The Avant-Postman : James Joyce, the Avant-garde and Postmodernism

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The Avant-Postman : James Joyce, the Avant-garde and

Postmodernism

David Vichnar

To cite this version:

David Vichnar. The Avant-Postman : James Joyce, the Avant-garde and Postmodernism. Literature.

Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle - Paris III; Univerzita Karlova (Prague), 2014. English. �NNT :

2014PA030010�. �tel-02905654�

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UNIVERSITE SORBONNE NOUVELLE – PARIS 3

ED 120 – Littératures française et comparée

EA 172 – CERC (CNU 10)

CHARLES UNIVERSITY IN PRAGUE

Faculty of Arts

Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

Thèse de doctorat en cotutelle

Littérature comparée

Joint PhD thesis

Anglo-American Literary Studies

David VICHNAR

THE AVANT-POSTMAN:

JAMES JOYCE, THE AVANT-GARDE

& POSTMODERNISM

Thèse dirigée par

Dissertation supervised by

Prof. Jean Bessière

Louis Armand, PhD

Soutenue le 20 janvier 2014

Defended 20 January 2014

Jury

Jean BESSIÈRE (Professeur émérite,

Louis ARMAND (Senior Lecturer,

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris-III)

Charles University in Prague)

Michéala SYMINGTON (Professeur,

Ondřej PILNÝ (Associate Professor,

Université de La Rochelle)

Charles University in Prague)

Joanny MOULIN (Professeur,

Magdaléna POTOČŇÁKOVÁ (Assistant

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Résumé

La thèse, intitulée « L’Avant-Postman: James Joyce, L’Avant-Garde et le Postmoderne », s’efforce

de construire une généalogie littéraire post-joycienne, centrée sur les notions de l’avant-garde

joy-cienne et de l’expérimentation littéraire, et prend les deux dernières œuvres de

Joyce, Ulysses et Finnegans Wake, pour points de départ des avant-gardes d’après la seconde

guerre mondiale, une époque généralement appelée « postmoderne », en Grande-Bretagne, aux

États-Unis, et en France.

L’Introduction identifie la notion d’une avant-garde joycienne à l'exploration, par Joyce, de la

ma-térialité du langage et l’identification de sa dernière œuvre, le « Work in Progress », à la «

Révolu-tion du mot », défendue par Eugène Jolas dans sa revue transiRévolu-tion.

L’exploration joycienne de la matérialité du langage se comprend selon trois orientations : l'écriture

conçue comme une trace physique, susceptible d’être distordue ou effacée ; le langage littéraire

compris comme une forgerie des mots des autres ; le projet de la création d’un idiome personnel,

défini comme un langage « autonome », qui doit être caractéristique de la littérature vraiment

mo-derne.

La thèse est divisée en huit chapitres, deux pour la Grande-Bretagne (de B.S. Johnson,

Brooke-Rose à Iain Sinclair), deux pour les États-Unis (de Burroughs et Gass à Acker et Sorrentino) et

trois pour la France (le nouveau roman, l’Oulipo, et la groupe Tel Quel). Le Chapitre VIII retrace

l’héritage joycien pour la littérature après 2000 dans ces trois espaces nationaux. La conclusion

définit l’avant-garde joycienne, telle qu'elle est thématisée après la seconde guerre mondiale,

comme un défi adressé à la notion de « postmoderne ».

Mots clés : James Joyce, l’avant-garde littéraire, le postmoderne, littérature expérimentale

d’après-guerre, histoire littéraire, littérature comparée.

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Abstract

The thesis, entitled “The Avant-Postman: James Joyce, the Avant-Garde and Postmodernism,”

attempts to construct a post-Joycean literary genealogy centred around the notions of a Joycean

avant-garde and literary experimentation written in its wake. It considers the last two works by

Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as points of departure for the post-war literary avant-gardes

in Great Britain, the USA, and France, in a period generally called “postmodern.”

The introduction bases the notion of a Joycean avant-garde upon Joyce’s sustained exploration of

the materiality of language and upon the appropriation of his last work, his “Work in Progress,” for

the cause of the “Revolution of the word” conducted by Eugene Jolas in his transition magazine.

The Joycean exploration of the materiality of language is considered as comprising three stimuli:

the conception of writing as physical trace, susceptible to distortion or effacement; the

understand-ing of literary language as a forgery of the words of others; and the project of creatunderstand-ing a personal

idiom as an “autonomous” language for a truly modern literature.

The material is divided into eight chapters, two for Great Britain (from B.S. Johnson via

Brooke-Rose to Iain Sinclair), two for the U.S. (from Burroughs and Gass to Acker and Sorrentino) and

three for France (the nouveau roman, Oulipo, and the Tel Quel group). Chapter Eight traces the

Joycean heritage within the literature after 2000 of the three national literary spaces. The

conclu-sion contextualises the theme of the Joycean post-war avant-garde as a challenge to the notion of

“postmodernism.”

Keywords: James Joyce, the literary avant-garde, postmodernism, post-war experimental

literature, literary history, comparative literature.

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Acknowledgments

The author expresses his gratitude and indebtedness to the two supervisors, Dr. Louis Armand

and Prof. Jean Bessière, for not only their inspiring feedback and unfailing support in all things

thesis-related, but also their heroic effort that went into getting the cotutelle programme under

which the thesis was conducted off the ground and keeping it aflight.

Per aspera ad astra.

Credit is also due to Dr. Joseph Brooker (Birkbeck College, London), who supervised the research

on the Anglophone part of the thesis during a scholarship stay in the academic year 2011-12,

ena-bled and kindly supported by the Anglo-Czech Fund.

Research on the Francophone part of the thesis during the 2012-13 research sojourn at the

Paris-III has been partly supported by the Mobility Fund of Charles University, as well as the most

gen-erous help of James H. Ottaway, Jr., whose support went beyond monetary value.

Fondly remembered is the useful feedback received from Profs. Derek Attridge, Daniel Ferrer,

Wil-liam Rowe and André Topia, who have read and commented upon selected parts or aspects of the

work. Thanks are due to Anne LeRoy who proofread the many French resumés accompanying the

thesis.

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INTRODUCTION: JOYCE THE AVANT-

We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries, to understand our interpreter. (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce)

The task set by Richard Ellmann—“to become Joyce’s contemporary” (JJ, 3)—is undertaken in the present work by charting the development of post-war writing that followed in the footsteps of Joyce’s “revolution of the word,” his ex-ploration of the materiality of language and the aesthetic autonomy of fiction. Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the latter propagated and interpreted by Jolas and the transition cohort, are a joint starting point from which genealogi-cal lines of development or constellations of concepts are drawn and formed. The argument traces the many depar-tures from Joyce’s materialist poetics in post-war Anglo-American and French literature that came to be dubbed, by their adherents and detractors alike, “experimental,” or “avant-garde.” The timeframe is, roughly speaking, the last four decades of the 20th century, with a few post-2000 enjambments that bring the entire genealogy into the present. Ellmann’s statement casts Joyce in a peculiar double temporality. As if Joyce were somehow ahead of us; as if the actuality of his writing and life had somehow not yet exhausted their potential; as if Joyce’s writing, in a messianic fashion, were dependent upon some second coming; as if its message, just as Sir Tristram in the second paragraph of

Finnegans Wake, had “passencore rearrived” (FW 3.4-5). As if the novelty of Joyce’s work, its “being ahead,” its avant-, brought about certain belatedness within our reception of it, a post-ness.

JOYCE THE AVANT-

The notion of being ahead, of being so novel as to seem to come from the future, is essential to the programmes of the movements of artistic avant-garde that have reshaped 20th-century art and literature. Writing described as “avant-garde” in what follows, will be understood along the lines of Renato Poggioli’s seminal study on The Theory of the

Avant-Garde. Here, avant-garde writing is marked by its concentration on linguistic creativity as “a necessary reaction

to the flat, opaque, and prosaic nature of our public speech, where the practical end of quantitative communication spoils the quality of expressive means.” This reaction has an essentially social task in that it functions as “at once ca-thartic and therapeutic in respect to the degeneration afflicting common language through conventional habits.”1 Hence, avant-garde writing is one whose “cult of novelty and even of the strange” has definable historical and social causes in the “tensions of our bourgeois, capitalistic, and technological society.”2 Conversely, the notion of belated-ness, of having one’s present moment already defined by a past that somehow pre-programmes it, with little left to do for the present beyond re-enacting, repeating or forging the past’s originary actions and statements, resonates within the common detraction of post-war neo-avant-gardes in canonical criticism. 3 Peter Bürger’s famous re-contextualisation of Poggioli’s argument within a broader historico-philosophical framework entails an insistence on the inherence of the historical avant-garde praxis to its proper historical context:

In a changed context, the resumption of avant-garde intentions with the means of avant-gardism can no longer even have the limited effectiveness the historical avant-gardes achieved. To the extent that the means by which the avant-gardistes hoped to bring about the sublation of art have attained the status of works of art, the claim that the praxis of life is to be re-newed can no longer be legitimately connected with their employment. To formulate more pointedly: the neo-avant-garde in-stitutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions. […] Neo-avant-gardiste art is au-tonomous art in the full sense of the term, which means that it negates the avant-gardiste intention of returning art to the praxis of life.4

1 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) 37. 2 Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 80; 107.

3 Also, one encounters this awareness of belatedness vis-à-vis Joyce everywhere in Joycean scholarship, which ever so often finds itself already in

the text, coming not from the outside, but somehow generated from, solicited by, the Joyce text which always already includes, as it were, its own

theory. Cf. David Vichnar, Joyce Against Theory (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2010), in view of whose overall argument, the criticism of Joyce appears as a discourse centred around a few governing notions and operations already “at work” in Joyce’s text.

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As will become clear, one of the three reasons for basing a “Joycean avant-garde” on his close alliance with the

transi-tion magazine is that of sidestepping the avant-garde vs. neo-avant-garde dichotomy in favour of a programme of

writ-ing which serves “cathartic and therapeutic” functions in respect to “the degeneration afflictwrit-ing common language through conventional habits” (à la Poggioli’s avant-garde) but at the same time remains “autonomous” in its insistence on “the disintegration of words and their subsequent reconstruction on other planes,” and in its disparagement toward “the plain reader”5 (à la Bürger’s neo-avant-garde). The transition magazine, during the eleven years of its activity (1927-38), published not only seventeen instalments from Joyce’s “Work in Progress” to become Finnegans Wake in 1939, as well as all the twelve essays that were to form the Our Exagmination collection, but also many theoretical analyses, polemics, proclamations and defences of the work against its detractors. Its guiding spirits were Elliot Paul and especially Eugène Jolas (1894-1952), an American raised in Alsace, whose trilingualism was reflected in his own writings as well as in the cosmopolitanism of the journal, arguably the last of the great vanguard vehicles of high modernism, and definitely the only one (at least of such scale and durability) explicitly devoted to the avant-garde. In retrospect, Jolas characterised transition as “a workshop of the intercontinental spirit, a proving ground of the new literature, a laboratory for poetic experiment.”6 Again, Jolas’ avant-garde undertaking was marked by certain belated-ness: by the publication of its first number in 1927, the historical avant-garde had been on the wane if not defunct, and so transition gained another, retrogressive dimension: that of the archive. Jolas himself conceived of transition as a “documentary organ” dedicated to presenting what he referred to later as “pan-romanticism.”

More literally, the reception of Finnegans Wake was a belated one for reasons of historical contingency: its 1939 publication on the eve of World War II, and the reaction—for most of the 1950s—against experiment in favour of a socially oriented and politically engaged art production, effectively turned Joyce’s last work into a symbolic end of an old era rather than an opening of a new one. As David Hayman puts it, “after its 1939 publication, the Wake fell seem-ingly into a black hole,” hiding in wait for its (belated) revisitation, calling upon future writers

to reshape the very tools of their craft, to say nothing of their means of perception. Not too many writers have answered the call, though a great many have responded and continue to respond to the less extreme challenge of Ulysses. Still, some-thing else is now clear. The Wake belongs to a class (not a genre) of works which invite the reader to perpetuate creation.7

Thus, there is a second sense in which transition is a useful starting point for the genealogical lines charted in this thesis: its notion of functioning as a “documentary organ” of the historical avant-garde is applicable to those post-war avant-garde groups, schools, or movements that chose to “perpetuate Joyce’s creation,” themselves becoming “doc-umentary organs” of the effects of his poetics. All three principal avant-garde groupings in the post-1960 British, Amer-ican, and French fiction—centred around B.S. Johnson’s experimentalism, the Surfictionist group around Raymond Federman, and the ensemble of literary theorists and practitioners around the Tel Quel magazine, respectively—have fulfilled this function. Last but not least, transition—in Jolas’ conception of it—was not only “a workshop of the intercon-tinental spirit”—and it is its internationalism and threefold focus on America, Britain and France that the present work also re-enacts—but also “a laboratory for poetic experiment.” Since Jolas himself uses a scientific metaphor (without however providing any sort of further conceptual rationale), it is not inopportune to anachronistically tie Jolas’ stress on poetic experiment with what, ten years after, philosopher John Dewey identified as the chief principle of the develop-ment of modern science:

In the history of man, the individual characteristics of mind were regarded as deviations from the normal, and as dangers against which society had to protect itself. Hence the long rule of custom, the rigid conservatism, and the still existing regime of conformity and intellectual standardisation. The development of modern science began when there was recognized in cer-tain technical fields a power to utilize variations as the starting points of new observations, hypotheses and experiments. The

5 Eugene Jolas, “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress: A

Symposium, ed. Samuel Beckett (New York: New Directions, 1929) 79-80.

6 Transition Workshop, ed. Eugene Jolas (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1949) 13.

7 David Hayman, “Some Writers in the Wake of the Wake,” In the Wake of the Wake, eds. David Hayman & Elliott Anderson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978) 3-4.

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growth of the experimental as distinct from the dogmatic habit of mind is due to increased ability to utilize variations for con-structive ends instead of suppressing them.8

Replace the “modern science” in Dewey’s argument with Jolas’ “new literature” and you will arrive at transition’s con-ception of experimentalism, conditioned by “a power to utilize variations as the starting points of new observations” and the “ability to utilize variations for constructive ends instead of suppressing them.” It is less a question of pro-gramme than a “habit of mind,” a mode of experiencing. To say this is to commit an etymological pleonasm, as the word “experiment” comes from Old French esperment meaning “practical knowledge, cunning, enchantment” and con-sequently “trial, proof, example, lesson,” derived from Latin experimentum “a trial, test, proof, experiment,” a noun of action stemming from experiri, “to test, try.” And it is out of this root verb that the word experientia grows, denoting “knowledge gained by repeated trials.” In turn, the structure of the verb entails the prefix ex-, “out of,” peritus “tested, passed over.” Experiment, as experience, is the process of departing from what has been tested, of gaining knowledge by venturing beyond the known grounds, toward, as with transition, the “testing ground of new literature.”

Although present in transition from its very start,9 it was not until transition 11 (Feb 1928) that Joyce’s work was drafted as part of Jolas’ revolutionary programme. In “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” Jolas presents the first sustained analysis of what needs to be accomplished for literature to be made genuinely “new”:

The Real metaphysical problem today is the word. The epoch when the writer photographed the life about him the mechan-ics of words redolent of the daguerreotype, is happily drawing to its close. The new artist of the word has recognized the au-tonomy of language and, aware of the twentieth century current towards universality, attempts to hammer out a verbal vision that destroys time and space.10

Jolas goes on to call for, among other things, “the disintegration of words and their subsequent reconstruction on other planes” which “constitute some of the most important acts of our epoch.”11 This disintegration is made all the more necessary by progress in psychology and psychoanalysis, whose “discoveries of the subconscious […] should have made it apparent that the instrument of language in its archaic condition could no longer be used.”12 And it is Joyce’s “Work in Progress” on whose basis Jolas formulates the notion of aesthetic autonomy or the idea of the materiality of the word:

Modern life, with its changed mythos and transmuted concepts of beauty makes it imperative that words be given new com-positions and relationships. James Joyce, in his new work published serially in transition, has given a body blow to the tradi-tionalists. As he subverts the orthodox meaning of words, the upholders of the norm are seized with panic, and all those who regard the English language as a static thing, sacrosanct in its position, and dogmatically defended by a crumbling hierarchy of philologists and pedagogues, are afraid.13

Jolas’ reading of Joyce’s “Work in Progress” emphasises the materiality of the word as an agent of historical change and the necessity for a new aesthetic of “decreation.” Language, like history, is in a condition of continuous flux and yet potentially expressive of a mystical realm whose modern forms have been described in psychoanalysis, myth criti-cism and surrealist art. Axiomatic—and also quite in tune with Joyce’s own beliefs—in Jolas’ argument is the convic-tion that the revoluconvic-tion of the word is one where the new does not simply erase or replace the old, but where language is in a state of constant flow and blending of various sediments. Revolution takes place less by means of a total over-throw of one regime by another than through the process of the new order subsuming into itself an earlier one. Despite the necessity of linguistic change, Joyce’s creative deformation makes it easier to recover what persists through time.14_{The concept of autonomy has its roots in Kantian ethical thought, tied with the modern idea of freedom, the}

8 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958) xiv.

9 Stuart Gilbert would reminisce years later over “that spring afternoon in Rue de l’Odéon” when he read the opening lines of what was to become

Finnegans Wake on the first page of transition 1 (Transition Workshop, 19).

10 Jolas, “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” 79. 11 Jolas, “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” 79-80. 12 Jolas, “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” 80. 13 Jolas, “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce,” 81.

14 Patricia Waugh has historicised Jolas’ notion of linguistic autonomy as springing from the following sources: “the ‘magic idealism’ of Novalis, the work of Jung and Freud, Bergsonian vitalism, and late nineteenth-century symbolism and the French surrealists, abandonment of ordinary waking consciousness or of everyday language, of positivism and empiricism, as instruments of knowledge. […] Jolas’ idea of the revolutionary artistic word is borrowed from the new sciences of the mind which in turn depend upon a Darwinian understanding of evolution (Waugh, “Introduction: Looking

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capacity to follow self-determined, rationally formulated principles as opposed to irrationalism from within and tyranni-cal oppression from without.15 Jolas’ version of autonomy was specifically intended to ease into history the linguistic macaronics of Joyce’s work as a monument to the new cosmos of the scientists and philosophers and the new self of psychoanalysis and anthropology – this concept of aesthetic autonomy, viewed by Jolas as the most radical effect of the revolution of the word, would soon become virtually definitive of cultural modernism.16 However blatant in pursuing his own agenda at Joyce’s expense, Jolas’ theories were never disputed or opposed by Joyce17 – to the contrary, in a few Finnegans Wake passages, Jolas is presented as Joyce’s spokesman. Joyce fully embraced transition’s revolu-tion of the word, a restorarevolu-tion of the word into a posirevolu-tion of respectability that it had relinquished to the image. A year after Jolas’ conceptualisation of Joyce’s linguistic autonomy, the June 1929 double-issue of transition 16/17 featured Samuel Beckett’s earliest work of criticism, his essay “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,” which contains one of the most famous and often-quoted observations about the language of the Wake in the whole of Joyce criticism:

Here is direct expression – pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. […] Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and lis-tened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.18

Beckett’s concept of “direct expression” and his instance on the conflation of content and form in Joyce’s Wake was soon to become the guiding principles under which Joyce’s materialist poetics came to be enlisted by so-called con-crete writing. Thus, the Joycean avant-garde can be defined as emergent from his lifelong preoccupation with the ma-teriality of language and partaking of the Jolasian “revolution of the word” through its linguistic poetics foregrounding the materiality of language. Joyce elevates this tendency of the modernist “attention to the medium” to a principle gov-erning the development of his oeuvre, marked as it is, from the floating signifiers of “paralysis,” “gnomon,” and “simo-ny” in the first paragraph of “The Sisters”—the first Dubliners story—to the possibly inexhaustible allusive potential of almost all “words” in Finnegans Wake, by a constant preoccupation with the materiality of language. The “scrupulous meanness” of Dubliners’ seemingly naturalist prose is complexified by means of Joyce’s etymological recalls or syn-tactical manipulations conveying the idiosyncratic rhythms of Dubliners’ speech. The opening scene of A Portrait, with its multiple shifts in perspective, repetitiveness, and verbal deformation (“O, the wild rose blossoms” becoming “O the

geen wothe botheth” [P, 7]), portrays the individual’s entry into language as charged with socio-sexual tension. In

vari-ous places throughout A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus perceives words “silently emptied of instantaneous sense,” thereby forming “heaps of dead language” (P 150) – language as material foreign and mysteri-ous to the human subjectivity, and yet affecting it profoundly: words like “suck” or “foetus” (described as “queer”), or, later on, les jupes or mulier cantat, evoke a bodily reaction of arousal and delirium.

Ulysses foregrounds linguistic materiality on the many various macro-levels: most obviously, by means of the

famed mythological method, the constant superimposition of multiple layers of narrative and the imposition of the Ho-meric intertext on its encyclopaedic rendering of 16 June 1904 in the colonial city of Dublin. Then, through the

Back on the Modern Tradition,” Revolutions of the Word: Intellectual Contexts for the Study of Modern Literature, ed. Patricia Waugh [London & New York: Arnold, 1997] 10-1).

15 Transferred to the realm of the aesthetic, “Kantian universalism involves the idea that art creates its own universe, one structured according to internal rules which are not subordinate to or interchangeable with the imperatives of other orders outside of the aesthetic. […] The kind of commit-ment to autonomy voiced by Jolas in his famous essay was as much an attempt to expand and problematize the relations of art to history as to close them down” (Waugh, “Introduction: Looking Back on the Modern Tradition,” 11).

16 Patricia Waugh has contextualised this attention to the medium within the broad field of modernism: “What is common to science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology and art is a retreat from a common-sensical positivism, a recognition of the limits of ordinary perception, and an open-ing of vision to a sense of the profound strangeness of world and self discovered within these modern disciplines” (Waugh, “Introduction: Lookopen-ing Back on the Modern Tradition,” 13).

17 Even Michael Finney’s article in Hayman’s collection, devoted to unmasking incongruities in Jolas’ linguistic theory and literary practice and to stressing their foreignness to Joyce’s project, ends on a lenient note: “Joyce agreed with some of the things Jolas had to say about reconstructing language, and he was indulgent of any philosophy or approach which would justify his linguistic and literary experiment. But whatever the truth, the fact remains that until its publication as Finnegans Wake in 1939, ‘Work in Progress’ was intimately associated with the Revolution of the Word— physically and ideologically—in the pages of transition” (Michael Finney, “Eugene Jolas, transition, and the Revolution of the Word,” In the Wake of

the Wake, 52).

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plicity of its styles and discourse parodies (e.g. the “Oxen of the Sun” episode at the maternity hospital, staging the evolution of the entire language), through the amount of “found” or “ready-made” linguistic material included (e.g. the “Eumaeus” chapter, stitched together from hundreds of recycled clichés, but also e.g. the famous “Plumtree’s Potted Meat” advertisement [U 17.560]), through its exploration of the visual and graphic dimension of typography and textu-ality (the “Aeolus” chapter at the newspaper room, but also e.g. the incident in which the “POST NO BILLS” wall in-scription wears off to form “POST 110 PILLS” [U 8.93]), but also on the level of the signifier. Examples abound: the very first sentence moves from “stately” to “crossed,” from the “state” to the “cross” (symbolising the Church), but also alluding to the Biblical “stations of the cross” (U 1.1-3). Another notorious instance is Molly Bloom’s translation of

me-tempsychosis as “met him pikehoses” (U 4.343) whereby misheard Greek is turned into the speech of an Irish

house-wife, just as Joyce turns the Greek epic into an Anglo-Irish novel. A prime example is the opening of “The Sirens” epi-sode, composed of 58 phrases (57 of which are repeated later on in the episode’s text) which stage the interplay of letters and words as material which resists meaning-driven interpretation since meaning is context-based.

Finnegans Wake explores the materiality of language at the level of the signifier via the pun and the

portman-teau, which together teach the lesson of the indivisibility of meaning from its material representation. Joyce’s “whorld” (FW 100.29) order, so the theory goes, has the merit of being based on language—which is man-made—rather than on incomprehensible cosmic events. Joyce thus simultaneously desacralizes both religion and language by means of signifiers that no longer stand for something signified but are objects in their own right, the Beckettian “something

it-self,” the subjects of multiple intentions inviting different interpretations. Their complexity makes meaning not

some-thing already accomplished, waiting to be expressed, but instead functions as a horizon, a perspective of semiotic production. Joyce elevates this tendency of the modernist “attention to the medium” to a principle governing the devel-opment of his oeuvre, marked as it is, from the floating signifiers of “paralysis,” “gnomon,” and “simony” in the first paragraph of “The Sisters”—the first Dubliners story—to the possibly inexhaustible allusive potential of almost all “words” in Finnegans Wake, by a constant preoccupation with the materiality of language. Joyce’s use of the portman-teau word and multilingual punning in creating the Wakean language can be seen as variously destabilising identity – of language, history, nation, and last but not least, of its own existence as text, within the potentially infinite re-writings imposed upon it in the reading process. To speak of indenting where identity is concerned is most relevant with the

Wake, a text in whose “scherzarade of one's thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indenti-fide the body never falls” (FW 51.4-6, my italics). To indentiindenti-fide is to identify with an “indentation” – for fiction, just as

history, functions and operates as a product of writing through the operation of reading. Furthermore, the very same sentence indents indentifide as idendifine, performing one instance of the sundry internal variations and differentia-tions that run the whole gamut of the Wakean “indentity of undiscernibles” (FW 49.36-50.1) where the only (s)word that never falls is that of certain and unambiguous identity. The reader’s identity, too, undergoes destabilization in that every reading of the Wake becomes split between the eye that registers multiplicity and the voice which can sound only one text at a time. In other words, every one of the potentially inexhaustible readerly realizations indents the iden-tity of the written: with the Wake more so than with any other text, to read is to re-write, to counter-sign. Every reading is a performance with a difference of the textual material. Indenting stretches out into legal discourse not only via the contractual relation of indenture, but also in that it denotes forging, duplicating – and the voice’s duplication, the per-formance, of the written is nowhere more forcefully limiting than in the Wake.

Finnegans Wake ties these concerns with the understanding of linguistic autonomy as its signature, the mark of

its singularity. This is foregrounded in the famous rhetorical question, “why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?” (FW 115.6-8) In the first of its interpretive investiga-tions into the “original” trespass of one HCE, or Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (FW 30.2), or Here Comes Everybody (FW 32.18-9), one finds the following injunction: “Hesitency was clearly to be evitated. Execration as cleverly to be honnisoid” (FW 35.1-21). Hesitency as a mark of writing which over-means its own sound-realisation, is not only the

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figure for all reading and interpretation forever re-realising its object, and not only for the writing functioning as the self’s peculiarly alienated, original and thus always to be forged, signature. More specifically, Joyce uses it to refer to his own artistic mark, his own forgery of language in the Wake where so much revolves around a letter penned in or-der to wash away the blame sticking to HCE. When elsewhere in the Wake Joyce’s altered writerly ego Shem men-tions his “celebridging over the guilt of the gap in your hiscitendency“ (FW 305.8-9), there is the unbridgeable “gap” out of which springs the notion of a “divided agency” behind any signature, behind all writing, but even more importantly,

hesitency becomes his-cite-tendency, the tendency toward citing. Forgery for Joyce is also a metaphor for artistic

cre-ation. Forgery is a figure for literary writing, forged not only in the sense of writing as technology, as that which is “wrought out of crude matter,” but also in the sense of literature as “discourse” founded upon appropriation and misap-propriation of words-of-the-other, whether in the narrow sense of another writer’s or in the widest sense of language itself. Asks Shem the penman, the letter-writer:

Who can say how many pseudostylic shamiana, how few or how many of the most venerated public impostures, how very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in the first place by this morbid process from his pelagiarist pen? (FW 181.36-182.3)

Joyce’s “pelagiarist pen” insists, throughout his whole oeuvre but especially in the Wake, that literary authenticity is impossible without forgery: of the letter, of the word, of diction, of style. However, for Shem’s letter to be delivered, the figure of the postman, the letter-carrier, is required – and found in the character of Shem’s brother Shaun. Here is an apostrophe directed to one of his variant incarnations:

Mine bruder, able Shaun […], Winner of the gamings, primed at the studience, propredicted from the storybouts, the choice of ages wise! Spickspookspokesman of our specturesque silentiousness! (FW 427.17-33)

The epithet, “winner of the gamings,” identifies Jolas as the Shaun figure here, via reference to his correct guess of the title (Finnegans Wake) of Joyce’s book at the 1937 family Thanksgiving dinner. Jolas, who was “propredicted from the storybouts,” predicted as the Wake’s propagator early on, a role fulfilled over the course of the ten-year friendship with Joyce, and who functioned as the “spickspookspokesman of our specturesque silentiousness,” the spokesperson of Joyce’s silence about his own work, with Joyce arguably “ghost/spook-writing” parts of some of Jolas’ articles.19

Taken together, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake bring about a change in the conception of what writing can and should do, issuing forth from their sustained examination of language as material and their avant-garde conception of aesthet-ic autonomy. They launch a series of effects for whaesthet-ich the post-war (neo-)avant-garde functions as a type of “docu-mentary organ.” These effects can be roughly divided into three groups:

1) concrete writing, the conception of words as traces disseminated in the materiality of the book; the typo-graphical foregrounding of letters, signs and words as distinct objects; what has come to be termed “me-tatextuality” or “liberature”20;

2) writing as plagiarism, the forgery of fiction, the word as always belonging to the other and in need of appro-priation; writing as parodic subversion of established discourses and styles; the Joycean “True Sentence” as always embedded in an ascertainable voice, always bearing a signature;21

19 Cf. McMillan, Transition 1927-38: The History of a Literary Era, 221-2.

20 Michael Kaufmann uses the term metatextuality for works that “‘show’ themselves and comment physically on their material existence in the way that metafictional works comment on their fictiveness” and whose printed form “becomes a part of the narrative,” so that ultimately, “the narrative occurs not only on the ‘other side’ of the page but directly in front of the readers’ eyes on the surface of the page itself” (Michael Kaufmann, Textual

Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print [London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1994] 14-5) ; Katarzyna Bazarnik has coined the

term liberature pertaining to works where “the typography and shape of the book, or its bibliographic code, becomes a peculiar stylistic device delib-erately used by authors […who] go beyond mere words, using typography, images, kind and colour of paper or other material they find more suita-ble for their purpose, sometimes even modifying the very form of the volume” (Katarzyna Bazarnik, Joyce & Liberature [Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2011] ii).

21 The conviction that reality “does not answer to the ‘point of view,’ the monocular vision, the single ascertainable tone. A tone, a voice, is some-body’s, a person’s, and people are confined to being themselves, are Evelines, are Croftons, are Stephens... The True Sentence, in Joyce’s opinion, had best settle for being true to the voice that utters it, and moreover had best acknowledge that when voices commence listening to themselves they turn into styles” (Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices [London: Faber & Faber, 1978] 16).

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3) destabilisation of the signifier as vehicle of established univocal meaning by means of multilingual punning and the technique of the portmanteau, a treatment of words as composite objects themselves, as machines generating polyvocal ever-shifting conglomerates of meanings; what Donald Theall terms a Joycean “tech-no-poetics.”22

These would, then, constitute the Joycean garde “signature” in solicitation of a counter-signature. As avant-gardists to the extent to which Joyce never quite fitted the bill, the writers dealt with here will be considered as both practitioners and theorists of fiction, as formulators of their own fiction programmes. Their critical work will therefore be examined as indicative of their attitude toward, and re-use of, the Joycean materialist poetics. Explicit commentary on Joyce’s treatment of language or his technical and stylistic advances, will be taken as a starting point in evaluating the writers’ position within the lineage issuing from his writing. The fiction will, then, be treated from two major viewpoints: the “textual” and the “conceptual.” By “textual” is meant both an overt acknowledgement of Joyce’s writing in passing, an allusion or quotation, oftentimes of parodic purpose, as well as the more subtle way of establishing a link through a type of similarity, whether stylistic or thematic. In the present context, symptomatic of a Joycean presence within the work of fiction under scrutiny will be the employment of a meta-narrative grid or scheme resultant in multiplication of styles (after Ulysses), and the enhancement of the expressive potential of language through verbal complexification, deformation, recreation (à la Finnegans Wake). Throughout, however, influence will be understood as no mere bor-rowing or passive imitation, but active transformation of the Joycean exploration of the materiality of language and the effects achieved through experimentation with the stylistic reservoir of language. A spectral Joycean presence will be found in what follows: a genealogy of post-war experimental writing countersigning Joyce’s signature, of works that countersign Ulysses and Finnegans Wake by taking account of what is singular about their materialist poetics, and re-imagining what that singularity could become in the new contexts of post-war literary production, creating wholly new singularities.23

The only major book-length treatise on literary response to Finnegans Wake and an attempt at conceptualising a tradi-tion “in its wake,” the only precursor to the present undertaking, is Hayman and Anderson’s co-edited work In the

Wake of the Wake, combining critical essays with interviews and excerpts from the works taken as representatives of

this tradition. In Hayman’s introduction, the post-Wake novel tradition is conceptualised as “growing out of tendencies central to the Wake rather than directly out of the Wake itself,” and Hayman is careful to limit his case for both influ-ence and impact to “writers who have actually read and studied Joyce” – hinflu-ence his two excellent interviews with Mau-rice Roche and Philippe Sollers, as well as the inclusion of an essay by Haroldo de Campos on “The Wake in Brazil and Hispanic America,” documenting Hayman’s conviction that “to date, most of the work in this “tradition” has been done by writers in languages other than English.”24 Accordingly, his further examples include Hélène Cixous, Michel Butor, Raymond Queneau, the Brazilian Noigandres group of concrete poetry (Augusto and Haroldo de Campos), and the German experimentalist Arno Schmidt. Writers from the Anglo-American cultural space include Christine Brooke-Rose, Anthony Burgess, Raymond Federman and John Barth. Hayman’s collection is a survey, and with the exception of the two interviews, he does not detail just how exactly these writers “have actually read and studied Joyce” – even though the degree of familiarity with Joyce’s Wake varies greatly between, say, Burgess and Brooke-Rose or Butor

22 “Joyce wrote books that were pivotal for examining relationships between the body and poetic communication and for exploring aspects of such items on the contemporary intellectual agenda as orality and literacy; the importance of transverse communication in contemporary discourse; the role of transgression in communication; the role of practical consciousness in everyday life; and the relationship between the events of everyday life and their embodiment and materialization in the sensory nature of the contemporary interior monologue” (Donald F. Theall, Beyond the Word:

Re-constructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture and Communication [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995] 56).

23 In conversation with the Joyce scholar Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida spoke of a “duel of singularities”: of writing and reading, in the course of which a countersignature comes both to confirm, repeat and respect the signature of the other, of the “original” work, and to lead it off elsewhere, so running the risk of betraying it, having to betray it in a certain way so as to respect it, through the invention of another signature just as singular. Thus redefined, the concept of the countersignature gathers up the whole paradox: you have to give yourself over singularly to singularity, but singu-larity itself then does have to share itself out and so compromise itself” (Jacques Derrida, “’This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge [New York: Routledge, 1992] 69).

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and Federman. Moreover, Michael Finney’s essay on “Eugene Jolas, Transition and the Revolution of the Word,” fails to bring forth the essential points of connection between Jolas’ revolutionary project and Joyce’s Wakean poetics, settling instead for a philological critique of some of the more controversial of transition’s linguistic theories. Despite these blind spots, Hayman’s collection (and his introduction) is useful in systematising the possible modes of the

Wake’s impact into four categories: the use of “language as a medium, the preoccupation with the process of saying

as doing”; “the refusal of plot” in favour of approximating “a portable infinity” in which “meanings proliferate amid a welter of effects”; “the increased attention to universals, the generalizing or […] “epic” tendency”; and finally a tenden-cy “to sublimate (not destroy) structure, harmony, and radiance in order to avoid the appearance, if not the fact, of aesthetic control.”25 But, failing to engage with the writers’ own theory of fiction or pronouncements regarding the tradi-tion that had come to inform their work, Hayman still remains faced with the questradi-tion of impact “inevitably mingl[ing] with that of fashions, and one may ask, Would the same thing not have occurred without Joyce?”26

Three other works of extant literary scholarship will be haunting—just as Joyce does with the writing under fo-cus—the individual readings that follow: Robert Martin Adams’ Afterjoyce: Studies in Fiction after Ulysses, Craig Han-sen Werner’s Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction since James Joyce, and Morton P. Levitt’s Modernist

Survi-vors: The Contemporary Novel in England, the United States, France, and Latin America. Adams is a historian of

liter-ary influence – and his study serves to show how “Joyce’s influence worked either directly or indirectly in combination with many other influences.”27 His account is spot-on when pointing out how Joyce’s idiosyncratic refashioning of ex-tant literary techniques and styles grew out of his equally personal take on literary history.28_{Useful are Adams’ “three} thematic interludes,” highly useful means by which to eke out the peculiar traits of Joyce’s literary heritage, treating it in terms of “the main devices-patterns-structures that he applied to prose fiction and that others applied after him.”29 These interludes deal, first, with “Paradigms and Grids” – Joyce’s use of Homeric exoskeleton in Ulysses so highly influential among his contemporaries. Second, in “Surfaces, Holes, Blurs, Smears,” Adams describes Joyce’s trans-formation of surfaces “from declaratives to interrogatives,” turning Joyce into a representative of “two wide-spread, multi-form trends that look more contradictory than they are”: the rejection of representation in favour of overt artifice and the rejection of artifice in favour of vision.30 Last but not least, Adams deals with the broad theme of “Language,” and Joyce’s chief operation performed thereon, its “disintegration.” Authors dealt with in Adams’ study are variegated and detailed,31_{and yet, despite the plethora of authors covered, Adams’ approach remains restrictive and problematic} in at least three respects. The Wake, for him, remains “a gigantic enigma, a labyrinth more inconceivably labyrinthine and in some ways more inelegant than anything seen in literature […], without transcending, in the minds of more than a small clique, the status of a curiosity”32 – a scandalously gross simplification, especially given the broadly compara-tive approach and the time of publication of his study. Second, Adams remains preoccupied with documenting particu-lar traces of Joyce’s “influence” which he fails to define (insisting throughout on its “coincidental” nature) or document with meta-literary material – there is no recourse to the authors’ works of criticism or public pronouncements, and thus no substantiation of an actual Joycean link. Third, and consequent to the previous two, there is no attempt on Adams’ part to conceive of Joyce’s experimental heritage as a genealogy running across national and linguistic borders: Ad-ams’ book is a series of readings, insightful and detailed, but ultimately isolated and discontinuous.

25 Hayman, “Some Writers in the Wake of the Wake,” 35-6. 26 Hayman, “Some Writers in the Wake of the Wake,” 35.

27 Robert Martin Adams, Afterjoyce: Studies in Fiction after Ulysses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 3.

28 As Adams points out, although Joyce studied novelists, both modern and traditional, the authors who had the most profound effect on his imagi-nation were not writers of prose fiction, and (with the notable exception of Shakespeare) not English. Joyce’s one chief acknowledged precursor— and the only novelist—was Flaubert; then there were poets (Homer or Dante), dramatists (Shakespeare or Ibsen), both (Goethe) and non-literary artists/theorists (Vico, Wagner).

29 Adams, Afterjoyce, 36. 30 Adams, Afterjoyce, 57.

31 His readings range from Joyce’s contemporaries—both Anglophone (Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett) and German (Herrmann Broch, Alfred Döblin)—to Joyce’s followers across linguistic and national traditions: Anglo-American (Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Dur-rell, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon), Spanish (José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy) and Italian (Carlo Emilio Gadda, Italo Calvino).

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The subtitle to Werner’s work delineates a specific field which is charted out with precision and consistency, ex-ploring “the diverse ways in which the current generation has created a post-Joycean tradition in American fiction.”33 Werner openly avows that his concern is “not so much to contribute to our understanding of Joyce as to study both the understandings and the misunderstandings which have helped shape the contemporary American novel.”34 Unlike Adams’ carefully painted portrait of Joyce the stylistic innovator, Werner’s Joyce is the momentous synthesiser be-tween realist observance of detail and the romanticist elevation thereof onto the level of symbol, Joyce the liberator, not of language or literature, but of experience.35 From this nebulous and anachronistic picture emerges an equally blurry-eyed notion of the Joycean influence within the U.S. post-war letters. Werner is certainly correct when claiming that “different writers read different Joyces—Dublin(er)’s Joyce, Stephen Joyce, Homer’s Joyce, Humphrey Chimpden Joyce—and react accordingly,” nor is he without a point when he argues that “Joyce had no one style, yet he has in-fluenced nearly every stylistic development in contemporary fiction,”36 even though the disjunctive “yet” seems out of place. But this “stylelessness” appears to give Werner the license to pronounce as “Joycean” every writer who sup-posedly shares with him however marginal a trait – personal, artistic, stylistic, aesthetic, ideological. In Werner’s over-view,37_{not only does Joyce become an equally relevant point of reference for writers as unlike as John Barth and} Norman Mailer (who even appear coupled together as “writer-performers”) or Saul Bellow and Gilbert Sorrentino, but questions remain why writers who “consolidate his advancement on traditional forms”—whatever that might entail— should matter equally to those who “extend Joyce’s technical achievement,” or indeed why writers who “participate directly in their works” (another vague notion)—which is something Joyce was extremely elusive about—should be as relevant to his heritage as those who “emulate Joyce’s control of biographical distance.” If unlike Adams and to his credit, Werner does strive to construe a Joycean tradition or genealogy—although only within the borders of one na-tional literature—then, to his detriment, this is a tradition so inclusive and protean as to border on meaninglessness, the adjective “Joycean” emptied of any identifiable referent. Werner’s concluding aquatic metaphor fits his impression-istic approach more than would be desirable.38

Levitt’s work treats the subject of Modernist Survivors within the scope of and differs from both Adams and Werner in broaching, via the example of Joyce, the broader implications of the historical periodization of modernism, its “survival” well after its supposed demise (with WWII) and its influential presence in what is too simply referred to as “postmodernism.” The generality of Levitt’s treatment of Joyce is a self-acknowledged one39_{; unlike Adams, and to his} credit, Levitt is unafraid to posit the centrality of Joyce for the modernist era – and for the era following in its wake. However, to his detriment, Levitt fails to detail the specificities of the “Joycean” character of the Modernist Age beyond the vague notions of Joyce’s “mythopoesis”—the “recognition that in myth we may test out not only our ties with socie-ties of the past but the present status of our own society”—and Joyce’s supposed “humanism,” defined as “the

33 Craig Hansen Werner, Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction after James Joyce (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1982) 5.

34 Werner, Paradoxical Resolutions, 6.

35 “Joyce battles to liberate experience, to admit the full range of human life into the work of art. Joyce’s most important weapon in this battle is […] his “scrupulous meanness” of observation, his refusal either to raise or lower his eyes from the concrete experience, in both its real and its dream aspects” (Werner, Paradoxical Resolutions, 4).

36 Werner, Paradoxical Resolutions, 33.

37 “Diversity characterizes contemporary American fiction as it characterized Joyce’s work. Some contemporary writers delight in Joyce’s technical achievement. John Barth, Russell Banks, Ronald Sukenick, and Raymond Federman manipulate and extend Joyce’s stylistic innovations, while Ernest Gaines, John Updike, and Ralph Ellison consolidate his advancement on traditional forms. Other writers reexamine Joyce’s conception of the relationship between the artist and his work. Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer participate directly in their works; James Baldwin and Saul Bellow emulate Joyce’s control of biographical distance; Flannery O’Connor assumes the Joycean pose of “absent” controller of the epiphanies. Still other writers reexamine Joyce’s thematic concerns. Toni Morrison, William Melvin Kelley, and William Burroughs perceive the political implications of Joyce’s work, while Donald Barthelme and William Gaddis extend his aesthetic themes. Pynchon, like Joyce, encompasses a wide range of seem-ingly incompatible extremes. Only the arranger’s ingenuity limits the permutations, possible arrangements of the writers” (Werner, Paradoxical

Resolutions, 7-8).

38 “Joyce’s shadow stipples the surface of the big two-hearted river, the mainstream of American fiction. The romantic and realistic currents flow on, whirling eddying, never quite merging, pulsing in a single rhythm” (Werner, Paradoxical Resolutions, 195).

39 “I have been speaking of Joyce as if his art could stand for all Modernist art. This is not to deny the very real differences—artistic, philosophic, and human differences—which exist between Joyce and Mann, or Joyce and Proust, or Joyce and Kafka. [… But] it seems indisputable to me that this is the great age of the novel. And Joyce, despite his individuality, is its eponymous hero, symbol (in part because of his individuality) of its artis-tic and human commitment: the Modernist Age might as tellingly be labeled the Age of Joyce” (Levitt, Modernist Survivors, 9-10).

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ished yet central vision of man surviving, of man persisting, a revised yet still powerful humanist vision.”40 It follows that, yet again, Levitt’s Joyce is not so much a source of a well-documented genealogy as a persona, a symbolic fig-ure: “It is the aura of Joyce that attracts me, just as I believe it compels all those novelists who follow him.”41 What is more, Levitt’s “humanist” outlook and his literary historical focus leads him to effectively disparage critical theory (so instrumental in disseminating Joyce’s legacy, particularly in France) and also overlook several truly experimental, even if marginal writers.42 Levitt’s argument is thus replete with shocking misjudgements and blatant simplifications, as when he makes the prediction that “Robbe-Grillet, for example, will surely be remembered more as footnote than as source, more for the implications of his theory than for its elaboration in fiction, and as far less significant novelist than his compatriots Butor and Simon.”43 Levitt’s is a narrow—and oftentimes reductive—focus on Joyce the mythmaker, delimiting Joyce’s legacy to that of symbolical mythical structure imposed upon detailed realism/naturalism without any consistent attention to Joyce’s manipulation with the linguistic medium, or indeed with that of his followers – shared with Adams (and to some extent Werner) is also his avoidance, if not outright omission, of engagement with the herit-age of Joyce’s Wake.

None of the conceptualisations of a post-Joycean writing deals with the obvious paradox entailed in positing the cen-trality of James Joyce for the literature of the post-war period: a challenge to, if not undermining, most conceptualisa-tions of what came to be called literary “postmodernism,” which, at least in its application as a period-marker, is ever so often characterised as replacement of, or successor to, modernism. This despite the fact that one of its inaugural formalisations, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, is based within a “fu-ture/anterior” temporality not dissimilar to that of Bürger’s conception of the post-ness of the neo-avant-garde, or the present construction of the Joycean avant-garde and its aftereffects:

A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. […] Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).44

The Conclusion will parallel the Introduction’s construction of a Joycean avant-garde by formulating (and challenging) a Joycean postmodernity, uniting the “avant-” and the “post-” from the title.

Joyce, the originator of the genealogy mapped out in the present work, will be a writer whose continuous and ever-expanding examination of the materiality of language challenge most of the simplistic dichotomies, as medium and his sublimation of structure was, in the last phase of his career, drafted in service of a specific avant-garde theory and programme, which in turn begat the following genealogy. This is the only sort of genealogy worth mapping, the only one keeping Joyce’s modernist/avant-gardist signature valid and relevant. It is also the Joyce whose after-life this thesis sets out to examine, the post-life of Joyce the avant-gardist, Joyce the avant-postman.

40 Levitt, Modernist Survivors, 10. 41 Levitt, Modernist Survivors, 11.

42 Cf. Levitt’s British chapter which takes extensive effort to deplore mainstream figures like Margaret Drabble or Kingsley Amis while completely omitting experimentalists such as Christine Brooke-Rose or Brigid Brophy.

43 Levitt, Modernist Survivors, 15.

44 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991) 81.

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“BUT HOW MANY HAVE FOLLOWED HIM?”:

JOYCE IN BRITAIN, 1960-80

One of the possible case studies by which to exemplify the turning of the tide between the cultural and literary climate of the 1950s and that of the mid- to late-1960s is the reception of James Joyce in the British fiction of the two decades. As is explicitly stated by the title of a highly influential study on the literature of the period, the 1950s in the English novel were marked by a reaction “against” experiment. Paralleling their contemporaries in poetry, novelists emerging in the 1950s re-visited the chief interests (class and society) and methods (realist novel sequence) of Victorian fiction. Shift in artistic ideology also evokes a change in “the canon” of the time, and homage is now paid to the social en-gagement and realistic style of H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, authors famously rejected by Virginia Woolf. Now, the tables are turned and it is Woolf who is literally the odd one out. Speaking with a virulence and hostility emblematic of the whole Zeitgeist was Kingsley Amis in 1955:

The idea about experiment being the life-blood of the English novel is one that dies hard. “Experiment,” in this context, boils down pretty regularly to “obtruded oddity,” whether in construction—multiple viewpoints and such—or in style; it is not felt that adventurousness in subject matter or attitude or tone really counts. Shift from one scene to the next in midsentence, cut down on verbs or definite articles, and you are putting yourself right up in the forefront, at any rate in the eyes of those who were reared on Joyce and Virginia Woolf and take a jaundiced view of more recent developments.1

Never mind the grotesquely caricatured literary experiment narrowed down to “multiple viewpoints and such” – Joyce and Woolf are a literary disease of which the “more recent developments” are meant to cure the British tradition. Fur-ther examples of both novel-sequence writers and public detractors of Joyce (ad hominem) and experimentalism (ad

rem) are C. P. Snow and William Cooper, respectively. There is, for instance, Snow’s conclusion recorded in Times Literary Supplement on 15 August 1958 to the effect that “Joyce’s way is at best a cul-de-sac.”2 Cooper is recorded to have stated that “the Experimental Novel” had to be “brushed out of the way before we could get a proper hearing.”3 Better still, Morton P. Levitt’s Modernist Survivors quotes Cooper explicitly tying his generation’s distaste for experi-ment with nationalist concerns – perhaps the hostility is directed not so much against Woolf or Joyce as toward the French nouveaux romanciers and American post-war experimentalists who readily embrace their heritage:

Aren’t the French wonderful! Who else in these days could present a literary avant-garde so irredeemably derrière? Avant-garde—and they’re still trying to get something out of Experimental Writing, which was fading away here at the end of the thirties and finally got the push at the beginning of the fifties. What a garde! [...] The point not to miss is this: not only are these anxious, suspicious, despairing French writers nullifying the novel, but they are weakening the intellectual world as a whole, by bringing one part of it into disrepute.4

Speaking as late as 1963, John Wain, another of the Angry Young Men’s ringleaders, still had reasons enough to plainly observe that the “experimental novel” had “died with Joyce” and that since Ulysses, “there has been little exper-imental writing that strikes one as serious, or motivated by anything more than faddishness or the irritable search for new gimmicks.”5

Joyce’s ghost haunts not only Angry Young Men’s critical pronouncements, but also their fiction – and to only slightly lesser derogation. Stuart Laing’s contribution to Alan Sinfield’s edited Society and Literature quotes Garnet Bowen in Kingsley Amis’ I Like it Here comparing two months abroad to “making a determined start on Finnegan’s [sic]

Wake – an experience bound in itself to be arduous and irritating, but one which could conceivably render available

rich variety of further experiences.”6 The “lucky” Jim Dixon, too, is portrayed as a reader of Joyce, remembering a “sentence in a book he’d once read” which proves to be from the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses. John Wain’s parody of the Wake in Hurry On Down reaches almost poetic heights: “Clout bell, shout well, pell-mell about a tout, get the hell out. About nowt.’”7 Even a writer of a decidedly more “experimental” ilk—at least when compared to the highly

1 Qtd. in Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction against Experiment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967) 40-1. 2 Qtd. in Randall Stevenson, The Last of England? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 406.

3 Qtd. in Rabinovitz, The Reaction against Experiment, 6.

4 Qtd. in Morton P. Levitt, Modernist Survivors (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987) 37. 5 Qtd. in Rabinovitz, The Reaction against Experiment, 8.

6 Stuart Laing, “Novels and the Novel,” Society and Literature 1945-1970, ed. Alan Sinfield (London: Methuen & Co., 1983) 251. 7 John Wain, Hurry on Down (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953) 53.