Ashplant
Reading, Smashing, and Playing Ulysses
Yee, Cordell D. K. The Word According to James Joyce: Reconstructing Representation. Bucknell Univ Pr, 1997.
Related topics:
Language and Linguistics
Music
Narration
Realism
Thought and Action
Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/word-according-to-james-joyce-reconstructing-representation/oclc/34958688&referer=brief_results
Yee describes and responds to a critical tendency toward reading Joyce's fiction as a chronology of increasingly deconstructive linguistic experiments. Under Yee's evaluation, this popular interpretation of Joyce as anti-realist presumes his ultimate subscription to uncertainty, futility, and non-referentiality, conclusions which are supported neither by the language and structure of Joyce's works, nor by Joyce's personal attitude towards the purpose of literature. Rather, Yee recalls Aristotelian philosophy and its response to Plato's faith in the forms. While Aristotle asserts the existence of these forms, he denies our ability to grasp them fully. Likewise, for Joyce, literature and philosophy come together in an asymptotal way, and Yee uses the term "process philosophy" to emphasize the "becoming" rather than "being" as the essence of reality. Thus, reality does exist, not by its constant inconstancy, but by its constancy of change.
Though critics typically posit an opposition between Joyce's earlier and later works (Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, versus Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake), Yee resists viewing stylistic difference as contest. Instead of evincing a revisionist trajectory ending in the rejection of representation, Yee considers Joyce's changing use of language to illustrate a continuum of applied Arisotelian poetics, where "unlike effects may follow from similar causes," but intellectual commitments remain basically consistent (17).
Genuine implementation of representation is located most easily in Dubliners and Portrait; these works may break with classic realism, but still rely on the stability of language in order to provide perspectives on contemporary society. More difficult is Yee's task of identifying productive representation in Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Here, the anti-realist argument relies on the inconsistent, contradictory system of signification presented by the words, sounds, and styles of these later novels, as evidence of Joyce's aggressive portrayal of the inability of language to convey meaningful information about reality. While Yee confirms Joyce's intensification of linguistic dynamicity, he refutes the assumption that mutability and representation are mutually exclusive; rather, he views such shifting layers as precisely what makes the creation so temporally realistic and representative—figured in the words of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus: "These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here" (U 3.288-89). The discipline of historical linguistics, by systematically tracking and reconstructing dynamic streams of phonetic/semantic value, provides a precedent of compatibility between unstable signification and tangible reality. Such an outlook may help us interpret the realism of minute orthographic variation as well as that of sweeping stylistic variation, as, for instance, in "Oxen of the Sun" (U 14).
Yee characterizes his approach as "intentionalist, contextualist, and historicist, in that order" (15). Acknowledging that intentionalism presently carries a negative stigma of conservative monologic, Yee defends and elaborates on this methodology: far from being "retrogressive," as the traditionally "caricatured" vision of intentionalism might lead us to suspect, Yee's readings not only recognize but revel in the contradictions, changes, and multiplicity across and within Joyce's fiction, utilizing Joyce's own commentary as a resource, rather than a foundation, for textual interpretation (16). Ultimately, these theoretical and biographical details support Yee's conclusion that "Joyce, far from retreating into intellectual helplessness, affirms the cognitive value of linguistic art" (66).
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