Performing Issy

The pedagogy of “outlaw teaching” is presented as a way of bringing risk into the classroom, as Joyce encourages us to do. Reading Ulysses aloud is one way of getting students to become familiar with risk-taking, and some tongue-in-cheek guidelines for such a reading are presented. An extended example of the benefits of such an approach is given with a reading of the “Night Lessons” chapter of Finnegans Wake, as a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, sometime prior to the selling of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Issy, the writer of the footnotes in this chapter, is rearticulated through narrative voicing as a baseball announcer, and the section takes on new life through the admittedly strained analogy of an inning-by-inning analysis of 20 pages of Finnegans Wake. The value of the enterprise is in its method: the author is modeling an approach to centrifugal reading that transforms the Wake into a reading game.

Death by Gramophone

Modernism grew up with the gramophone and came to fear its mechanization as a threat to the lost aurality of a pre-war world. For many modernists, Joyce among them, the gramophone brought death, as the opposite of what they were writing for and a direct threat to their writing lives. Joyce’s gramophone recordings are paired with T. S. Eliot’s writings on the music-hall, and particularly the vaudeville performer Marie Lloyd, to show the humanity of live performance against the soullessness of art in a box. Other modernist works, from To the Lighthouse to As I Lay Dying to Krapp’s Last Tape to Brighton Rock, make an appearance in this wide-ranging study.

In Conclusion

The author draws from his position as editor of the Florida James Joyce Series to present twelve different new approaches to Joyce study. The book returns home by comparing the centrifugal method (departure) with the centripetal theme (return): Joyce’s departures are a cycle of fifths, which inexorably comes back to the home key. The twelve forewords given in this chapter are all centrifugal gestures, radiating outward in a series that has no limit. Concluding that universities in crisis must expand their definitions of research, teaching, and service, the author finds a home in the colleagues who have supported the Joycean enterprise. The book ends with a tribute to the best of Joyceans, Zack Bowen, whose approach models the empathy, collegiality, and hospitality that universities have forgotten.

Introduction

This introduction argues that error is the central theme in Joyce’s work, and all of Joyce is written in what he calls “the language of the outlaw.” Together with this internal moral compass, there is a parallel drive in Joyce’s work to explore the boundaries of experience, to travel outwardly, or through centrifugal motion, in an attempt to widen the range of human thought. Both movements are necessary for a student’s exploration of the world.

The True Story of Jumbo the Elephant

Chapter 4 takes as its point of departure one single line from the “Cyclops” section of Ulysses about an elephant called Jumbo. It follows Jumbo the elephant through a thicket of cultural history in the 1880s to discover the elephant as a symbol of imperial ambition, of the carnivalesque and the tragic, of a Victorian age. The approach to Jumbo the Elephant reveals a way in to Joyce through exhumation, through the recovery of a world that has been lost, just as Ulysses is a recovery of a pre-war world.

Philatelic Joyce

Chapter 2 argues that all of Joyce pushes the envelope, moving beyond itself, refusing to end. It makes the central claim of the book that a love of the “a-telic,” or that which has no ending (telos), is the drive that makes the Joycean free. Each modernist object in Joyce has a four-dimensional life (the fourth dimension being time): this chapter focuses on three postage stamps referred to in the “Ithaca” section of Ulysses by way of example. By entering the world of infinite possibility that these philatelic objects open into, we fly by the nets of the everyday (like Stephen Dedalus), escape paralysis (unlike the characters in Dubliners), and soar towards the sun (like Icarus) to achieve freedom.

At Fault

Chapter 1 argues that the university is in crisis, hamstrung by fear of corporate liability, the loss of due process, and the rise of optics over truth as a university value. The students are the victims of an educational environment that has no tolerance for error. The modern university is “At Fault”: at a fault line, where the principles of empathy and understanding are at war with the principles of institutional cowardice.

Seeing the Joe Miller

This chapter contains a study of the processes of neurology involved in humor detection and what those processes tell us about incongruity and risk-taking in the works of Joyce. A “Joe Miller” is a joke, and this study of Joyce’s jokes takes us into the heart of Joyce’s treasure hoard, which is language. Getting a joke is a cognitive function, performed in the same section of the brain where language tasks take place; appreciating a joke is an affective function, performed in the insular cortex, which is also implicated in pain perception, the perception of disgust, and vomiting. Both depend on parallax, or comparison with existing paradigms; the ability to think of two things at the same time is a useful way into the lexical world of Joyce.

Siren Songs

Where chapter 5 ranged widely across recorded music in modernist literature, chapter 6 focuses narrowly on live performance of music in the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses. Beginning with a study of solfège in the works of Joyce, the chapter carefully listens to the different voices in the episode, assigning each voice a musical part. A recital of the songs in the episode follows, discussing each song as a musical subtext for the events on the page. The chapter closes with a finale that overlays Joyce’s text onto the actual music of Friedrich Flotow’s “M’Appari,” so that Joyce’s musical effects can be properly heard and understood through narrative voicing.

Finnegans Wake for Dummies

Chapter 3 argues that there is a way to read and understand Finnegans Wake, if we can only read according to a new path that starts in the middle and works out to the beginning and the end. Included is a report of a successful experiment in pedagogy that read the Wake in outwardly radiating circles, as dictated by the principle of ascending difficulty, beginning with the easiest sections and working out to the hardest ones. This “spiral reading” path then turns out to track very closely the process of Joyce’s compositional process, and so gives us an insight into Joyce’s method. A syllabus for the original course is included as an Appendix, in an invitation to future teachers.