Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modernist Disability Aesthetics

Marion Quirici
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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
堕落、颓废与乔伊斯的现代主义残疾美学
1928年,詹姆斯·乔伊斯的《安娜·利维娅·普勒贝尔》以独立卷的形式出版后不久,《观察家报》发表了杰拉尔德·古尔德的一篇负面评论。“看起来他的帽子里好像有个拼字比赛,被嗡嗡声弄糊涂了,”他抱怨道帕德瑞克·科勒姆在给《安娜·利维娅》的序言中称赞乔伊斯是“文学形式的创新者”,古尔德反驳说:“我怀疑打嗝是否真的是一种发明,因为所有的婴儿都会打嗝”(7)。他对这一章关于河流和流动的水的总结回应是直率的:“这一切给我的唯一暗示,”他写道,“是大脑上的水”(7)。古尔德的技巧——通过援引残疾来诋毁乔伊斯——被一种轻快的触碰所冲淡,揭示了在优生学和社会达尔文主义的这个阶段,使用消极的残疾隐喻作为第二天性反射。事实上,到1928年,残疾意象在乔伊斯的作品中已经是一个老生常谈的比喻。这篇文章探讨了早期对乔伊斯小说的回应中对残疾的呼唤,从报纸评论到著名的现代主义同时代人的文章。我的研究证明了19世纪堕落理论对两次世界大战期间现代主义文学接受的持久影响。堕落理论认为,现代艺术导致了人类的残疾、削弱和道德败坏。所谓的“堕落艺术”是正在崛起的纳粹党攻击的目标,但德国以外的其他人也持同样的态度,认为现代主义是一种病态的表达:乔伊斯在英国、爱尔兰和美国的批评者用堕落和疾病的意象来描述他们眼中的不道德、不可理解和低俗的作品。他们认为他的作品,以及他作为创新偶像的地位,表明了道德、精神和艺术的普遍衰退。乔伊斯创造性地回应了这些
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