Joyce Will Attend: The Joyce Tour of Postwar Literature

Abstract

Joyce will attend. This is my promise in this essay. Joyce will arrive among us, will arrive not as a physical presence but as a ghostly presence in the intimate act of reading. In the act of reading, according to Hillis Miller, ‘the dead are raised as ghosts, as dead, as purely fictive or verbal entities, as shades or shadows, as shadows of shades… Reading is one major form of the responsibility the living have to the dead’ (Miller 1995, 74–5). Reading Joyce, of course, has been a significant pursuit in literary studies, and reading Joyce, paying homage to Joyce, is precisely what we are doing in this collection of essays. Speaking about this homage at another Joyce gathering, Jacques Derrida addressed the canonicity of Joyce, and the sense that Ulysses seems to contain and anticipate the whole of Western culture, and argued: ‘nothing can be invented on the subject of Joyce. Everything we can say about Ulysses, for example, has already been anticipated there’ (Derrida, ed. Kamuf 1991, 579). Everything in Joyce has been integrated into the machine of knowledge, ‘the encyclopedic field of the universitas’. But Derrida poses the possibility that something may interrupt this machine, may, at least temporarily, displace the perpetual accomplishment of knowing Joyce. He tells Joyce scholars:

I will appear to you after death.

You will see my ghost after death.

My ghost will haunt you after death.

Leopold Bloom, Ulysses

Joyce remains a stranger to me, as if I did not know him.

Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’

James Joyce: outcast from Ireland, scornful of Britain, and uneasy about the humanism of a Europe to which he could never fully surrender, he became instead a nomad, a world author.

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland