Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- References and abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction: On being a Joycean
- Chapter 1 Deconstructive criticism of Joyce
- Chapter 2 Popular Joyce?
- Chapter 3 Touching ‘Clay’: reference and reality in Dubliners
- Chapter 4 Joyce and the ideology of character
- Chapter 5 ‘Suck was a queer word’: language, sex, and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Chapter 6 Joyce, Jameson, and the text of history
- Chapter 7 Wakean history: not yet
- Chapter 8 Molly's flow: the writing of ‘Penelope’ and the question of women's language
- Chapter 9 The postmodernity of Joyce: chance, coincidence, and the reader
- Chapter 10 Countlessness of livestories: narrativity in Finnegans Wake
- Chapter 11 Finnegans awake, or the dream of interpretation
- Chapter 12 The Wake's confounded language
- Chapter 13 Envoi: judging Joyce
- Works cited
- Index
Chapter 9 - The postmodernity of Joyce: chance, coincidence, and the reader
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- References and abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction: On being a Joycean
- Chapter 1 Deconstructive criticism of Joyce
- Chapter 2 Popular Joyce?
- Chapter 3 Touching ‘Clay’: reference and reality in Dubliners
- Chapter 4 Joyce and the ideology of character
- Chapter 5 ‘Suck was a queer word’: language, sex, and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Chapter 6 Joyce, Jameson, and the text of history
- Chapter 7 Wakean history: not yet
- Chapter 8 Molly's flow: the writing of ‘Penelope’ and the question of women's language
- Chapter 9 The postmodernity of Joyce: chance, coincidence, and the reader
- Chapter 10 Countlessness of livestories: narrativity in Finnegans Wake
- Chapter 11 Finnegans awake, or the dream of interpretation
- Chapter 12 The Wake's confounded language
- Chapter 13 Envoi: judging Joyce
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
In the ‘Ithaca’ episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus narrates two short fictions to Leopold Bloom (U 17.611–41), one a scene in a solitary hotel, the other his Parable of the Plums (with which the reader is already familiar from Stephen's telling of it in ‘Aeolus’ (U 7.923–1058). Bloom, occupying for a moment the place of the reader of Ulysses, has two responses to these stories. The second, an entirely typical one for Bloom, is to speculate on the commercial possibilities of a collection of Stephen's works; it is the first, however, that interests me here. What strikes Bloom most forcibly about the initial story is Stephen's choice (as far as we know, quite unmotivated) of the name ‘Queen's Hotel’ for his fictional setting, a name which evokes in the older man a detailed memory of his father's suicide – recounted in the clinical detail typical of the chapter – in the Queen's Hotel, Ennis. This recollection is followed by an enquiry from the catechistic voice: ‘Did he attribute this homonymity to information or coincidence or intuition?’ The answer is concise and unambiguous: ‘Coincidence’.
To the two distinct modes of knowledge that might explain the unexpected chiming between the worlds of narrator and audience, ‘information’ and ‘intuition’, Bloom prefers that unaccountable falling together of events that we call coincidence.
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- Joyce EffectsOn Language, Theory, and History, pp. 117 - 125Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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