{"title":"Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modernist Disability Aesthetics","authors":"Marion Quirici","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt20krxc7.7","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Shortly after the publication of James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle as a standalone volume in 1928, the Observer issued an unfavorable review by Gerald Gould. “It looks as if he had a spelling-bee in his bonnet, and had got confused by the buzz,” he complained.1 To Padraic Colum, whose preface to Anna Livia had praised Joyce as “an innovator of literary form,”2 Gould countered, “I doubt whether it is really an invention to burble, since all babies do it” (7). His summary response to this chapter on rivers and flowing waters was blunt: “The only water it all suggests to me,” he wrote, “is water on the brain” (7). Gould’s technique— discrediting Joyce by invoking disability—is dashed off with a lightness of touch that reveals the use of negative disability metaphors as a secondnature reflex during this stage of eugenics and social Darwinism. Indeed, by 1928, disability imagery was already a well-worn trope in Joyce’s reception. This essay explores the invocations of disability in early responses to Joyce’s novels, from newspaper reviews to essays by well-known modernist contemporaries. My study demonstrates the lasting impact of nineteenthcentury theories of degeneration—the idea that modern art was contributing to the disabling, weakening, and moral deterioration of the human race—on the reception of modernist literature in the interwar period. Socalled “degenerate art” was targeted by the rising Nazi party,3 but others outside Germany shared the attitude that modernism was an expression of sickness: Joyce’s critics in England, Ireland, and the United States used imagery of degeneracy and disease to describe what they saw as the immorality, incomprehensibility, and lowness of his writing. They saw his work, and his status as an icon of innovation, as indicative of a spreading moral, mental, and artistic decline. Joyce, responding creatively to these","PeriodicalId":330014,"journal":{"name":"Joyce Studies Annual","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2017-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Joyce Studies Annual","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20krxc7.7","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 3
Abstract
Shortly after the publication of James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle as a standalone volume in 1928, the Observer issued an unfavorable review by Gerald Gould. “It looks as if he had a spelling-bee in his bonnet, and had got confused by the buzz,” he complained.1 To Padraic Colum, whose preface to Anna Livia had praised Joyce as “an innovator of literary form,”2 Gould countered, “I doubt whether it is really an invention to burble, since all babies do it” (7). His summary response to this chapter on rivers and flowing waters was blunt: “The only water it all suggests to me,” he wrote, “is water on the brain” (7). Gould’s technique— discrediting Joyce by invoking disability—is dashed off with a lightness of touch that reveals the use of negative disability metaphors as a secondnature reflex during this stage of eugenics and social Darwinism. Indeed, by 1928, disability imagery was already a well-worn trope in Joyce’s reception. This essay explores the invocations of disability in early responses to Joyce’s novels, from newspaper reviews to essays by well-known modernist contemporaries. My study demonstrates the lasting impact of nineteenthcentury theories of degeneration—the idea that modern art was contributing to the disabling, weakening, and moral deterioration of the human race—on the reception of modernist literature in the interwar period. Socalled “degenerate art” was targeted by the rising Nazi party,3 but others outside Germany shared the attitude that modernism was an expression of sickness: Joyce’s critics in England, Ireland, and the United States used imagery of degeneracy and disease to describe what they saw as the immorality, incomprehensibility, and lowness of his writing. They saw his work, and his status as an icon of innovation, as indicative of a spreading moral, mental, and artistic decline. Joyce, responding creatively to these