Putting Rouge on the Corpse: Cosmopolitan Joyce and Modern Culture

Abstract

‘We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries, to understand our interpreter’ (3). So proclaims the opening of Richard Ellmann’s monumental biography of Joyce and so has Joyce scholarship responded. Expressed in the present progressive, Ellmann’s declaration has continued to summon exegetes so that more than one monograph has staked its interpretive heft on the biographer’s avowal, to such an extent, in fact, that what once appeared as cocky prophecy risks becoming a scholarly platitude of the Joyce industry.¹ In this double-helixed logic, Ellmann’s assertion testifies to the artist’s canonicity that Joyce criticism reproduces and thereby perpetuates. In its aftermath, Joyce has accordingly become, in a manner of speaking, one of the discipline’s and modernism’s most valuable literary annuities. This tautological process, so fundamental to disciplinarity and so distinctive of modernism, forms the focus of this chapter. With Joyce, I want to apply the explanatory logic developed in Virginia Woolf’s intellectual model to his cultural transmission and reception in order to make further claims about why, how, and with what consequences literary modernism came to count itself as an artistic movement expressive not of a single nation or people or even of one time but of universal culture, to become the monolith that once held sway over the literary imagination and cultural capital of the twentieth century.²