James Joyce and the Reader’s Understanding

Brigid Brophy

James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word by Colin MacCabe
Macmillan, 186 pp, £8.95, February 1979, ISBN 0 333 21648 2

‘The aim of this work,’ Colin MacCabe announces, ‘is not to provide the meaning of Joyce’s work but to allow it to be read.’

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Vol. 2 No. 3 · 21 February 1980 » Brigid Brophy » James Joyce and the Reader’s Understanding (print version)
pages 8-9 | 3048 words

Letters

From Patrick Parrinder

SIR: As the perpetrator of one of the ‘unpublished theses’ (actually, a brief essay) cited in Colin MacCabe’s James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, may I say how delighted I am that Miss Brophy, author of Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, is bringing her sledge-hammer to bear on works of literary criticism (LRB, Vol. 2, No 3)? How soon may we expect to know the names of the other 49? Keep at ’em, Miss Brophy!

Patrick Parrinder
University of Reading

From Brigid Brophy

SIR: I hope Mr Parrinder’s thesis or essay is more accurate than his letter to you (LRB, Vol. 2, No 4), in which he describes me as ‘author of Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without’. This achieves an inaccuracy rate of 66^2/3 per cent, since the book is in fact by Michael Levey, Charles Osborne and

Brigid Brophy
London SW5

From J.D. MacShane

SIR: For a critic Brigid Brophy (LRB, Vol. 2, No 3) is a good novelist. I have read both Colin MacCabe’s book and much of James Joyce and, as neither academic nor novelist, I find the first a useful gloss on the second. Members of the academic world will have a better sense of how to deal with Ms Brophy’s bile but I remain astonished that, save in a passing sentence, she avoids all reference to the central theme of MacCabe’s book, viz: the intense political role that Joyce essayed in the literature of his time. To have been brought up on Joyce with her mother’s milk may make him cosy and familiar to Ms Brophy but has she actually reread him since she became old enough to vote? I have no doubt that Ms Brophy also managed to read Ovid, Milton and Sterne blind to their political significance, but then Ms Brophy’s concept of politics and the political role of writers revolves around them being or doing no more than nagging to death Arts Ministers over PLR. Joyce survived the stupid, uncomprehending reaction of the critics of his day. I suspect MacCabe will do the same.

J.D. MacShane
Geneva

Brigid Brophy writes: If politics is its ‘central theme’, Mr MacCabe’s book is even emptier than I thought. A last chapter of 13 pages recounts, largely through his letters to his brother, Joyce’s understandably out-of-touch efforts to follow Irish and European politics from the position of an expatriate in Trieste. In addition, Mr MacCabe purports to give a ‘political reading’ of Finnegans Wake, but it turns out to be a neo-Freudian reading, which discerns in the book such things as the ‘impact’ of feminine narcissism on ‘phallocentric male discourse’. Apart from its incidental disclosure that Mr MacCabe supposes ‘disinterest’ to mean ‘lack of interest’, this chapter is notable only for his question: ‘Can we categorise the text as a feminine discourse despite its articulation by a male pen or must that pen be accounted for?’ Alas, Mr MacCabe doesn’t go on to say what a female pen is like and whether it manages to assume a non-phallic shape. Perhaps he has misunderstood ‘la plume de ma tante’.