A Take on James Joyce by Sally Rooney

I have not read Sally Rooney. What I understand about her is that she is a best-selling Irish writer of literary importance. After reading her Misreading Ulysses from The Paris Review, I think she is very intelligent, and amusing, and I would read any essay she writes. Joyce does not seem to intimate her at all.

Some tasty bits:

Each reader, of course, encounters their own Ulysses: the one they create for themselves in the act of reading. Every reading of the novel yields a new text, one that has been pulled this way and that by the attention and inattention, the knowledge and ignorance, the likes and dislikes of the particular reader. And that reader is inevitably an entire person: a person with their own distinctive body, their own feelings, their own vocabulary, their own personal library of sensory memories and associations. These qualities are not unfortunate failures of objectivity: they are what make us capable of reading in the first place. Ulysses demands a reader who can respond as a human being, emotionally, intellectually, physically, erotically, even spiritually. And these demands are made on readers who are by necessity in no two cases the same. In our own particular bodies, reading with our eyes and our hands, with our own thoughts and feelings, we remake and reinterpret every text we encounter. Every interpretation has its weaknesses, its points of interest, its missing pieces. From this small limited partial perspective, embracing its smallness and limitations, I feel I need not worry so much about “misreading” Joyce. Every reading of Ulysses is a misreading, a faulty but revealing translation, a way of drawing the novel into new and perhaps unintended relationships. All that matters to me is finding a way to read the book that is interesting: that opens out instead of closing down.

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The novel in English has always had a curious relationship with gender. It was in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that this new form of storytelling started to develop: relatively long prose narratives, set mostly in the present day, populated by fictional characters whose romantic lives made up the basis of the plot. These stories were sufficiently new and different from existing forms of popular literature at the time that they started to be called by the simple word novel. Formally, these books sketched out the parameters of a new genre of storytelling, incorporating narrative techniques, like epistolary exchanges, that would be crucial to the novel’s later development; thematically, their concerns were with gender, status, and sexual morality. These were the earliest stories to be described as novels in English, and they were primarily written by women, like Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood. The formal innovations of these early novels, their tales of seduction and sexual intrigue, not to mention their popularity and commercial success, would prove profoundly influential on the eighteenth-century prose tradition that followed. Male writers like Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson drew deeply on the themes and stylistic techniques of the early female novelists, sometimes while openly disparaging their work. Richardson described his novel Pamela as “a new species of writing,” which, “dismissing the improbable and marvellous, with which novels generally abound, might promote the cause of religion and virtue.” Because the term novel had been coined to describe the work of women, Richardson tried to frame Pamela as something else, a “new species,” an attempt to differentiate his supposedly virtuous book from the immoral novels with which it ran the risk of being associated. Considering his disdain for what was then called the novel, we might find it a little strange that twentieth-century histories of the English-language novel generally identified these male writers—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding—as the inventors of the form. In the intervening centuries, the novel had become an important tradition in English prose, and the books that first gave rise to the term were retroactively excluded from the category. Haywood, Manley, Behn, and other early female novelists are generally discussed even today under the euphemistic label “amatory fiction.”

If attempts to reconstruct a history for the novel have tended to diminish its female progenitors, however, I don’t want to go too far in the other direction. The form as we know it certainly owes an enormous debt to the work of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, quite as much as to the early female novelists who began to sketch out a preliminary framework for the genre. But none of these authors, male or female, are widely read for pleasure by ordinary readers today. The eighteenth century was a period of genesis, experimentation and rapid development for the Anglophone prose narrative, but it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that these distinct traditions would reach a transformative synthesis, giving rise to what present-day readers unanimously recognize as the novel. The writer responsible for this extraordinary synthesis—the author of the earliest novels in the English language still widely read and loved in the present day—is Jane Austen. At the beginning of a new century, Austen’s work provided the formal resources that would see the novel develop into the preeminent form of literary writing in English. Her novels represent the culmination of the emergent genre, a kind of mediation between two related but conflicting traditions in eighteenth-century prose.

***

So if the stakes of the Greek epic are war and peace, and the stakes of the Renaissance tragedy are life and death, then we might say that, at least since Austen, the stakes of the English-language novel are love and marriage. And however much Ulysses might seem to protest otherwise, this is precisely what is really at stake for Bloom, Stephen and Molly on June 16, 1904. The fate of nations is not involved; we never imagine for a minute that any lethal disaster lurks in store for the characters; all that hangs in the balance is friendship, love, family. Ulysses is, like Pride and Prejudice, a purely relational novel. It was Jane Austen who developed the prose narrative techniques necessary to sustain a reader’s interest in such apparently trivial matters, and James Joyce, in writing a novel, necessarily inherited these techniques, though what he did with them was a matter for his own individual genius. Austen’s subtly masterful use of perspective becomes in Ulysses a sort of madcap textual rampage, but with much of the same underlying purpose: to illuminate the events of the novel through the eyes and minds of its protagonists. Even the small circumscribed communities in which Austen stages her plots are echoed in Joyce’s almost implausibly tight-knit Dublin, where Leopold Bloom seems to be acquainted with pretty much everyone he meets. Into the vessel of the novel form, Joyce pours the contents of his story, and if at times it overspills, still we recognize the contours of the container. Formally, it’s in Austen’s lineage, far more directly than Homer’s or Shakespeare’s, that Ulysses participates. But what an unwilling participant it seems to be! Everywhere grasping for the father who isn’t there, and too embarrassed to acknowledge the mother who is. Jane Austen might even be imagined as one of the nightmares from which Ulysses is trying to awake. Its Homeric title, its Shakespearean frame of reference, its endless textual allusions to the works of male forebears: all these come to seem like ways of warding off the uncomfortably effeminate generic history Joyce cannot help but inherit. Referring to Don Gifford’s book Ulysses Annotated, which provides citations for the many thousands of textual references in the novel, we note that Daniel Defoe is cited seven separate times. The later Victorian novelist Charles Dickens merits fifteen mentions. Jane Austen’s name doesn’t even appear in the index. Though I am suggesting that Ulysses ought to be situated in Austen’s lineage, I’m not suggesting that James Joyce would agree. Ulysses kicks back at, picks apart and argues against many of the techniques and conventions Jane Austen established: but then arguing and kicking back are things children often to do to their parents.

Some ideas popping up:

1. That if love and sex and gender have been such long-standing staples of the English language novel, then Kevin Lambert's Edgy, Unapologetic, and Transgressive: 8 Books That Seek to Unsettle the Reader is an essay that needs serious consideration.
2. What one can learn from differences in approach to sex and gender, may not be direct, but as a reflection. There was a gay man in prison who gave me more insights to my own dating preferences than I might have gotten on my own (until this meeting and our discussions, it had not come to my attention I had pretty much kept girlfriends separated by zip code.)
3. Since I am thinking hard on writing an essay ab out Raintree County, a novel I am not so sure how any longer how it incorporates Ulysses, Rooney gives me insights on a deeper connection between the two novels, sex.
4. I need a female character  -well, more than the one I have - for "Chasing Ashes."

sch 12/8/22