My Life in Joyce Studies, Such as It Is

Abstract

Coming from someone who takes pride in writing clearly, that simple, seemingly comic add-on, “Such as It Is,” seems strangely ambiguous: Does it refer to “My [Academic] Life” or to the state of “Joyce Studies”? And why the ambiguity? I have never thought of myself as a Joycean. My professional interest in Joyce has almost from the start been his place among the Modernist Masters—the great age of the novel, as I (continue to) understand it—and in his role as a lodestar for the generations of novelists who have followed him. But from the very start, nearly half a century ago, Joyceans have insisted that I was indeed one of them. I feel honored by the label and also a bit limited. I first read Ulysses in an undergraduate course at Dickinson College in 1957 . . . if “read” is quite the right word for it, even if I did approach every word on every page with all the concentration and goodwill then at my command. We were assigned fifteen novels in a fifteen-week course, and although I can’t recall the entire syllabus, I know that midway through the course Ulysses was followed first by Swann’s Way, then by The Magic Mountain and The Trial, and finally by The Sound and the Fury, in a frustrating, fascinating, intimidating five-week excursion into the modern novel. (I didn’t know the term Modernism at the time. But in a sign of how mysterious—or misleading—literary definitions can be, we also read Arnold Bennett’s contemporaneous novel Riceyman Steps.) It was obviously impossible for me to read Ulysses—indeed, any one of these five novels—in the single week assigned to it (I was taking five other courses that semester) so that I determined to continue reading Ulysses while starting the next assignment and then on to the ones after that and then, finally, at last, to the fifth, so that by the final week, quite literally, I was