James Joyce and critical theory

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CHAPTER TWOJames Joyce and critical theory

Comparative Critical Studies 1, 1–2, pp. 85–96 © BCLA 2004

In his contribution to this volume, Robert Weninger shows that thereare at least two major kinds of reception aesthetics or reader responsetheory, associated with the two main figures of the Constance School,Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss. The first school deals with themicrocosm of response, the second with the macrocosm; the first issynchronic, the second diachronic. Weninger also places this predomin-antly German phenomenon in literary criticism in the context of themostly French revolution in literary criticism and theory that wentunder many different names but that is most commonly referred to as‘post-structuralism’. Both reader-reception theories and post-structuralismcan be considered as belonging to what Jauss called ‘the fourthparadigm’ in literary theory in that they give the central role in theliterary process to the reader of the text.

At the time when Jauss was writing there were many different waysto interpret and even to describe the developments in literary theorybetween the mid-sixties and the beginning of the eighties, none ofthem without problems. Even the dates are not unproblematic. Butsince that time the fierce debates have calmed down and the ‘theorywars’ have long since been followed by a series of other conflicts; ofthese the scandal of Paul de Man, the ‘science wars’ and the ‘culturewars’ may well be the most important. But even to a casual observer itis clear that there are links between the ‘theory wars’ and the otherscandals and wars, so that we have almost reached the point where it isnecessary to make post-structuralism itself into the object of aWirkungsgeschichte.

In fact, this is, in a very limited fashion, what I tried to do in mydoctoral dissertation for the University of Toronto, on the Frenchcritical reception of Friedrich Hölderlin and James Joyce, which waslater turned into two separate books. Together, the two studiessketch a history of the specifically French development of ‘post-structuralism’. What I would like to do in this essay is sketch briefly

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what the role of James Joyce and his work has been in this develop-ment.

In a way, my choice of the German poet and the Irish novelist as thetwin focuses of the study was dictated more by my personal tastes thanby any knowledge of or insight into the dynamics of French intellectualhistory. But what I discovered to my very welcome surprise was thatthis arbitrary choice turned out to be extremely felicitous. Broadlyspeaking one can observe two different things:

1. Hölderlin’s poetry is central in French criticism in the periodbetween the end of the Second World War until about 1968, whenreferences to the poet almost disappear. In the same year HélèneCixous almost single-handedly places Joyce in the position ofwriter’s writer that had been left vacant by Hölderlin and this lastsuntil the second half of the seventies. In the late seventies Joyce’simpact slowly diminishes and Hölderlin re-appears.

2. Apart from this temporal alternation, a close study of the waxingand waning of Hölderlin’s influence in France allows one to see thefull extent of the influence of Martin Heidegger’s thought onFrench post-structuralism. The Marxist atmosphere of the sixtiesobscured the German philosopher’s contribution to post-structuralistthinking when in 1976 with the death of both Heidegger and ofChairman Mao and with the debate about the Vietnamese boatpeople, the hegemony of the intellectual Left was first seriouslychallenged by so-called nouveaux philosophes André Glucksman andBernard-Henri Lévy.

Of course Joyce’s reputation in France did not really start with thedefence and publication of Hélène Cixous’ doctoral dissertation. It haseven been argued, mostly by French critics, that already in thetwenties France was responsible for Joyce’s international literary fameand there are some arguments in support of such a case. But Joyce’sintroduction in France was due to two Americans. It was Ezra Poundwho convinced him to leave Trieste for Paris and it was Sylvia Beachwho on Christmas Eve 1920 introduced the Irish writer to ValeryLarbaud. In early February she sent the French writer and criticcopies of The Little Review in which Ulysses had been serialised.Larbaud was more than enthusiastic. On 22 February he wrote Beach(in English), ‘I am raving mad over Ulysses … It is wonderful! As greatas Rabelais.’1 Sylvia Beach’s friend and colleague Adrienne Monnierorganised a lecture by Larbaud about Ulysses on 7 December 1921, two


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months before the book was published; 250 Parisians attended.Nineteen years later Adrienne Monnier remarked about the lecture:‘C’est bien la première fois, croyons-nous, qu’un ouvrage de langueanglaise ait été étudié en France, par un écrivain français, avant del’être en Angleterre ou en Amérique.’2 This lecture and especially itslater publication in the Nouvelle Revue Française not only made Joyce’sname in France and in other European countries with an intellectualélite that looked up to Paris, the shorter version of the lecturepublished in the Criterion created a quarrel that amounted to verywelcome publicity for the book.

Central in the argument of Larbaud’s article is the claim that JamesJoyce invented the ‘interior monologue’. This novelty was so importantthat an author like Jean Giraudoux, one of the most popular Frenchwriters of the time, could sarcastically comment in his novel Juliette aupays des hommes, ‘ce qui intriguait Paris en ce moment, ce n’était certespas la mort, c’était le monologue intérieur.’3 On the other hand, all thisdiscussion kept Joyce at the centre of literary attention and ten yearslater he would cynically tell one of his associates that he needed anotherof these well-named concepts to keep his name in the spotlights.

Larbaud not only compared Joyce to French writers like Flaubertand Lautréamont, but for him, the Irish writer was essentially aEuropean: ‘Il est ce qu’on appelle un pur ‘Milésien’: Irlandais etcatholique de vieille souche; de cette Irlande qui se sent quelquesaffinités avec l’Espagne, la France et l’Italie, mais pour qui l’Angleterreest un pays étranger dont rien, pas même la communauté de langue, nela rapproche.’4 (Larbaud 1922a, 387).

This was a view that Joyce may have had some sympathy with (infact it may well be one of the parts of the article that he helpedLarbaud to write) and it is a view that helped Joyce’s acceptance inFrance as a major writer in English, but it did not endear him to theIrish writers. From the opening of his piece, Larbaud speaks as a pre-eminent European writer himself, when he claims that the men ofletters of his own generation consider Joyce as ‘the greatest currentlyliving writer of the English language, the equal of Swift, Sterne and ofFielding.’5 According to Larbaud, Joyce ‘did as much as did all theheroes of Irish nationalism to attract the respect of intellectuals ofevery other country toward Ireland. His work restored Ireland, orrather gave to young Ireland an artistic countenance, an intellectualidentity’ (253). It is in this respect that he can be compared to Ibsen,Strindberg, Nietzsche.


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Joseph Kelly in Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon, claimed that theappearance of Joyce as a modernist writer was an invention of twoAmerican writers, Eliot and Pound, yet all of the characteristics thatKelly identifies figure prominently in Larbaud’s article too: Joyce is aEuropean genius who has written classic works of literature that havefinally put Ireland on the literary and intellectual map.6

The influential critic Ernest Boyd took the bait and accusedLarbaud of refusing to see that Joyce was first and foremost an Irishwriter, more specifically the direct heir to the Irish Revival of the earlypart of the century. Boyd was not Irish: he was an American born inDublin who had settled in New York in 1920 and who was, notaccidentally, a historian of the Irish Revival. Joyce had known ofErnest Boyd’s existence at least since March 1917, when from Zürichhe thanked the critic for his review of A Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man in New Ireland and he had been very disappointed whenhis name failed to appear in Boyd’s Ireland’s Literary Renaissance,which was in 1916 the first book-length history of the Irish Revival toappear. Boyd published an essay in the 28 May 1922 issue of NewYork Tribune that would become the basis of an addition to the revisededition of his book.

Boyd begins the article by claiming that Joyce’s originality and claimto fame do not rely on his poetry or drama, but on the three volumesof fiction. Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses‘have rightly aroused the attention of the intelligent public in Europeand America, even though a French critic has rashly declared that withthem “Ireland makes a sensational re-entry into European literature”’(302). Boyd claims that apart ‘from its affecting and ingenuous belief inthe myth of a ‘European’ literature,’ this statement rests on falseassumptions and he especially objects to Larbaud’s attempt to read Joyceoutside of ‘the facts of Ireland’s literary and intellectual evolution’.Boyd claims that the effort to cut Joyce ‘off from the stream of whichhe is a tributary’ can only be futile:

The logical outcome of this doctrinaire zeal of the coterie is to leave this profoundlyIrish genius in the possession of a prematurely cosmopolitan reputation, the unkindfate which has always overtaken writers isolated from the conditions of which they area part, and presented to the world without any perspective.

Joyce’s work itself refutes such ideas: ‘To claim for this book aEuropean significance simultaneously denied to J. M. Synge and JamesStephens is to confess complete ignorance of its genesis, and to invest



its content with a mysterious import which the actuality of referenceswould seem to deny’ (305).

Boyd continued the polemic in January 1925 in the New York TheWorld with a rebuttal of the special relationship that Joyce, accordingto Larbaud, had enjoyed with the ‘New Ireland’. Boyd assumes thatLarbaud’s expression refers to the newly independent Ireland of SinnFein and in that case the French writer is sadly mistaken. He explainsthat it was only with great difficulty and by using different pseudo-nyms that he himself managed to publish reviews of A Portrait of theArtist as a Young Man in the Dublin nationalist journals and that theNew Ireland not only condemned Joyce, but with him all the otherwriters of the revival, including Boyd himself (Deming 320–1). In anycase, Joyce himself decided to side with Larbaud, because there areindications that he urged the French writer to reply, which the latterdid in another article in the Nouvelle revue française in 1925.

It should be clear by now that this is not a quarrel between acosmopolitan French writer and a provincial Irish hack. Ernest Boydwas not a nationalist bigot. He had been introduced to French literaturewhen he was still a child and had studied in Switzerland and Germany.After a brief stint as the drama critic of the Irish Times, he joined theBritish foreign office and worked as a diplomat in the United States,Barcelona and Copenhagen. In 1920 he resigned because of hissympathies for the Irish nationalist cause and he moved to New York.It was there that he collected and edited the stories of Balzac and deMaupassant, publications that were followed in 1928 with a biographyof the latter. He also translated Anatole France’s Rabelais and publishedintroductions for Casanova’s Memoires, Zola’s Nana and SherwoodAnderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. If anything, his many literary activitiesshow that in many ways he did for French literature in America whatValery Larbaud had done for British literature in France.

In France Joyce became a well-known figure. By the end of 1922several stories from Dubliners had been translated and published invarious journals; a translation of Ulysses by Larbaud himself was underway. In 1924 the French Portrait came out as Dedalus and two yearslater the complete Dubliners and in 1929, finally, the French Ulysses.Yet apart from some early adherents of the interior monologue, Joyce’swriting did not really have much of an impact and this would notchange when Work in Progress was being published in the thirties andFinnegans Wake itself in 1939. Neither did the Second World Warchange Joyce’s impact at first.


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But in the fifties Joyce made a come-back and his name was eventurned into a French adjective, ‘Joycien’. But the theoreticians of thenouveau roman who did so much to make Joyce a household name intheir writings about the ‘theory’ of the novel, managed to divest theword ‘Joycien’ of all meaning. In the theoretical writings of AlainRobbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Michel Butor Joyce is always oneof a litany of famous precursors: this is an example from Robbe-Grillet:‘Flaubert, Dostoïevsky, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett’. Withthe exception of Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, both of themintimately influenced by the Joyce of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,Joyce’s influence on French literature and criticism was limited to theformulaic repetition of his name in literary manifestos.

This was not different when a new group of nouveau roman writersstarted the magazine Tel Quel. In the meantime most of Joyce’s works(with the exception of Finnegans Wake) had been translated. In additionseveral collections of essays, introductory books and recollections byFrench admirers had been published and the stage was set for a newmoment in the reception of Joyce. Initially, the telqueliens followed inthe footsteps of the nouveaux romanciers. From the beginning, Joyce’sname was among the tutelary gods of Tel Quel, but only in 1968 didJoyce suddenly become, not just an important writer, but the Authorpar excellence.

In that year Hélène Cixous, an angliciste and assistant of Jean-Jacques Mayoux, who had written an introductory book on Joyce’swork, defended and published her dissertation on L’Exil de JamesJoyce, one of the biggest monographs on the author ever published.Although it is a fairly traditional Sorbonne thesis of the homme etoeuvre type, the book contains a number of additions that were certainlyadded after the defence and that have everything to do with therevolutionary ‘évenements’ of May 1968, which were not exclusivelyfought in the streets of Paris. One of the founding texts of post-structuralist philosophy is Jacques Derrida’s long essay La Pharmaciede Platon and it is this text that had just been published in twoinstalments in Tel Quel. Derrida had shown an interest in Joyce sincehis first publication, a translation of Husserl, and there is an intriguingfootnote in ‘La Pharmacie’ that reads: ‘The paragraph that ends herewould have mentioned that this Platonic pharmacy also contains andannotates all of the text by Bataille, inscribing into the history of theegg the sun of the cursed part. The whole of this essay being itselfnothing else, as one will soon have understood, but a reading of



Finnegans Wake.’ Most readers, and Hélène Cixous is one of them,interpret this comment as meaning that ‘La Pharmacie’ can be read asan interpretation of Finnegans Wake, but I have tried to argue in TheFrench Joyce that this only makes sense on an extremely superficiallevel as meaning that the Wake, like Plato’s pharmacy (and almostevery other text, by definition), problematizes writing.

Cixous was sufficiently impressed by Derrida’s point to add to herrather old-fashioned Sartrean biographical reading of Joyce three extrasections detailing the possible connections between Joyce’s later workand Egyptian lore, which is totally dependent on Derrida’s text on theone hand and on the chapter about the Egyptian Book of the Dead inJames Atherton’s The Books at the Wake on the other hand. Cixous’appendix does not, as far as I have been able to establish, contain anynew idea. The obvious haste with which the introduction of newmaterials was effected has resulted in visible scars: the three addedsections are not integrated in the book, but just added to it.

In a way Cixous’s textual strategy in L’Exil de James Joyce illustratesthe heady and hurried atmosphere of May 1968 and in these events TelQuel played a crucial role: Cixous had published chapters of herdissertation in Tel Quel and the same magazine had also publishedtranslations of the Joyce chapters of Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta,three years before the book as a whole would be translated. She hadalso organised the publication of the so-called ‘dirty letters’ betweenJoyce and his wife, which cost her the friendship of Maria Jolas.

May 1968 has been described as at least in part a conflict betweentwo different intellectual clans, on the one hand the traditionalprofessors of the Sorbonne and on the other an alliance of progressivestudents and teachers at the Ecole normale supérieure, other schoolssuch as the Ecole Pratique des hautes études and a number of publicintellectuals. This is clear for example in the paradigmatic and verywell-documented 1965 conflict between Roland Barthes and theSorbonne scholar of Racine, Raymond Picard. In Homo academicusPierre Bourdieu has described May 1968 as a revolt against the centralpower of the University on the part of these margins, and if he is right,it is clear that by the seventies, it was the latter group who had won thebattle. Especially at the beginning, this conflict was one between thehumanist and historical traditions in French academic criticism on theone hand and on the other a semiotic and structuralist science ofliterature. It was only in the later writings of Barthes that criticismbecame what he called the mathesis singularis, ‘the impossible science of


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the unique being’. In the earlier form of post-structuralist thinking, thedominant feeling was one in which linguistics would be the mother ormaster science of all humanist disciplines. And it was a movement thatwas non- or even anti-institutional: the central figures Barthes, Foucault,Lacan, Derrida, were all critical of institutions such as the university,and their own power (what Bourdieu calls their symbolic capital) didnot depend on an institution.

A similar movement can be seen at work in Tel Quel. The centralfigure in that journal was Philippe Sollers, a writer without anyacademic affiliation, who took over the board in the early sixties after acoup d’état in which he got rid of Jean-Edern Hallier, the other Frenchenfant terrible. Under Sollers the journal’s existence resembled that ofthe maoist groupuscule that it would become in the second half of 1968.Just before the events of May ’68, he had already ousted his main rivalJean-Pierre Faye, who started the journal Change which would for awhile offer a less maoist but still radically leftist alternative to Tel Quel.

The remaining group around Philippe Sollers proclaimed ‘Larévolution ici maintenant’ and the establishment of a ‘Groupe d’étudesthéoriques’ consisting of the journal’s still active contributors anddedicated to a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary ideal. This ideal is boththeoretical (i.e. philosophical and critical) and practical, which in thiscontext means literary. Central is a theory of écriture that is adoptedfrom Derrida’s philosophy and Lacan’s psychoanalysis. This is followedby several rounds of quarrels with other journals and groups, leadingto a break with the Communist Party in 1971 and the open adoption ofmaoism. In the next six years Sollers would run Tel Quel, published bya Catholic publisher, as a journal purely devoted to Marxist-Leninism.

The practical literary results are only visible in the following year: inTel Quel two long essays are published by Stephen Heath. Sollershimself publishes the novel Lois, which he claims he had completelyrewritten after reading Finnegans Wake. From a theoretical point ofview: Finnegans Wake becomes the paradigm for a radically politicaltheory of écriture. This was all too evident when in 1975 Sollers delivereda paper and then took part in a panel at the Paris International JamesJoyce Symposium. Sollers opens his talk, which was duly published inTel Quel under the title ‘Joyce and Company’, with the statement that‘since Finnegans Wake was written, English no longer exists’. The bookrepresents a political act, since to the virulent nationalism of pre-warfascism, Joyce opposed what Sollers calls a ‘transnationalism’. It isJoyce’s interest in religion that makes the Wake ‘the most formidably



antifascist book produced between the two wars’. Politics pervadeseverything, even psychoanalysis. Sollers sees contemporary history as afundamental struggle between Jung and Freud, and Joyce clearly takesFreud’s side against Jung who represents ‘the set of spiritualist orpara-occultist resistance to psychoanalysis, … a metaphysical counter-investment’. Finnegans Wake thus becomes the central text in a globalcultural revolution.

In the wake of the rise of the nouveaux philosophes in 1976 Tel Quelexplicitly repudiated its maoism and Sollers henceforth reserved hisadulation for Pope John Paul II, although his admiration for JacquesLacan remained intact up to the latter’s death and beyond. In hiscreative writing, Sollers now takes the bible as his source and he writesabout that book, in terms that remind one of his statements aboutFinnegans Wake, that it is ‘the book that most frightens all moderns,that scandalizes most and shocks most deeply their incredible decency’.Joyce remains central in Sollers’ experimental novels, especially inParadis, a book without capital letters and without punctuation, multi-lingual and intertextual, which may well be the closest a French writerhas ever come to the kind of writing that Joyce had attempted inFinnegans Wake.

In a very important sense, Sollers may well be one of the mostcentral figures in the French reception of Joyce and even in thedevelopment of post-structuralism in general: not only were histheoretical writings and discussions extremely influential, quite a few ofthe post-structuralist thinkers treated him as an equal and most of themread his creative prose works as representing the practical paradigm oftheir theories. Roland Barthes devoted a whole book to Sollers’s prose,Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertexuality was at least in part based onthe technical innovations in her husband’s Paradis, and Derrida andLacan showed great respect for his prose. Joyce’s influence on Sollers’theory and practice had reached its highest point in the late seventies.

Sollers still played a role at the 1982 Joyce centenary celebrations inParis, but in the next year he published the first of a series of ‘straight’novels in which he paints a picture of Paris of the end of the twentiethcentury from the perspective of an intellectual and a writer with thekind of life only Philippe Sollers leads. As he moved away stylisticallyfrom the experimental writing of his middle period, Sollers alsoabandoned Joyce as an exemplary figure, although his work stilloccasionally refers to the Irish writer. We can observe similar changesin the interest in Joyce’s work in Cixous and Derrida. The former lost


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interest in Joyce by the end of the seventies, Derrida wrote, deliveredand published two of his longer conference addresses in the mid-eighties but since then he has ceased to comment on Joyce. With onlya few exceptions, most of the French Joyceans now active do notconsider themselves as post-structuralists any longer. The ex-studentsof Hélène Cixous are engaged in what they themselves call critiquegénétique, the close study of the genesis of Joyce’s texts, especiallyUlysses and Finnegans Wake.

There is no time to show this here (I refer you to my book and tothe much more comprehensive volume The Reception of James Joyce inEurope (Continuum 2004) which I have edited), not just Sollers’interpretations but also Lacan and Derrida’s readings of Joyce tell usmuch more about their own thinking than about the Irish writer. Mostprobably the reason for this is simply that despite what they and whattheir followers have claimed, Joyce’s work only seemed to confirmtheir thinking, a linguistics-based Freudianism on the one hand and aradically anti-referential linguistic philosophy on the other. NeitherLacan nor Derrida comments on any specific Joyce text; they restricttheir readings to what Derek Attridge has called ‘Joyce Effects’ and itis only their many commentators who, from the late seventies to theend of the eighties, have applied the psychoanalytical and philosophicalreadings to concrete texts of Joyce.

This is the situation in France. It is remarkable then, if we look atthe reception of the French reception of Joyce, or, to be more precise,the meta-reception of the French Joyce, to see that the spectre ofFrench Joyce still haunts Joyce criticism. Both Attridge and Christinevan Boheemen have recently published books in which they explorethe impact of Derrida and that of both Derrida and Lacan respectively.Van Boheemen even claims that Joyce’s writing not just anticipates thequarrel but that Derrida and Lacan’s different interpretations of Joyceare prefigured in Joyce’s writing and that this writing is necessary tofully understand the work of the philosopher and of the psychoanalyst.The rhetoric of later feminist, postcolonial and cultural studiesapproaches to Joyce’s work are also often marked by Lacan orDerrida’s comments on Joyce and the same is true for the genetic workof David Hayman and some of his students.

If we take seriously Foucault’s and Robert Weninger’s suggestionsabout ‘transdiscursive’ writers and apply them to the field of post-structuralist Joyce and to the ‘theoretical’ approaches in general, it isdifficult to avoid the conclusion that, at least in the French context and



probably for only a limited amount of time, both James Joyce andPhilippe Sollers are such writers, or better, such ‘author-functions’:Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Paradis were for a rather brief time‘paradigms’, reference-works.

This in itself is not interesting, although of course it remains strangethat the same political ideology, stalinist communism, could give riseto a total condemnation of Ulysses by Radek on the one hand, and onthe other to an equally complete appropriation of Joyce’s last twoworks by the French post-structuralists. Let us look again at theinterest in the reader that Jauss, more than a quarter of a century ago,described as the basis for a fourth paradigm of literary studies. Whathas happened to the reader in this process? Cynical observers mayclaim that the shift, broadly, from the context in which the work waswritten, to the author, to the work itself and finally to the reader of thework, has resulted in a development that we can oberve in some recentessays and books in the United States. Literature professors there havebegun to write their autobiographies, as if the reasoning of theindividual critic was: enough about these writers, enough about texts,let’s talk about me for a change. This American development too waspreceded by a similar movement in France where precisely the authorswho had first effected the ‘death of the author’ started to write auto-biographies or thinly disguised autobiographical novels. The majorfigures of post-structuralism have all participated in what one couldcall this ‘autobiographical turn’: Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, PhilippeSollers, Jacques Derrida and a host of minor figures. But I am surethat neither Hans-Robert Jauss nor Wolfgang Iser anticipated thisparticular kind of reader aesthetics.

What this fairly recent phenomenon does illustrate, is that not allreaders are equal and this insight can help us offer an antidote toWeninger’s Foucauldian pessimism about the possibility of readingUlysses without quotation marks. There are strong readers and weakreaders: the latter are what Thomas Kuhn would call the practitionersof ‘normal science’, those critics who write glosses on Derrida or whointerpret Finnegans Wake through concepts found in the work of Lacanor Deleuze. The former are strong readers like Radek and Sollers whomanage to construct interpretations that are not only radically differentbut that in one way or another convince other readers. That theirreadings are sometimes ludicrously idiosyncratic and even totallyirrelevant is not important: they are important because they come fromLacan or Derrida. How you become such a strong reader is just as


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much a mystery to me as to how, in the real world, one personbecomes a strong leader, but that there is a difference between the twocategories should be clear. Derrida and Kristeva can find a publisherand readers for their autobiographical musings, whereas I can’t.

Maybe literary criticism should become much more critical than ithas been in the last fifty years. Literary theory that focuses exclusivelyon the reader seems to end in a kind of textual solipsism that does notdiffer much from the exclusive focus on the text in New Criticism. Atruly critical criticism cannot simply on principle exclude the contextin which a literary work came into existence. This is not just true ofthe genetic criticism that has in France replaced post-structuralism, itis also true for the kind of reception studies that will be published inthe extensive volumes on the European reception of Joyce’s work thatWim Van Mierlo and I have been editing in the series on the Receptionof British Authors in Europe (Series Editor: Elinor Shaffer) published byContinuum. Surely it is only possible to give a meaningful descriptionof how authors and their works were read in a particular national orcultural context, when we know first what they thought they weredoing? This is especially true for an author like James Joyce whoplayed such a central role in the way his work was presented to thepublic and who had an immense impact on the criticism written duringhis life-time. With some exaggeration, it might be claimed that in thecase of Finnegans Wake it would be possible to trace almost all themajor critical insights about that book to statements by the authorhimself. If that is the case, we might do worse than invest more timeand energy in trying to establish exactly how James Joyce read Ulyssesand Finnegans Wake. After all, that too is a kind of reader reception.

1 Valery Larbaud, Lettres à Adrienne Monnier et à Sylvia Beach 1919–1933 (Paris:Éditions Imec, 1991), 40.

2 Adrienne Monnier, ‘L’Ulysse de Joyce et le public Français’, La Gazette des amisdes livres 10 (1940), 51.

3 Jean Giraudoux, Juliette au pays des hommes (Paris: Émile-Paul, 1924), 149.4 Valery Larbaud, ‘James Joyce’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, 103: 387.5 Translation in Robert H. Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage: Volume

I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 252.6 Joseph Kelly, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon. Austin: University of Texas Press,

1998.


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