Joyce Against Theory by Vichnar David

Author:Vichnar, David [Vichnar, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Litteraria Pragensia
Published: 2013-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

6. Modernism & Postmodernism

I

The first study to seriously engage in rethinking Joyce as a postmodernist writer (and what bearings that might have on an understanding of his modernist status) saw the light of day in the present work’s year zero—1984. Heyward Ehrlich’s edited Light Rays: James Joyce and Modernism [106] brings together contributions both by prominent Joyceans (Hugh Kenner, Fritz Senn, Margot Norris) and “outsiders”: theoreticians (Leslie Fiedler, Ihab Hassan) but also musicians (John Cage, Pierre Boulez). Ihab Hassan’s contribution, hardly surprisingly, will be of great relevance as a starting point of our discussion.

The title, “Finnegans Wake and the Postmodern Imagination,” is offered as an invitation “to place this most outrageous of books, this parodic myth of all myths, this endless sound of language and its echolalias […] in the field of our consciousness.” The crucial question, “How does Finnegans Wake accord with, how does it make itself available to, the postmodern imagination?” bespeaks the underlying conviction that the book “stands as a monstrous prophecy that we have begun to discover […] but have not yet decided how to heed” (93). Hassan offers seven perspectives on this central question, each of which is punctuated by a counterpoint composed of “postmodern rumours and random reflections.” The first, “A Death Book and Book of Life,” conceives of the Wake as a book “more determinedly cyclical than Vico and the very seasons of the unforgetting earth.” Its “presentiment of all ends” seems to portend “death of the self […] of the old reader himself” (94). Speaking of “the secret threat of Finnegans Wake ,” Hassan asks, “Is Finnegans Wake outside literature? Or is it pointing the way for literature to go beyond itself? Or, again, is it a prophecy of the end of literature as we have come to know it?” He answers all three with a resolute “Yes. That is why I call Finnegans Wake not only a death book but also a book of life, not simply an end but a progress as well” (95).

The second perspective addresses the Wake from the viewpoint on its negotiation of “high art, popular culture, and beyond,” addressing Joyce-the-writer from the supposed paradox of his being “among the most autobiographical of artists and the most impersonal, the most self-obsessed and also the most dramatically universal,” a paradox that is argued to be no paradox at all, for Joyce “simply pushed his subjective will so far that it became superfluous to distinguish between subject and object, self and world” (96). In Finnegans Wake then, “the distance between the sublime and the ridiculous is contracted into a pun and expanded into endless parody” and “pop, which Leslie Fielder identifies with postmodern, is never far from the edge of Finnegans Wake .” But the Wake ’s affinity with popular culture is still more complex. In view of the communal readings Finnegans Wake calls for, Hassan hails Joyce for having “revived the magical function of the old bards and shamans, in what by convention we consider a most unlikely place, the seminar room.

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