book review for Joyceans of note

English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Spring 2004 v47 i2 p235(5)
Modernism & Ireland. (Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory)(Book
Review) Greg Winston.

Nicholas Andrew Miller. Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002. xi + 226 pp. $55.00

DURING THE PAST DECADE, questions of historical representation, national
authenticity and cultural identity have generally dominated Irish studies. In
seeking to define Irishness in its modern context, many narratives speak to the
rapid transformation of 1990s Ireland and the economic prowess of the Celtic
Tiger in a newly unified Europe. Such accounts frequently depict the country as
breaking at long last with an oppressive colonial past and rising to a rightful
and prosperous place among developed sovereign nations. By such accounts,
Ireland has in a sense reached the end of its history, insofar as that history
depends on a position of colonial subjugation.

In the introduction to his book Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory,
Nicholas Miller challenges one such narrative history--Fintan O'Toole's thesis
of an "ex-isle" modern Ireland no longer perceived or perceiving itself as a
satellite island of Britain. Miller warns against the implosive potential
inherent in such an assessment of Irish history when he writes, "When in the
name of historical progress and development Ireland is reconfignred as an
'ex-isle' belatedly cut off from its own past, history is promptly reconfirmed
as the perpetual nightmare from which Ireland is trying to awake." In such a
way, this clever and fascinating study commences with a Joycean nod before
circling back, Finnegan-like, to a final-chapter analysis of the Wake. In the
intervening pages, Miller explores the function of memory in modern Irish
historical imagination through a well-integrated and strategically calculated
variety of critical perspectives and textual analyses.

Before turning directly to Ireland, however, Miller's first interest lies in
identifying a number of modernist discourses external to Irish culture and
memory. Such discourses--including public monuments and cinema--he identifies
as sites of ongoing cultural memory-work. Part One establishes these sites
within the theoretical parameters of Marxist and psychoanalytic historicism.
Focusing on a wide array of texts, including Holocaust memorials, Dante's
Divine Comedy, and a Roberto Rossellini film, the three opening chapters
introduce the vocabulary for an "erotics of memory" in visual and narrative
representation of history. Through 2,146 Stones, contemporary artist Jochen
Gerz's invisible and illegible Holocaust "counter-memorial," Miller examines
some of the fundamental paradoxes of monuments to the past. These stones are in
every sense the figural and literal groundwork for Miller's study.

Turning in chapter two to the modernist literary "touchstones" of Dante and
Exodus, Miller reads the allegorical significance of two originary "lethal
histories." The gazes of Dante's pilgrim across the River Lethe, of Moses
across the River Jordan, express the link of desire forged between memory-work
and narrative. The chapter next mines critical strata leading from Arnold and
Benjamin, to Jameson, Freud and Althusser. The result is a functional alloy of
historical and psychoanalytical approaches positing "that history is a
discourse of desire" and from which emerges, in a revision of the famous
Jamesonian slogan, Miller's own mantra: "always eroticize!" This sets up, in
the subsequent chapter, the first extended textual analysis, a Lacanian reading
of Roberto Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia. Contrasting the direct cinematic
adaptation of "The Dead" in John Huston's last film with Rossellini's
symptomatic reading of Joyce's short story, Miller begins a solid application
of the theoretical framework constructed in the first half of the study.

Part Two shifts the frame of ex-centric discourses to the memory work of early
twentieth-century Ireland. Entitled "Spectacles of History," it focuses on
three case studies of historical representation and recollection in modern
Irish culture. Starting with early cinema, chapter four examines the first
screening of American director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation in 1916:
"Less than six months after the Easter Rising, and particularly in the wake of
its leaders' martyrdom, Griffith's melodrama of a nation's 'birth,' through a
North/South war pitting brother against brother in racial conflict, would
certainly have resonated in Ireland with a power--and an ambivalence--it did
not evoke elsewhere." Miller ponders the curious memorializing effect that
certain narrative similarities and linguistic coincidences between the film and
recent Irish history might have had on its first Irish audience. While some of
these points are well researched--such as pinpointing in Joseph Holloway's
Dublin theatre diaries a moment of audience identification of Griffith's
Abraham Lincoln with British Military Governor Sir John Maxwell--others are
less tenable. The film title Uncrowned King triggering nostalgia for Parnell
nearly thirty years after his death, while interesting and not altogether
improbable, seems to point more towards historical speculation than clear
spectacle. Overall, the chapter makes a compelling case for examining the
dynamics of discursive exportation. It also includes very useful background
sections on early cinema and Irish cinematic history.

The final two chapters develop new approaches, respectively, to Yeats and Joyce
with regard to these writers' representations of Irish myth and historiography.
Chapter five outlines a counter-memorialist strain in Yeats's poetic and
dramatic depictions of the Cuchulain myth. Yeats's career-long expression and
revision of Cuchulain are read in contrast to Oliver Sheppard's static
commemorative statue in the General Post Office. At one point, Miller
momentarily allows his own interpretation of Sheppard's work to displace
Yeats's when the latter would serve him more effectively. This comes in the
assumption that Yeats's later representations of the Cuchulain myth arose
primarily out of an objection to the Sheppard statue's Christification of the
hero, rather than its role as propaganda or inferior art. Yet, the latter
opinions appear clearly represented in Yeats's claim (cited by Miller, 146)
that "some of the best known of the young men who got themselves killed in 1916
had the Irish legendary hero Cuchulain so much in their minds that the
Government has celebrated the event with a bad statue." While he does note on
Yeats's part a general aversion to the "cult of sacrifice" that came out of the
Easter Rising, Miller does not offer clear proof that Yeats saw the Sheppard
monument along similar lines.

Still, Miller does manage an especially convincing defense against charges of
fascism leveled at Yeats in recent years. Through competent close reading of
the Cuchulain plays and several later poems, including "Easter, 1916," "The
Circus Animals' Desertion," and "A Crazed Girl," Miller's argument makes the
ultimate point that Yeats's wish was not to control or manage history but
merely to afford his readers a chance of continually revisiting it. Miller
shines fresh light on familiar ground by considering the theme of
marmorialization in "Easter, 1916" within his now established context of
memory-work and counter-memorial function. The chapter also extends the
previous discussion of Irish cinema with worthwhile treatment of Jim Sheridan's
The Field and N. G. Bristow's Everybody's Gone, as contemporary examples,
respectively, of memorialist and counter-memorialist Irish cinema. The
description of how these films--in conventional and non-conventional
ways--appropriate the image of Cuchulain fighting the sea sets up an
interesting comparison of Yeats and Joyce to lead into the closing chapter.

Concluding with analysis of Finnegans Wake, chapter six treats that text's
potential as a counter-memorial narrative of history. Early in the chapter
Miller articulates his definition of historical memory as "more than a faculty
by which subjects recollect what happened in the past. It is the vital and
processive modality of subjectivity itself, an activity in and through which
the rememberer locates his or her own 'self,' not in the discrete confinement
of a single 'presence,' but across all of history. As a discourse of desire,
memory figures the subject in its temporally 'stretched-out' modality."
Accordingly, Miller's analysis of the Wake reveals this dynamic process of
memory-work as literally embodied or stretched out across Joyce's text via such
subjective presences as HCE and ALP. "Finnegans Wake," asserts Miller, "poses
the 'question of history' as a problem not of memory but of re-membering; not
of knowing how the past truthfully occurred but of specifying--creatively,
continuously, poetically--'How it ends?"

His reading of the Wake becomes especially illuminating for its intertextual
links to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the Four Masters' Annals
of Irish History: tracing expectations for historiography from these works--the
one Joyce's own fiction, the other a traditional history of early Irish
culture--seems to set Finnegans Wake in a unique position for a discussion of
Joyce's erotics of memory. The chapter grounds several phases of Wake analysis
in theoretical contexts that include sixteenth-century anamorphotic painting, a
Lacanian erotics of narrative, and Giambattista Vico's New Science as a key
Joycean pretext. In this way, like the entire study, it displays a remarkable
connective capacity for bridging diverse disciplines and historical periods.
Just so, this book will prove useful to readers with interests in Irish
studies, literary theory, film studies, and modernism.

GREG WINSTON

Husson College