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Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of "Ulysses" in Ireland by John McCourt

2022; University of Tulsa; Volume: 59; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjq.2022.0034

1938-6036

Joseph Brooker,

Irish and British Studies

Reviewed by: Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of "Ulysses" in Ireland by John McCourt Joseph Brooker (bio) CONSUMING JOYCE: 100 YEARS OF "ULYSSES" IN IRELAND, by John McCourt. London: Bloomsbury Publishers, 2022. ix + 288 pp. $81.00 cloth, $24.25 paper, $19.40 ebook. It has often been said that James Joyce has received more critical attention than any writer of literature in English save William Shakespeare. A corollary, as with Shakespeare, is that an unusual amount has been published about this attention and about what may be called Joyce's reception as a whole. In earlier decades, sections of books catalogued these fortunes: a long sequence in Marvin Magalaner and Richard M. Kain's Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation, and the critical afterword in the second edition of Harry Levin's James Joyce or Hugh Kenner's "Ulysses," for instance.1 Then whole books documented aspects of Joyce's critical reception: Geert Lernout's The French Joyce, Neil Cornwell's James Joyce and the Russians, and Jeffrey Segall's Joyce in America.2 Joseph Kelly's Our Joyce made a distinguished contribution based on archival research, and I attempted a synoptic narrative in Joyce's Critics.3 Curiously lacking, amid all this documentation, was a full-length history of Joyce's reception in Ireland. Now John McCourt offers one. While McCourt's subtitle refers to Ulysses, in practice, Joyce's whole corpus and career are involved. The book is arranged simply. Of its ten chapters, the first two describe "Joyce in Ireland before Ulysses" and "Ulysses in Court" (a familiar enough tale this, after the work of other scholars including Joseph M. Hassett's excellent account The "Ulysses" Trials4). The rest move chronologically from "Ulysses in Ireland in the 1920s" to "Millennial Joyce," each covering either a decade ("Coming of Age in the 1980s") or two ("Taking the Tower" describes both the 1960s and 1970s). The parameters of "Irish reception" sometimes need to be flexible. In documenting Joyce's reception in Ireland, the book mentions the arrival of foreign scholars, from Richard Ellmann through the 1960s symposia participants to academic appointments in this century. Irish responses, meanwhile, sometimes occurred outside the country, whether from Irish ambassadors to Switzerland or Irish academics resident in the United States. But the book primarily records the responses of Irish people in Ireland. It cites early reviews and commentaries; obituaries and reflections on Joyce's death (notably one from Elizabeth Bowen5); poems that refer to Joyce by Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, or Seamus Heaney;6 and comments on the importance of Joyce from poets and novelists, from Edna O'Brien through Dermot Bolger to Eimear McBride.7 McCourt also chronicles [End Page 709] theatrical adaptations, including Alan McClelland's Bloomsday, which went unstaged in the late 1950s due to the objections of the Catholic hierarchy (132-34); Hugh Leonard's Stephen D, performed at the Gate Theatre and beyond in 1966; Marjorie Barkentin's "Ulysses" in Nighttown shown on the Abbey's Peacock stage in the 1970s; and Fionnula Flanagan's rendition of James Joyce's Women (148).8 Responses to Joyce include film adaptations shot in Ireland: Joseph Strick's Ulysses, Sean Walsh's Bloom, and Pat Murphy's Nora.9 In later chapters, the Joyce Estate emerges as a frequent block on such projects. McCourt's material extends into diverse areas of public life: the speeches of politicians in Dáil Éireann or the invocations of Joyce by both John F. Kennedy and Mary Robinson; the purchases of Joyce papers by the National Library of Ireland for considerable sums unthinkable in earlier decades; the attempts, often uneven since the 1960s, to keep the Sandycove Martello Tower open as a museum, while Joyce is also commemorated in other centers, museums, and statues. McCourt sweeps briskly from poets to playwrights, actors to presidents, ambassadors to ministers of tourism, as well as the journalists and columnists who provide much of the copy he quotes. Professional literary critics are an important part of the story, but Consuming Joyce shows how comparatively fragmentary the Irish critical response was for several decades. Certain commentators like Niall Montgomery made dense essay-length contributions, but even John...