Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back (Irish Studies)

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Summary: Great Intro to Joyce's way of Seeing
Review: Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back by John Gordon (Irish Studies: Syracuse University Press) Joyce was a realist, but his reality was not ours," writes John Gordon in his new book. Here, he maintains that the shifting styles and techniques of Joyce's work are a function of two interacting realities-the external reality of a particular time and place and the internal reality of a character's mental state. In making this case Gordon offers up a number of new readings: how Stephen Dedalus conceives and composes his villanelle; why the Dubliners story about Little Chandler is titled "A Little Cloud"; why Gerty MacDowell suddenly appears and disappears; what is happening when Leopold Bloom stares for two minutes on end at a beer bottle's label; why the triangle etched at the center of Finnegans Wake doubles itself and grows a pair of circles; why the next to last chapter of Ulysses has, by far, the book's highest incidence of the letter C; and who is the man in the macintosh.
Gordon, whose authoritative "Finnegans Wake": A Plot Summary received critical acclaim and is considered one of the standard references, revises-and challenges-the received version of reality. For instance, Joyce features ghost visitations, telepathy, and other paranormal phenomena not as 'flights into fantasy' but because he believed in the real possibility of such occurrences.
This book is what Hollywood would call a prequel to my earlier "Finnegans Wake": A Plot Summary. There, I set out to show that for all its verbal arabesque, Joyce's most perplexing work nonetheless maintained its author's lifelong commitment to his own brand of realism, to the mimetic rendering of a world in which real things happen, in chronological succession, according to laws of cause and effect. That phrase "his own brand of realism" requires some explaining, which is where this book comes in. I am undertaking to explore, through Joyce's work leading up to Finnegans Wake, the evolution of Joycean reality and the Joycean strategies for expressing and dramatizing it.