his distance from the central mainspring of the Anglo-Irish literary revival, "a land almost fabulous in its sorrow and senility".
It also provides him with a valuable chance to demonstrate his independence by biting the hand that feeds him, Lady Gregory having been instrumental in securing Joyce these reviews in the first place (an episode alluded to in Ulysses). Otherwise, aridity reigns.
The third and by far the most important category consists of lectures and several newspaper articles that Joyce wrote in Trieste or for a Triestine journal between 1907 and 1912. All these pieces deal with Irish subject matter, mostly with the political developments of the day, and there has been much controversy about their import and about how seriously they should be taken.
Those who have wished to promote a nationalist view of Joyce have been happy to use them as evidence, but there is a great deal of ambiguity in what the pieces actually say. Along with considerable distrust of England and English intentions goes a more passionate ambivalence towards the Irish themselves and the mess they have got themselves into. As Joyce puts it, in a striking formulation that perhaps sums up his attitude: "For seven centuries it [Ireland] has never been a faithful subject of England. Nor, on the other hand, has it been faithful to itself."
The force to which it has been faithful, of course, in Joyce's view, is the Roman Catholic Church, which is accustomed, however, as he dryly puts it, "to paying her faithful in long-term drafts".
So far, perhaps, so predictable, but what may come as a surprise to some people is the vehemence of Joyce's rejection of the British parliament and of the Irish Parliamentary Party as a means of gaining anything for Ireland. Insofar as he has an allegiance, it is to a moderate Sinn Fein programme, behaving as if Ireland were independent while in fact it is not. (No particular awareness is shown of the complications that the presence of a large indigenous unionist population might bring to these matters.)
Underlying all of this, however, is a sense of impatience with the whole subject. At the conclusion of his most substantial piece on the issue, "Ireland, Island of Saints and Scholars", he announces that if Ireland is going to have a revival, it should get on with it quickly; otherwise, as he puts it: "I shall have already taken the last tram home". It seems to me, finally, that no coherent political or ideological stance can really be taken from this very mixed bag. The editor, in his wise and balanced introduction, refers to the way in which these texts have been over-read, sometimes even distorted, in order to yield a political message agreeable to the interpreter. Interesting though they are, too much stress should not be laid upon them.
In a letter in French in 1918 Joyce declares that "the problem of my race is so complicated that one needs all the means of a supple (elastique) art to sketch it out - without resolving it". He says that personal pronouncements on it "are no longer permitted to me" (an interesting use of the passive voice). This, though, is no more than the truth. As the editor rightly observes, Joyce does not "jettison history" and its burdens; instead, he deals with it in the only way that takes it out of the nightmare world where he found it.
THE joker in the pack, finally, is the piece "From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer", written in 1931 in honour of his friend and proteg e, the tenor John Sullivan. This is virtually the only piece written in "Finnegans Wakese" outside Finnegans Wake itself; it properly belongs among the creative writings. It is a series of miniepiphanies, each glorifying Sullivan and taking care to put his rivals in their place. It is difficult to credit that this playful piece, crammed with operatic allusions, is by the same person that produced the stiffnecked book reviews that take up the early pages of this volume.
The introduction, by editor Kevin Barry, professor of English in NUI Galway, is especially valuable in tracing the complex process whereby Joyce, in his Triestine writings, began to liberate himself from the fixed antinomies and stereotypes that were the norm of Irish history, and to embark on a process of crossing-over and inversion of such antinomies that he took much further, of course, in his creative work.
The notes are very reliable and provide information that is always relevant and focused. An especially valuable feature of this edition is that the texts in Italian are newly translated by Conor Deane. And, as a bonus, the original Italian, and, where relevant, French, are given in an appendix.
Terence Killeen is a critic and an Irish Times journalist