Sentimentalizing James Joyce

[NOTE: The below is a paper I submitted to a course taught by Nancy Armstrong and Len Tennenhouse in 1998, completely intact and unedited, 1st-year-grad-student warts and all.]

Jonathan Goldman Final Paper: CO 183 5-14-98 Professors Armstrong and Tennenhouse

The Sentimentalizing of James Joyce

“I believe that Joyce’s works exhibit a great deal of sentimentality,” wrote Clive Hart in 1967, “and while I do not think this is a damning criticism, it seems to me, that the Joycean modes of sentimentality require closer and more careful scrutiny than they have hitherto received” (516). It seems that way still. Indeed, the sentimental writes large in Joyce’s text. Hart’s article on the sentimental Joyce, far from instigating a scholarly trend, appears as an aberration in the vast bibliography of Joyce criticism. The lack of critical attention directed toward sentimentalism is made all the more conspicuous considering the thorough investigations of the roles played in Joyce of literary materials such as myths, Shakespeare, Aristotle. Yet the appearance and function of sentimentality are equally essential to the textual operations of Joyce’s writings. Hart explicates his conception of sentimentality : First, the attribution by the author of more emotion than is warranted by his subject (excessive “feeling”) and, as a corollary, seeking from the reader a similar 1

overplus of emotion; second, the dissociation of subject from emotion and the presentation of the latter divorced from the former (with, as corollary, the valuing of emotion for its own sake); third, a distortion of reality in order to make possible an emotional response which would not otherwise be relevant; fourth, an evident desire to maintain an illusory state of affairs because this is felt to be more pleasing than reality.

The definition thematizes sentimentality, presenting it as currents within the text. Sentimentality can, however, be instead understood as a set of formal operations producing specific textual results. Hart’s understanding can still be useful when the sentimental is thus constituted. The sentimental, rather than excessive feeling attributed to a subject, is a subject constructing its interiority by projecting emotion onto an object. Rather than a valuing of emotion for its own sake, it is a manipulation of emotion’s coercive value. Rather than a distortion of reality to produce an emotional response, emotional responses are mobilized to construct a new reality. Such textual moves, usually attributed to popular literature, result from the enlisting of sentimental tropes. For example, the figures of the dying daughter and the man of feeling play prominently in Joyce’s work, starting with Stephen Hero and, while undergoing various permutations, lasting through to the final pages of Finnegans Wake. These figures make initial appearances and are subsequently altered; sentimentality is reconfigured to operate in new ways. I. The Dying Daughter In Stephen Hero, Isabel, the Daedalus daughter, performs a figure – the dying daughter – drawn directly from the sentimental tradition. Her heritage runs from Richardson’s Clarissa and through Little Eva of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Isabel, having lived among the nuns, is constructed of the characteristics of virtue: religion and reserve. She is thus estranged from Stephen, in whose language she is described.1

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She had acquiesced in the religion of her mother; she had accepted everything that had been proposed to her. If she lived she had exactly the temper for a Catholic wife of limited intelligence and of pious docility and if she died she was supposed to have earned for herself a place in the eternal heaven of Christians from which her two brothers were likely to be shut out. (126)

Isabel emerges as a typical device of sentimentalism, against which Stephen, through his disdainful description and his suggested impiety, is immediately defined. The wholesomely good daughter of sentimentalism, and her inevitable – and medically inexplicable – death, characteristically serve to domesticate characters against whose immorality the virtuous attributes contrast. The tragic death strengthens domestic bonds and re-assimilates alienated family members. Crucial to this process is the sentimental figure’s interior life; the construction of interiority signals the authenticity of virtue, casts it as more than mere performance. Hence the importance of Clarissa’s letters, signs that her virtue is within, thus real. At death the immanent goodness of a Clarissa or a Little Eva is magically transferred; rather than disappearing, goodness is dispersed amongst the mourners. The sentimental language does not die with the sentimental trope, it reappears elsewhere in the text. Isabel’s illness and death works this way on her father. Mr. Daedalus’ initial appearances in the text cast him as a character type. His daughter’s return to the financially strained household irritates him: “He was annoyed that his daughter would not avail herself of the opportunity afforded her in the convent” (109). As Isabel’s health declines he remains disgruntled; Mrs. Daedalus must manage “parrying her husband’s illhumour and attending on her dying daughter” (151). During Isabel’s final moments his behavior alters. He cries and says to her “ ‘That’s right, duckey: take that now” when Mrs. Daedalus gives her a dose of champagne2 (164). At the cemetery he sobs, his conversion complete. Joyce’s manuscripts indicate that much of the depiction of Isabel’s illness and funeral is directly drawn from Joyce’s writings about his brother Georgie’s death.

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Specifically, the “epiphanies” include conversations about Georgie with Joyce’s mother Mary and his friend Frances Skeffington, both of which appear in Stephen practically unaltered.3 While the question of how consciously Joyce utilized the device of the dying daughter is irrelevant here, the gender switch the sentimental object undergoes upon transcription to the early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man underscores Isabel’s doubling as the sentimental trope. Yet Stephen resists. Mrs. Daedalus enlists the sentimental in an attempt to socialize him. She cites Isabel’s illness, as well as the example of her own devotions, to compel him to perform religious duties: “I am making a novena and I want you to offer up your communion for a special intention of mine” (131). At Stephen’s request for clarification she says, “Well, dear, I’m very much concerned about Isabel … I don’t know what to think.” Stephen perceives the ploy. “He was much annoyed that his mother should try to wheedle him into conformity by using his sister’s health as an argument. He felt that such an attempt dishonoured him and freed him from the last dissuasions of considerate piety” (132). His mother’s manipulation of sentiment becomes Stephen’s occasion to reveal his irreligion and assert his independence. Mrs. Daedalus’s response confirms not only the religious but also the domestic nature of Stephen’s fully realized estrangement: “I little thought, said his mother, that it would come to this – that a child of mine would lose the faith” (133). Stephen’s refusal to submit denotes a failure of the sentimental figure. The failure is effected through a repudiation of Isabel’s interiority. Stephen disqualifies her interior life for its conformity. Her “case” is “hopeless” (126). He dismisses the possibility of an “interchange of ideas between them” (126-7). In addition to Stephen’s judgments, the text de-idealizes the dying daughter trope. In a prelude to Isabel’s death, interiority actually leaks from her body, issuing as material, rather than as spiritual essence. Stephen’s mother makes the discovery: “What ought I do? There’s some matter coming away from the hole in Isabel’s … stomach … Did you ever hear of that happening?” (163).4 Isabel’s somatized interiority is de-authorized, because it is the wrong kind of interiority, and her sentimentality is the wrong kind of sentimentality. Mrs. Daedalus’ expectation that Stephen can advise on the subject of the matter of Isabel is appropriate to this situation. The negation of the sentimentality of Isabel does not negate

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sentimentality from the text. The text and Stephen conspire to construct a different, better, sentimental object: Stephen. II. Man of Feeling Fight sentimentality with sentimentality would be a fitting aphorism for texts constructing opposition to the work of sentimentalism. The conversion of Mr. Daedalus demonstrates the potency of the sentimental; textual combat against sentimentality inevitably resorts to reconfiguration of sentimental devices. So the repudiation of the sentimental is achieved only by the establishing of Stephen’s interiority, which in turn only defines itself in opposition to Isabel’s interiority. Stephen casts his interiority as authentic. He repeatedly insists he is in contact with his “nature,” whereas Isabel’s devotion and submission preclude her from realizing hers, as Catholicism teaches “that nature is in the possession of Satan” (127). Cranly’s interrogation of Stephen about Isabel produces a response that highlights how Stephen’s self-formulation depends on an attempted denunciation of sentimentalism. Stephen had felt impulses of pity for his mother, for his father, for Isabel, for Wells also but he believed he had done right in resisting them: he had first of all to save himself and he had no business trying to save others unless his experiment with himself justified him. Cranly had all but formulated serious charges against him, calling up by implication the picture of Isabel … but Stephen stood up to the charges and answered in his heart that it was injustice to point a finger of reproach at him and that a vague inactive pity from those who upheld a system of mutual servile association toward those who accepted it was only a play upon emotions as characteristic of the egoist as of the man of sentiment.

Yet a man of sentiment is exactly what Stephen becomes. He insists that his behavior express his interiority. He will not perform an outward show of devotion: “That cannot

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be done for long by anyone who is sensitive” (139). Speaking from his “soul,” his “spiritual nature,” he exults in his true self: “ To express oneself without pretense, to acknowledge one’s own humanity!” (142).5 The authenticity Stephen claims contrasts with the artificiality of the sentimental. He repeatedly dismisses forms of sentimentality as contrived. Specifically, his own refusal to accept the sentimentality of his sister is set against public responses to her death. Talk at Isabel’s grave is “unnatural” (168). “Falsities and trivialities” comprise the funeral. McCann’s expression of sympathy, a carefully timed pressing of Stephen’s hand, achieves “the acme of unconvincingness” (169), an inauthenticity of such dimension that it qualifies as epiphany.6 The emphasis on his nature, his authenticity, his interiority, signal the close relationship between Stephen and another sentimental figure: the man of feeling. The man of feeling is typically unable to perform emotion within accepted social forms. Compare Stephen’s rejection of convention with that of Goethe’s Werther: “A man shaped by the rules will never produce anything tasteless or bad … and yet on the other hand, say what you please, the rules will destroy the true feeling of nature and its true expression” (32). 7 Like Werther, Stephen is estranged from society and family because of his refusal to play by the rules. He is unable to accept conventions of religion, academics, occupation, nationality, bourgeois culture,8 all of which would impose on his nature. Maurice perceives Stephen’s connection with the man of feeling, naming Stephen’s situation one of “certain difficulties of temperament” (229). Stephen’s relationship with his parents clearly delineates his estrangement. Again, he is defined against Isabel. His refusal to perform appropriately, display that he is affected by Isabel’s death, causes domestic conflict. Mr. Daedalus excoriates him: Didn’t I see you the morning of your poor sister’s funeral – don’t forget that? Unnatural bloody ruffian. By Christ I was ashamed of you that morning. You couldn’t behave like a or talk or do a bloody thing only slink over into a corner with the hearse drivers and mutes by God. Who taught you to drink

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pints of plain porter, might I ask? Is that considered the proper thing for an a … artist to do? (228)

Stephen’s inappropriate response to Isabel produces his unsociability – and unnaturalness – in the eyes of his father as it produces his irreligion in the eyes of his mother.9 Thus Stephen’s sentimental rebellion is further defined against his sister. The rejection of one sentimental trope is effected only through the substituting another. To be sure, Stephen never reaches quite the extremity of emotion evinced by Werther. The man of feeling produced by Stephen differs sharply from its literary forebears. Feeling itself is rethought as Stephen’s interiority is authorized by virtue of its relationship to the intellect. III. Man of More Feeling The sentimentality of Stephen, substituted for that of Isabel, comprises important distinctions from the tropes of the dying daughter and the man of feeling. The divergences authorize Stephen’s sentimentality, confirm its legitimacy. First difference: it is male. Clearly the sentimentalism emanating from Isabel – and her hole – and enlisted by Mrs. Daedalus, is gendered, female, associated with domesticity. Defining himself against this discourse, Stephen’s sentimentality, only communicable to auditors such as Cranly or Maurice, is male. It may be tempting to cast these two modes of sentimentalism in the common dichotomy of female/shapeless to male/shape, although to do so would be to ignore that the sentimentalism of Isabel is very much a formal textual feature. These forms of sentimentalism Stephen rejects, and Stephen reforms. Stephen’s sentimentality is authorized because it is intellectual; it stems from an intellectual process, Stephen’s “experiment,” and is linked to Stephen’s literary interests. Stephen’s pursuit of his nature is depicted as an intellectual exercise, his unsociability constructed in relation to his theoretical inclinations. “Stephen had mentioned his sister’s illness and spread out a few leagues of theory on the subject of the tyranny of home” (126). He is considered by Cranly an “inhuman theorist.” In the text the sequence of events concerning Isabel – the return home, the decline and death – alternate with

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Stephen’s academic activities, to which they are initially seen only in relation: “She came home a few days after the famous day of Stephen’s paper” (109). This is before the contrivances and insipidities of the academy emerge as another restriction on Stephen’s interiority. (“Impossible that he should find his soul’s sufficient good in societies for the encouragement of thought among laymen,” the text declares on 193). Naturally, Isabel’s interiority is unintellectual; between Stephen and his sister there can be no “interchange of ideas” (126). Riquelme suggests that they do in fact communicate, citing Isabel’s attention to Stephen’s piano playing. He writes of Isabel, “She has become his audience, albeit temporarily” (111). If this moment indeed constitutes communication, it is, interestingly, non-linguistic and sensual, as if to highlight the convergence of two sensitive souls while maintaining the distinction between the intellectual and unintellectual, authorized and illegitimate brands of the sentimental. Stephen’s intellectualism manifests in his aesthetic theories and literary activities. Literature –particularly Ibsen, that subversive – is viewed by his family and acquaintances as a barrier to socialization. Mrs. Daedalus blames Stephen’s religious revolt on “those books,” which she “won’t have in the house to corrupt anyone else,” as if they have their own affective interiority (135). It is Stephen’s writing, however, which creates his interiority. Writing becomes simultaneously an exercise of the intellect and a channel for emotion. In this the man of feeling is most clearly redefined. While Werther writes, “Today I witnessed a scene which, if written down plainly and exactly, would be the loveliest idyll the world has ever seen; but why trouble with poetry and scenes and idylls?” (35), Stephen valorizes his writing, particularly for its plainness and exactness. His “romantic” verses he burns (226). But he plans to keep his writings in which his intellectualism and feeling are conjoined: the epiphanies. IV. Writing Sentiment The epiphanies reform sentimentalism, providing a form in which emotion can register without recourse to the tropes of sentimentalism. The concept of the epiphany initially arises for Stephen when he hears a conversation which provides “an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely” (211). The exchange between the

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Young Lady and Gentlemen, hitting Stephen where it hurts, leads to his conception of epiphany. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. The overheard conversation strikes Stephen’s “sensitiveness,” suggesting the emotional effect of the moment. Yet the recording of such instances is his duty as a “man of letters.” The epiphany thus demonstrates that sentimentality is authorized when filtered through scholarly treatment. Stephen’s emergence as sentimental object depends on containing emotion in form. Rather than restricting the emotional capabilities, however, the form enhances the sentimentality of the man of letters/feeling. The delineation of two varieties of epiphany further suggests the parameters by which sentimentality and intellect conjoin. Scholes points out, “The mind of the artist is ‘memorable,’ his companions and environment ‘vulgar’ ” (4). In the first kind of epiphany, vulgarity, the banality of convention, is frozen, emphasizing the estrangement that produces a man of feeling from the man of letters. The second type of epiphany, located within the man of letters’ interiority, confirms that emotion is allowed to resonate when formally framed – written. Interiority is authorized when authored. Constructing interiority through writing is a sentimental gesture linking Stephen back to not only Werther but also Clarissa. To oppose the somatized sentimentality of Isabel the text constructs a sentimentality independent of the body, purely textual. Of course, the epiphanies are subject to assertions of authorial irony, as are all aspects of Stephen in both Stephen and Portrait. Without an imputation that the epiphanies bear exegetical relevance to Joyce’s work, however, it is clear that they represent a domain in which Stephen re-incorporates the sentimental while rejecting the forms it takes in the figure of Isabel.

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The dynamic repeats itself in Joyce’s writings. Forms of sentimentality are enlisted, then rejected, and sentiment moves on. Clark writes, “In retrospect, no discourse is without emotional appeal or pathos, and so, in retrospect, the sentimentality becomes evident” (19). Joyce’s work portrays this process. Isabel disappears by the time Stephen becomes Portrait,10 but Stephen remains as man of feeling. In Portrait he resists the sentimentality of church and state; his own sentimentality he constructs in writing, as the novel concludes in his diary. Portrait also picks up Stephen’s sentimentalizing of Emma Clery where Stephen leaves off. The sentimentalism of the epiphanies is repudiated in Ulysses. Stephen ridicules himself: “Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?” (“Proteus,” 40). Ulysses also replays Stephen’s rebellion from religion, again as a rejection of sentimentality, substituting Mrs. Dedalus’s deathbed for Isabel’s illness. In “Circe” the specter of Stephen’s mother appears to him and he has to cry “Non serviam!” yet again (582). The chapter concludes with Bloom’s sentimentalizing Stephen to the extent that Bloom’s dead son Rudy appears in a vision. In fact, it seems that as Joyce’s writings progress and become more formally complex, more written – difficult – sentimentality increases, perhaps, as Hart’s essay suggests, reaching an apotheosis in Finnegans Wake. V. The Reappearance of Isabel Stephen and Finnegans Wake, which can be seen as bookending Joyce’s work, have a remarkable relationship. After the strange absences of Isabel and Maurice from Portrait, after a few Dedalus sisters appear in Ulysses, along with a triumvirate of Blooms, the nuclear family of Stephen is numerically repeated in Finnegans Wake. Two parents, two brothers, a sister: in their most popular incarnations HCE and ALP, Shem and Shaun, Issy. Issy bears strong similarities to Isabel. She is associated with nuns and Easter (556. 1-8). She seems to die (159.10-8, 413.17-26, 556.18), and she is canonized: “Saintette Isabelle” (556.7). “What’s in a name?” Stephen , in Ulysses, quotes Shakespeare, twice, to support his thesis connecting Hamlet to the Bard’s biography (“Scylla and Charibdis,” 210, 211). What’s in a name? In Stephen, Isabel’s name, “a certain lifeless name”(165), is

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considered and reconfigured. Stephen recalls the children calling: “Isabel, the Risabel, the Rix-Dix Disabel.” Now surely the Joyce critical community, considering names and naming in Joyce, would not contend that Finnegans Wake’s Issy, Isabelle, Isobel, and, yes, Isabel (210.12) are unrelated to Stephen’s sister in the draft of Portrait.11 So why is there apparently, amongst the libraries of Joyce commentary, including essays on Issy and volumes devoted to Joyce’s female characters, no exploration of the connection? Why has the criticism missed the possibility that in Issy Isabel plays a role perhaps as essential as do thoroughly investigated literary materials, such as Isolde, Ophelia, Lucia Joyce? Perhaps it is because of the lack of evidence amongst Finnegans Wake drafts and notebooks that Issy refers to Isabel; as if such evidence of intention is still, even with authors lying dead for a generation, necessary to literary scholarship. Glasheen’s table of characters in Finnegans Wake, “Who is Who When Everybody is Somebody Else,” includes “Isabel” as Issy’s full name, but this does not seem to refer to the Daedalus daughter of Stephen. It lists Stephen, and “James Joyce young” as permutations of Shem without mentioning Maurice or Isabel Daedalus; the family counterparts are drawn from the Joyce and Bloom clans. The omissions, representative, I think it is fair to say, of Joyce scholarship, may reflect a belief that as Stephen was published only posthumously, echoes of it in Finnegans Wake are of little concern, as Joyce could not have expected anyone to catch the allusions.12 The sentimental figure’s function in Finnegans Wake is, naturally, difficult to decipher. In Book I, chapter vi, Issy, as Nuvoletta, arrives in the midst of a domestic squabble between her brothers, here named Mookse and Gripes. She tries and fails to distract them. She tried all the winsome ways her four winds had taught her. She tossed her sfumastelliacinous hair like la princesse de la Petite Bretagne and she rounded her mignons arms like Mrs. Cornwallis-West and she smiled over herself like the beauty of the image of the pose of the daughter of the queen of the Emperour of Irelande and she sighed after herself as were she born to bride with Tristis Tristissimus. But, sweet madonine, she might fair as well have carried her daisy’s

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worth to Florida. For the Mookse, a dogmad Accanite, were not amoosed and the Gripes, a dubliboused Catalick, wis pinefully obliviscent. (157-8) Nuvoletta, lively, narcissistic and erotically suggestive, can not reconcile her brothers, whose quarrel transforms them beyond usual standards of recognition. Tindall glosses, “The combatants, having changed to an apron and a handkerchief … are picked up by the two washerwomen and put with other washing into the same basket. Neither right nor wrong, despite the professor’s insistence, Mookse and Gripes are one” (121). At this moment Nuvoletta dies, or commits suicide. The domestic peace – what represents the domestic better than laundry? – coincides with Nuvoletta’s death: “She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone” (159). There is an endless number of ways to read Nuvoletta’s death at the moment the dispute ends. Perhaps the sentimental daughter functions normally, her death spurring reconciliation. Maybe, the reconciliation effected without her, she is purposeless and is killed off. Possibly, Issy’s liveliness, narcissism, and erotic suggestion, replacing Isabel’s virtue, blocks the sentimental function. These explications reflect how Issy indeed embodies a sentimental trope. None of the explications precludes a textual repudiation of the sentimental. The Narrator, Tindall’s “professor,” announces the artificiality of sentimentalism, first by exposing it as a trope of popular literature. “There fell a tear, a singeult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those crylove fables fans who are ‘keen’ on the pretty-pretty commonface sort of thing).” Then, at the conclusion of the passage, the narrator takes credit for his performance: “No applause, please! Bast!” Again, the intellectual rejects the contrivance of the sentimental. It is not difficult to argue here that the professor’s repudiation rings hollow, that the polyvalence of the text levels narrative hierarchy. However, I want to propose another way sentimentality “rearrives” in Finnegans Wake, one that I have, in fact, been proposing for several pages. The sentimentality of Finnegans Wake resides in its most salient feature: obscurantism. As Stephen and the epiphanies indicate, artifice and banality, framed within the interiority of the intellectual, construct an authorized, authorial, written sentimentality. Difficulty, elusiveness and allusiveness, formal complexity or play,13

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function similarly. Decoding the obscure text becomes a sentimental process, simultaneously hyper-intellectual like Stephen and pre-linguistic, emotional, like Isabel listening to the piano. Difficulty constructs the written interiority of the author. Joyce is the man of feeling, and sentimental object. VI. The Rearrival of James Joyce Hart writes that in Finnegans Wake, “emotion, in respect both of feeling and of tone, pops in and out of the book.” I contend that emotion, the sentimental, through the written construction of authorial interiority , is always present, regardless of feeling and tone. Issy may or may not operate as sentimental figure. However, the decoding required to recognize the trope announces the text as intellectual, high art, the product of an interiority whose emotions are validated by virtue of its originality and its avoidance of artificiality. Convention, sentimental language, for example, filtered through the artist, is transformed from “vulgar” to “memorable.” And, tautologically, it is memorable because it is art. It is art with a signature; no one could ever, upon looking into Joyce’s text mistake it for that of another author. Difficulty also insists on recourse to the author for assistance. Sentimental language describes the death of Nuvoletta , whose name (Italian: little cloud) alludes directly to Joyce, the author of “A Little Cloud.” Tindall pronounces the scene “pleasing.” But “bannistars” is enigmatic without Joyce’s having revealed that Swift’s Stella is an Issy alias. This is one minor instance in a 628-page text. We can talk about the intentional fallacy; we can kill off our authors. Difficulty resurrects them. Some Joyce scholars may claim disinterest. Which have not read the schema for Ulysses, do not know the Homeric correspondences of each chapter, are unaware that much of Portrait is autobiographical, have never read Joyce’s explanation that the style of Finnegans Wake corresponds to its being about the night? I have, clearly, moved away from the operation of formal figures and toward the operation of much of Joyce criticism. It is not necessary to have a privileged 1998 perspective to see the sentimentalizing of James Joyce. Hart understood this critical dynamic. “The extravagant praise of Finnegans Wake has been possible only because of the relative ease which the majority of readers find in deciding for themselves, and the

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ease – the sentimental ease – with which one can convince oneself of the book’s majestic quality” (523). Hart also notes that Joyce’s performance contributes to this development: “As is well known, Joyce would on occasion adopt the heroic, transitional, stance of the dedicated artist who had dared push back the frontiers of writing” (524). The oft-raised “defense” of Joyce, that he wanted to write for “everyone,” Hart terms a “further manifestation of sentimentality.” Certainly there is a similarity between the notion of Joyce as an egalitarian writing for the masses, whose authentic interiority will affect and infect his readers, and the notion of a dying daughter whose virtue serves to strengthen the domestic situation. VII. The Return of Repetition Thus Joyce functions as sentimental object within Joyce criticism. This sentimentalizing is certainly one reason that sentimentalism within Joyce’s text is so conspicuously overlooked. Hart is perceptive on this subject as well: “Fear of sentimentality seems to be responsible for preventing critics who are otherwise sympathetic towards Joyce from admitting its presence in his works. Such an admission would devalue the books. This is, of course, a sentimental response on the part of the critics” (516). Hart alludes to the critical tendency , prevalent in but not restricted to Joyce scholarship, to accept a text on its terms, to comply with its work. Critics thus become confederate in repudiating the affective powers of tropes of sentimentalism, blind to the way sentimentalism remains, reformed; they, in fact, constitute a step in the process. It is often noted that Joyce’s textual features reappear, altered, throughout his work, that characters in Dubliners are cast in Ulysses, that Finnegans Wake alludes to all of Joyce’s writings. Clearly, in some of these cases, it is sentimentality that is reappearing, to be repudiated and reformed. Clark writes, “The ‘serious’ constitutes itself again and again – not as a continuity but as a series of repetitions – against a feminized ‘other’ discourse” (19). While “serious” is a word I will not use to describe Joyce’s writings, Clark’s argument applies, with sentimentality playing the role of opposition. The sentimental repeats itself throughout Joyce’s work, rearriving again and again, until,

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reaching the textual boundaries, it spills out like somatized or spiritual or authorized or not, into criticism, where it rearrives some more.

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Works Cited Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Glasheen, Adaline. Third Census of Finnegans Wake. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. Hart, Clive. “James Joyce’s Sentimentality.” Philological Quarterly 46 (1967) : 517526. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. –––. Stephen Hero. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1963. –––. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1990. Riquelme, Jean Paul. “Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man: styles of realism and fantasy.” The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. 103-130. Scholes, Robert and Richard M. Kain. The Workshop of Daedalus. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1965. Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Trans. Micahael Hulse. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

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Notes 1

There does not seem to be much room for debate on the question of narratorial “perspective” in most passages of Stephen Hero, but I acknowledge that I am simplifying a potential debate about the degree to which Bakhtinian “speech zones,” or Kenner’s “Uncle Charles principle,” (or other conceptions of narrative devices) operate in the text. 2 A curious medical treatment. An anesthetic? An Irish sendoff? 3 See Scholes and Kain, 29-32. 4 The passage was originally written about the death of Georgie Joyce. The epiphany sets Joyce at the piano. Mary Joyce arrives and asks, “Do you know anything about the body ? … What ought I do? … There’s some matter coming away from the hole in Georgie’s stomach … Did you ever hear of that happening” (Scholes and Kain, 29). 5 The text does not leave unproblematic Stephen’s imaginings of his nature, as is demonstrated by an exchange with Cranly. “Then you do not believe any longer?” “I cannot believe.” “But you could at one time.” “I cannot now.” “You could if you wanted to.” “Well, I don’t want to” (138). The palpable irony directed toward Stephen raises the question of the degree to which Stephen satirizes Stephen. As the case of Goethe suggests, portrayals of the man of feeling tend inevitably toward irony. 6 This exchange also appears amongst the epiphanies with Georgie Joyce’s death as the reason for condolences (Scholes and Kain, 32). 7 Stephen’s, “Please understand the importance of Goethe” (201), again suggests a direct association. 8 See, respectively, 131-5, 193, 228, 156, 229. 9 Although one might detect a note of admiration in Mr. Daedalus’s question about the porter. 10 It is remarkable how easily Stephen loses both his brother and his sister; I suggest that the siblings’ absence from Portrait serves to heighten the isolation of the man of feeling, and the estrangement of Stephen from his parents. 11 Especially as “There are no coincidences in Joyce” is a mantra of sorts for the Joyce admiration society. 12 As if that stopped him before. 13 I indeed mean Derrida, whose “Force and Signification,” attempting to identify beauty, value, genius, takes sentimental recourse to naming authors Derrida likes – including, in a footnote, Joyce (302).

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