Culture, 1922 by Manganaro Marc;

Author:Manganaro, Marc;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

READING JOYCE’S “CULTURE”

In 1992 Margot Norris, with particular attention to critical work on Finnegans Wake, noted that though poststructural approaches to Joyce differed significantly from New Critical readings, as seen especially in the poststructural rejection of the New Critical belief in the “coherence” of a literary text, in both schools “the cultural politics gets lost” as “events are collapsed into textuality.” 25 Pointing to the “synchronic bias of the prevailing practices of these traditions,” Norris makes the claim, in reference to Finnegans Wake in particular, that these widely separated schools in fact represent one continuous approach, “a nearly unbroken tradition of ahistorical approaches” that largely ignore, among other things, Irish history and politics (356). “To situate the historical and cultural content” of the Joycean corpus, Norris asserts, means refuting New Critical autotelic approaches, as well as the “free-floating logo-poeia that would assimilate all specific . . . references to language per se. ” Instead, Norris notes, quoting Cheryl Herr, attention needs to be paid to “the voices and texts through which [Joyce’s] society carried out its ideological practices” (357).

The book Norris cites is Herr’s Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (1986), a key study in the effort to recapture a “cultural” Joyce. And yet while Herr’s book makes useful approaches to the social processes and productions brought to and produced within Joyce’s texts, especially in the realm of the popular press, the music halls, and the theater of the day, in fact little attention is paid to what culture as word, term, and model meant in Joyce’s day and how it historically came to mean, variously, what it did—for example, as Arnoldian national project, social evolutionary dogma, or modern “cultural relativist” principle. In Herr’s book, references to “Irish culture,” “popular culture,” and “Joyce’s culture” unproblematically abound, and theorizing upon culture as concept is limited to the application of Marxist semiotic models of culture, which are all too readily, confidently, put forward as a way of understanding the “world” in Joyce’s texts.26

In an essay published a year later Herr notes that Ulysses is essentially “a model of cultural processes and materials.” Within the context of an argument that Joyce constructed Ulysses through the “grand dichotomies” of “Art and Life, Nature and Culture,” she asserts that “Joyce’s insistent alluding makes clear . . . that thinking, the streaming of consciousness . . . the very shape of the self are woven from the materials of one’s culture.”27 Herr is perceptive in viewing “nature as culture” in Joyce’s texts, but she does not recognize Joyce’s “culture” as culture, as an invented and contested concept that was in the process of being invented and contested in Joyce’s day and, as Virginia Dominguez asserts in her cautionary tale of the loose use of the ideological smoking gun that is culture, remains up for grabs to this day.28 Indeed, in this regard Herr, in the rhetorical act of proclaiming culture’s precedence (for Joyce) over nature, naturalizes culture itself.

My purpose in this section is to approach Joyce’s own texts in a “cultural” register.

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