Abstract
Joyce Writing Disability is a fascinating and original collection of essays edited by Jeremy Colangelo. This collection sits at the generative intersection of modernist studies and disability studies and each of the nine essays explores a different aspect of disability, ranging through illness studies, trauma studies and Joyce's fascination with the non-normative body and mind. Although Joyce's interest in disability has often been commented on, this is the first book-length study that takes Joyce's engagement with disability and non-normativity as its focus, making this link concrete and central as opposed to peripheral or secondary. In this vein, the foreword by Maren Linett expertly situates this collection within debates surrounding modernism and disability studies and as an extension of the crucial work she began when considering Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake in her book Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature. The breadth of this collection – exploring works that spanned Joyce's writing career, ranging from Dubliners to a fragment, ‘Twilight of Blindness Madness Descends on Swift,’ written in October 1928 – demonstrates that Joyce's fascination with disability, debility and non-normative subjecthood was far-reaching, encompassing and ongoing rather than a momentary or passing concern. This a must read for anyone who is fascinated by the work of James Joyce, not only for the disability theorists amongst us, as it provides a new and thematically rich way of reading Joyce.
The strength of this collection rests in its ability to provide a well-rounded and thorough introduction to James Joyce's engagement with disability. The outlining of key terminology from disability studies in the introductory chapter is particularly beneficial as it makes this book accessible to those who are familiar with Joyce's work but are not disability studies scholars. Therefore, this text begins a fascinating and long-needed dialogue between Joyce studies and disability studies and provides the foundational tools to continue and expand these generative conversations. Alongside this introductory capacity, Joyce Writing Disability also presents a host of original, complex and creative readings of Joyce and disability. Casey Lawrence's essay ‘“Limping and Devious”: The Disabled Male Body in “A Mother”’, which explores the limp of Mr. ‘Hoppy’ Holohan and its relation to masculinity and social status, is particularly compelling as it is well-written and provides an innovative close reading of the often-overlooked short story ‘The Mother’ of Dubliners. When it is examined, ‘The Mother’ is often read in terms of gender politics and the limitations of women in the public sphere but Lawrence breathes new life into this argument by exploring how ‘the gendered body and the disabled body are thus pitted against each other’ (location: 1231) which allows for deft links to be drawn between gender and disability in the ilk of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's seminal work Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature.
Even essays considering more frequently discussed figures – such as the blind stripling – are innovative as demonstrated by Rafael Hernandez in ‘“Dark Men in Mien and Movement”: Blindness and the Body in Ulysses.’ Hernandez's argument hinges on the notion that ‘disability is associated inextricably with racialisation and racial categories in the colonial context of Ireland’ (location: 2564) and he traces this racialised-disability synonym through characters such as Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and the blind stripling. Most persuasively, Hernandez uses ideas of blindness, sight and knowledge to undercut the ‘the assumed abled embodiment of the omniscient third-party narrator’ (location: 2532) and demonstrate how disabled characters and metaphors of disability can impact the embodiment, structure and reading of a text. This consideration of disability and non-normative embodiment in relation to the form and structure of Joyce's work is a continued theme and another triumph of this collection, as seen in the essays of Jeremy Colangelo and John Morey. Colangelo's ‘Two Sides of Hemiplegia: On the Affect of Paralysis in Dubliners’ redefines the theme of paralysis in Dubliners as the tension between stasis and mobility, using the specificity of ‘hemiplegia’ – a condition resulting in paralysis of half the body, often caused by strokes – and explores how Joyce uses this tension, or ‘paralysis, as an aesthetic structure’ of the short story collection (location: 872). Morey, in ‘Boulez, Cage, and the Disabled Wake,’ takes a disablist approach to Finnegan's Wake and two pieces of (post)modernist sonic artwork inspired by this text and examines how ‘the body of each three works is disabled both extrinsically (in form) and intrinsically (in formation)’ (location: 3720).
It is also important to note how this collection seeks to move away from the pathologised and diagnosis-focused model of disability and is extending disability studies to consider illness and trauma studies. Both essays considering Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, by Kathleen Morrissey and Boriana Alexandrova, explore themes of disability and debility more broadly by examining eating disorders and childhood trauma. Disability studies can often focus on physical bodily difference, and I commend this collection for considering disability and non-normativity in a wide range of ways. The essays by Giovanna Vincenti, Jennifer Marchisotto and Marion Quirci also seek to extend ideas of disability by exploring Joyce's work through a more biographical lens, exploring his blindness and ill-health, the mental illness of his daughter Lucia and the sheer volume of critical reviews that invoked disability and degeneracy when discussing Joyce and his work, respectively. Quirci's ‘Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce's Modernist Disability Aesthetics’ is especially noteworthy as it once again considers disability as a generative site for Joyce, arguing that ‘by crafting a radical disability aesthetic’, through creatively responding to reviews that labelled him disabled and degenerate and redeploying these tropes, he ‘challenged the metric of beauty by which art had traditionally been associated’ (location: 3127) and created literature that allowed space for non-normativity.
On the whole, this is a well-considered and eloquent collection but at times nuance is lost to the liberal use of biographical detail about Joyce's life. Equally, subject specific or technical vocabulary is often glossed over where further explanation is needed. This is particularly noticeable with disability theory terms which, although are defined in the beginning, are sometimes used as if all readers are disability theory specialists. Overall, I commend Jeremy Colangelo and the collection of essays he has brought together and the conversations and avenues of enquiry this book will enable.