The Word According to James Joyce: Reconstructing Representation

This book argues for a more conservative view of Joyce's place in the history of critical theory than the view held by scholars. For years interpretation of Joyce's views on language has proceeded on the assumption that an avant-garde writer requires an avant garde theory. It has been suggested that critical theory has just begun to catch up with Joyce, and that we are now able to see Joyce for what he was. In his denial that language refers to anything but itself and in his undoing representation, Joyce anticipates contemporary developments in the history of critical theory. Contrary to modern criticism, Joyce does not abandon representation, the idea that language affords access to reality. This study finds an Aristotelian underpinning for much of Joyce's thinking on language and representation. Language is primarily an aural phenomenon, but knowledge, according to Aristotle, is grounded mainly in vision. In Dubliners and A Portrait Joyce tries to make language as efficient a cognitive tool as vision. According to this study, his solution lies in a systematic conception of language, which entails a correspondence theory of representation which provides an explanation of how verbal art, apprehended temporally, can approximate the directness and immediacy of visual art, which is apprehended spatially. Viewed historically, however, language as system has its limitations - a tenuous stability; it does not provide a stable "surface" for reflecting extralinguistic reality. This book argues that this fact does not mean that reality is inaccessible through language, but complicates the task of recovering it. Joyce's response is to redefine the connection between language and the real. In hiswork from Ulysses on, this study argues, he increasingly realizes a resemblance theory of representation, a conception of language as process - one that emphasizes the aural and temporal properties of language. Joyce, however, does not totally reject a systemic conception of language. In Finnegans Wake he attempts a synthesis of the linguistics of time and space. According to this study, the problem of representation for Joyce resolves into that of translating sensory experience into language. His focus on this problem allies him, to a certain extent, with modernist writers like Ezra Pound (ideogrammic method), T. S. Eliot (objective correlative), and Gertrude Stein (continuous present), who profess to be strengthening the connection between word and object. The modernists therefore cannot be seen as precipitating, much less initiating, a retreat from the word. This interpretation of Joyce's works might seem to be at odds with his reputation for experimentalism, his radical departures from traditional literary techniques. There is, however, no such discrepancy, not even with Finnegans Wake. Joyce's innovations are motivated by a desire to revivify traditional notions about the powers of language to communicate and to represent the world.