Post-Genetic Joyce
1995; Columbia University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2688-5220
AutoresDaniel Ferrer, Michael Groden,
Tópico(s)Translation Studies and Practices
ResumoD.F.: This title should not be understood as a more or less private allusion to an anthology(1) published ten years ago and which played its small part in bridging the gap between French and American criticism, as I hope this conference will do. Of course, no Joycean can resist the pleasure of recondite allusions and jokes for the happy few--but this title has more relevant over-tones. First, it might be taken as a portmanteau word, combining and genetic. This carries a double suggestion: one could say that genetic criticism stands in the same relation to traditional genetic studies as post-structuralism stands in relation to structuralism. It does not reject them but subsumes them, and reinterprets them from a different point of view (which is precisely based on a post-structuralist conception of the text). But one might also consider that this reinterpretation is only a shift of emphasis, that this point of view (including the so-called post-structuralist conception of the text) was already virtually present in those studies; that the power of the Joycean text and avant-texte had already induced a practice of reading that largely anticipated theorisation. For genetic studies are nothing new in the Joycean field. Seventeen years ago Michael Groden published a decisive book called in Progress which is still the starting point for any genetic study of Ulysses today, and he is going to devote his part of our talk to a reconsideration of a few aspects of this book. But he had several important predecessors: one need only mention the names of A. Walton Litz, Robert Scholes and David Hayman, but we could even say that Stuart Gilbert's pioneering study James Joyce's Ulysses, written with the help of Joyce, is partly genetic, since it makes extensive use of a genetic document (the famous chart) and probably of some of the Notebooks. Joyce's works were so intimidating that one felt from the start that one needed all the help one could get, including whatever clarification of intentions was to be discovered in the available manuscripts. But the manuscripts, far from making things simpler, introduced new levels of complexities, inducing new modes of reading. Beside these two ideas--the relation of genetic criticism (at least Joycean genetic criticism) to a conception of the text and the claim that genetic criticism is not identical to itself, entertaining a complex relationship with its own past--our title could convey two more possibilities, which we will be able to take up only briefly today. -- The genetic process is largely retrospective: teleology is not a critical artefact, it is built in the writing process itself in which constant reinterpretations and recontextualisations are at least as important as projections and intentions. -- But this does not mean that the printed text is the terminus ad quem of this process: genetic criticism must take into consideration the apres-texte as well as the avant-texte (the post-text as well as the pre-text), the text being only one possible realization of a matrix that precedes it and in some cases goes on after it. We will be able to present only some illustrations of these ideas. Michael Groden will take his examples from Ulysses, and more specifically the Cyclops episode, and then I will take my examples from the transition between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and from Finnegans Wake. M.G.: in Progress is representative of a genetic-teleological model of writing. It argued that Joyce wrote Ulysses in three stages--which it labelled as early, middle, and late--with the early stage focussed on the novelistic story of Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus; the middle stage a transitional one in which Joyce turned to parody styles; and the late stage concerned mainly with stylistic elaboration, symbolistic details, and Homeric parallels. I took for granted that a literary work was characterized, even defined, by unity--even if Ulysses itself caused a lot of problems for this assumption. …
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