By Katherine Franco, author of “Staging the Surface: James Joyce’s Theater for Theorization in ‘Circe,’” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 47, no. 3, Spring 2024, pp. 106-123, now on Project MUSE, FREE for a limited time.
When one sets out to write a theory, one usually does not compose a play-text. Yet in the ninth episode of Ulysses Mr. Best recommends Stephen Dedalus take up a form closer to theater than criticism—“like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote” (175)—when he proffers his theory of Shakespeare and paternity. My article “Staging the Surface: James Joyce’s Theater for Theorization in ‘Circe’” emerges from this provocation: what would it mean to read the novel’s “Circe” episode as Joyce’s theorization of reading practice and method?
Each time I witnessed a discussion of the critical terms surface and depth over the last several years, or returned to Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious or to subsequent calls for surface reading by Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best at the center of what are now known as the “method wars,” I would find myself thinking about “Circe.” The almost two-hundred-page-long episode is a heady text that refuses a simple distinction between surface and depth. This is due to its closet drama form whose generic name foregrounds interiority as well as public, externalized theatrical spectacle. I was unaware of closet drama studies or the form’s historically pedagogical function when I first encountered “Circe,” but I sensed what Martin Puchner calls the closet drama’s relationship between “theoretical meditation and theatrical spectatorship” (521). “Circe” may appear to be the novel’s site of theatrical and “directable” action, but my article argues—by examining Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse—that the episode’s “active” form should be understood as a theorization of his own novel.
If return is known as the theme of Ulysses and the Odyssey, “Staging the Surface” queries what it means to return to a text not with the goal of explication but spectatorship and speculation. Those latter two terms—spectatorship and speculation—come together in the etymology of the word theōria. A dialogue is likely not the most direct or efficient form to communicate a theory. Yet it can do something that monologic form cannot teach, as Wilde and others who have taken up the Platonic dialogue or closet drama understood. When I first read Ulysses I had no plans to reread it, but this episode’s use of a form contingent on iterability, such as a play-text, instructed me that it must be approached through several readings. I was prepared, if not eager, to err in my first reading of “Circe” because I understood a play as a textual artifact that necessitates multiple stagings.
To imagine ourselves as viewers of Joyce’s spectacle does not mean to assent to critical passivity or cowardice. When toward the end of my article I claim that we have to trust ourselves to merely “show up” to “Circe,” I do not mean to endorse the practice of “just reading” (as proposed by “surface readers”) according to Carolyn Lesjak in “Reading Dialectically,” nor the practice of being a “middle reader” who “accommodates herself to the given, to common sense, against the now discredited excesses of the theory years” (241). Instead, I want to make a case for the kind of critique and speculative thought prompted by a textual performance contingent on the opportunity for a belated or subsequent encounter. Joyce’s “Circe” episode reveals that sentences or words from the earlier episode of “Lestrygonians” were a kind of rehearsal, as we now have a chance to encounter them again (377). In taking up questions about surface and depth from the time of Joyce’s juvenilia through Ulysses, I trace a history that goes beyond contemporary debates on method in literary studies. “Circe” is a recommendation for rereading as an ontological necessity: here we have no choice but to encounter the novel’s earlier phrases. “Circe” makes a theater out of our present methodological and theoretical debates to a literal extent. It also reminds us that theōria’s history demands that.
Works Cited
- Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1-21, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1. Accessed 3 Nov. 2021.
- Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Cornell UP, 1982.
- Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler. Vintage, 1986.
- Lesjak, Carolyn. “Reading Dialectically.” Criticism, vol. 55, no. 2, 2013, pp. 233-277. www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/criticism.55.2.0233. Accessed 12 Jan. 2024.
- Puchner, Martin. “The Theater in Modernist Thought.” New Literary History, vol. 33, no. 3, 2002, pp. 521-32, www.jstor.org/stable/20057738. Accessed 17 Aug. 2022.
KATHERINE FRANCO ([email protected]) is a PhD student in English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing appears in Jacket2, Chicago Review, and the Oxford Review of Books, among others. She was an editorial assistant on James Joyce’s Correspondence, a digital edition of Joyce’s unpublished letters, in 2022.
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