Part of a series entitled Classical Receptions in 20th Century Writings, this monograph contributes admirably to an interdisciplinary understanding of the literary impact of James Joyce. F. argues convincingly in the introduction that this impact is ongoing and that Joyce's critical engagement with Homer's Odyssey is still relevant, affording further opportunities for re-examination in the contemporary world, not only for academics, but also for modern writers who encounter Homer by way of Joyce. F. argues that this is mainly because Joyce provided readers with a way of viewing Homer as a de-stabilising force, capable of ambiguity, multiple meanings and alternative possibilities, rather than with a fixed and ‘correct’ interpretation. Certainly, this view has gained traction in the last few decades, supported by classical scholars such as M. Katz and J. Peradotto.
F. provides a good overview of the more recent shift in how Joyce is now read in the context of his cultural and political environment, interestingly linking modernism with the recent explosion of interest in reception studies. Above all, F. argues that Joyce promoted the concept of a personal emotional connection with Homer for readers, independent of institutionalised academic readings. This connection could offer what she calls ‘transformative’ liberation from personal and sexual repression. For this point of view F. draws heavily on the work of D. Kiberd, who argued in Ulysses and Us (2009) that Joyce was writing for the ordinary reader about everyday experiences and not for an exclusive academic or literary audience. This view is somewhat ironic in view of Joyce's adoption as a literary icon by academics, in part no doubt, because he is so difficult for the average person to read. Although it is without doubt that Joyce challenged what the author calls ‘institutionally-sanctioned’ reading practices in his own time, this reviewer considers that he would not have been as displeased with his later scholarly canonisation as F. suggests.
The first chapter begins with a well-researched analysis of the influence on Joyce by his classically trained Jesuit teachers, who used ancient literature as a form of social control over their students. Joyce and his fellow students, however, saw the subversive appeal in the use of Latin words to both conceal and emphasise an illicit response to sex and bodily functions. Joyce's schoolboy ‘cloacal obsession’, as H.G. Wells called it, is particularly evident in the character of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Stephen Hero. Furthermore, the appeal of passwords or assumed classical knowledge prompted Joyce to challenge readers with solving puzzles around interpretation of his own texts. In the second chapter F. examines Joyce's antipathy to the violence of history dominated by ‘great men’. This is seen when Stephen, in Ulysses, declares that ‘history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ (U 2.377). This notion explains Joyce's somewhat ambivalent view of Irish nationalism, cultural nostalgia and, moreover, his exile from his home country. Furthermore, this view explains Joyce's desire in Ulysses to examine the everyday world and to portray non-elite citizens, who, in wandering around Dublin, are able to resolve their own personal relationship issues rather than attempting to solve the political and social problems of the day.
Of more interest to Classicists perhaps, the third chapter compares the self-conscious nature of both the Odyssey and Ulysses, focusing on the way in which Homer and Joyce ‘illuminate’ each other in terms of the story-telling process, the emotional involvement of the reader, and the enchantment and the dangers of song. This is particularly evident in the author's reading of the Phaeacians as an ideal audience compared to the men in the library in Joyce's ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ chapter. Both audiences are detached and uninvolved in the events described and can thus hear stories with abstract enjoyment. This is contrasted with Odysseus who, on hearing the song of his own adventures in Troy, was unable to enjoy the story in the same way and wept with emotion at the memories of war that the song evoked. And, unlike the other men in the library, Stephen, in Ulysses, is emotionally engaged with literature and understands ‘the power and the pain’ of stories. In addition, F. charts Joyce's evolution in re-examining the role of women in the classical tradition. Particularly noteworthy is F.'s discussion on the influence of Samuel Butler on Joyce. Butler, in his controversial book The Authoress of the Odyssey, after casting doubt on Penelope's fidelity, concluded that he knew of no writer who would have been able to portray such a contradictory female character as Penelope without being a woman. F. suggests that Joyce may have seen this statement as a challenge for his portrayal of Molly Bloom, whose female voice and perspective so superbly ends the Irish version of a heroic quest. This portrayal anticipates by some decades the increased interest in engaging with the Homeric poems from a feminine point of view, not only by scholars, but also from writers such as Margaret Atwood and Madeline Miller.
The last chapter considers the reception of Joyce in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and his influence on writers such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. Walcott claimed in an interview that he had never read the Homeric poems in their entirety, yet, as a great admirer of both Homer and Joyce, he was inspired to set his own poem, Omeros, in the Caribbean. F. argues that even partial readings of Joyce can have an impact on modern writers. She concludes the book by examining the dynamic influence of Joyce on two contemporary writers – Maya Lang and Alison Bechdel, who wrote The Sixteenth of June and Fun Home respectively. She argues that Joyce's championing of literature's value in the real world offered these writers a model of playful, personal readings that acknowledge the past but are not constrained by it. At the end of The Sixteenth of June the protagonist, ironically named Nora (the name of Joyce's wife), manages to break free of her past and to determine her own future, not with a romantic liaison as in the Odyssey and Ulysses, but with the possibility of a platonic friendship between a man and a woman.
In Fun Home Bechdel turns to mythology and literature, as Joyce did, as a way of obtaining the distance needed to tell her own story, writing of her difficult relationship with her father, an English professor and an admirer of Joyce. It is through the connection of their personal readings of Joyce that Bechdel embarks on her own quest to find sexual and creative freedom, discovering family secrets along the way. Despite the academic interpretations of Joyce that she encounters at college, Bechdel finally reads Ulysses in its entirety and discovers a further emotional connection. She comes to the conclusion that Joyce's Parisian publishers published his work ‘because they were lesbians, because they knew a thing or two about erotic truth’. Joyce thus becomes a medium through which other twenty-first-century receptions can travel, reminding us that classical literature has always been mediated by other writers and scholars throughout history. F. concludes by claiming that for Joyce, human society is always in a process of change and that literature can play a crucial role in this process. This volume is an essential reference tool for reception scholars interested in the ways in which Joyce engaged with the classical tradition, in turn creating a long-lasting literary legacy of his own.
