Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of "Ulysses" in Ireland by John McCourt (review)

Abstract

I has often been said that James Joyce has received more critical attention than any writer of literature in English save William Shakespeare. A corollary, as with Shakespeare, is that an unusual amount has been published about this attention and about what may be called Joyce’s reception as a whole. In earlier decades, sections of books catalogued these fortunes: a long sequence in Marvin Magalaner and Richard M. Kain’s Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation, and the critical afterword in the second edition of Harry Levin’s James Joyce or Hugh Kenner’s “Ulysses,” for instance.1 Then whole books documented aspects of Joyce’s critical reception: Geert Lernout’s The French Joyce, Neil Cornwell’s James Joyce and the Russians, and Jeffrey Segall’s Joyce in America.2 Joseph Kelly’s Our Joyce made a distinguished contribution based on archival research, and I attempted a synoptic narrative in Joyce’s Critics.3 Curiously lacking, amid all this documentation, was a full-length history of Joyce’s reception in Ireland. Now John McCourt offers one. While McCourt’s subtitle refers to Ulysses, in practice, Joyce’s whole corpus and career are involved. The book is arranged simply. Of its ten chapters, the first two describe “Joyce in Ireland before Ulysses” and “Ulysses in Court” (a familiar enough tale this, after the work of other scholars including Joseph M. Hassett’s excellent account The “Ulysses” Trials4). The rest move chronologically from “Ulysses in Ireland in the 1920s” to “Millennial Joyce,” each covering either a decade (“Coming of Age in the 1980s”) or two (“Taking the Tower” describes both the 1960s and 1970s). The parameters of “Irish reception” sometimes need to be flexible. In documenting Joyce’s reception in Ireland, the book mentions the arrival of foreign scholars, from Richard Ellmann through the 1960s symposia participants to academic appointments in this century. Irish responses, meanwhile, sometimes occurred outside the country, whether from Irish ambassadors to Switzerland or Irish academics resident in the United States. But the book primarily records the responses of Irish people in Ireland. It cites early reviews and commentaries; obituaries and reflections on Joyce’s death (notably one from Elizabeth Bowen5); poems that refer to Joyce by Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, or Seamus Heaney;6 and comments on the importance of Joyce from poets and novelists, from Edna O’Brien through Dermot Bolger to Eimear McBride.7 McCourt also chroni-