James_Joyces_Negations_Irony_Indetermina

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‘The Dominant Tradition’, Irish Literary Supplement, March 22, Spring 2009, pp. 18-19. 
 
Brian Cosgrove, James Joyce’s Negations: Irony, Indeterminacy and Nihilism in ‘Ulysses’ and 
Other Writings, University College Dublin Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-904558-85-9, 256 pp + x. 
 
The opening pages of Brian Cosgrove’s study, James Joyce’s Negations: Irony, 
Indeterminacy and Nihilism in ‘Ulysses’ and Other Writings, are invigorating in their clarity of 
purpose. In the Preface, Cosgrove, an Ireland-based Irishman, takes care to distinguish his approach 
from those adopted by ‘Hibernophile’ post-colonial critics in recent decades, announcing his bid for 
a position within what he calls the ‘dominant tradition’. By using this phrase Cosgrove means that 
his reading will manifest an interest in the ‘European dimension’ of Joyce’s works, and that as such 
it follows, like so many other interventions over the years, in the footsteps of Ezra Pound’s 
reception of the Joycean oeuvre. This stated allegiance to the cosmopolitan perspective derives from 
Cosgrove’s interest in the relevance to Joyce of the writings of a number of nineteenth-century 
continental figures, most notably Frederic Schlegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Gustave Flaubert. 
 
In the Introduction, Cosgrove explains the title of his study, arguing excitingly for the value 
of a reading of Joyce’s works which would privilege negation, rather than affirmation, as the 
attitude most representative of Joyce’s meaning. The originality of this proposal resides in its 
willingness to go against the grain of one of the most obvious and enduring idées reçues of Joyce 
criticism (and literary criticism in general), which is the assumption that a positive worldview can 
ultimately be retrieved from the careful reading of a good work of art. As Cosgrove points out, 
Ulysses emerges from most critical investigations as a text celebratory of ‘life, or language, or the 
human comedy – or all three’: ‘the overall interpretation of Ulysses, and by extension, of Joyce 
himself’ is couched ‘in insistently positive terms’. This, as Cosgrove asserts, is a ‘half-truth that 
must be tempered by – and may have to yield to – a recognition of harsher and more problematic 
features’. Cosgrove’s aim is to enable a more negative reading of Joyce – a reading which would 
excavate some of the reasons which caused Carl Jung to describe Ulysses as ‘ironic, sardonic, 
virulent, contemptuous, sad, despairing, and bitter.’ 
 
The promise of these bracing opening pages is unfortunately not fulfilled in the following 
chapters, which are undermined at every turn by dubious logical choices. The first of these consists 
in Cosgrove’s attempt to analyse Joyce’s irony (which is defined for the purposes of the book as a 
metaphysical stance rather than a rhetorical device) by separating out its Schlegelian constituent 
parts from its Flaubertian elements. Cosgrove considers Schlegel’s description of irony as the 
artist’s necessary response to the infinity and chaos characteristic of human life to be accurate to 
(and therefore, in Cosgrove’s scheme, influential in shaping) the sense of the complexity of the 
world which Joyce’s works themselves convey. While Cosgrove approves of Schlegel’s invocation 
of creative freedom (and especially of artistic caprice or Wilkür) as a means of rendering an 
irreducibly complex and chaotic world, he is more hesitant in his assessment of Flaubert’s notorious 
linguistic and formal perfectionism, which, as an ‘attempt to translate the complex fluidity of the 
real into the secure fixity of le mot juste must inevitably lead to a reduction of the existential to the 
merely formal.’ For Cosgrove, ‘there is a possible extremism’ in Flaubert’s devotion to ‘cold’, 
‘indifferent’, ‘impassible’ art. Brief delineations of Schlegel’s and Flaubert’s ironic positions lead to 
an oversimplified summary of the differences between them: ‘one might associate Flaubert with the 
dominance of the Word and Schlegel with the accommodation of a multifarious World.’ Joyce’s use 
of a vast array of styles in Ulysses is related to Schlegel’s call for the adoption of multiple 
perspectives. By contrast, Flaubert’s adherence to scientific and impersonal artistic ideals, and 
concomitant dedication to exact wording, are criticized as ‘absolutist’ and ‘exclusivist’ – the effect 
of this obsessive streak, in Cosgrove’s view, is to imperil Flaubert’s capacity to render the chaos of 
the world’s contradictions. This portrayal misrepresents Flaubert, whose letters are full of his acute 
sense of the ineffable infinity of the world’s contrasts. As Cosgrove himself points out, Flaubert 
often referred to his sense of two opposing selves (‘deux bonshommes distincts’) wrestling within 
him. He was constantly enthralled by chance encounters with le grotesque triste (occurrences 
simultaneously funny and sad). His disbelief in the existence of absolute truths (‘il n’y a pas de 
vrai; il n’ y a que des manières de voir’) was adamant, and each of his works betray his efforts to 
develop and deploy the kind of ‘multiperspectivism’ Schlegel advocates. One need only remember 
Flaubert’s elaboration of the technique of style indirect libre (which enables an author to interweave 
discrepant narrative points of view) to realize how severely Cosgrove diminishes Flaubert’s legacy 
in order to promote his own sense of Schlegel’s importance. 
 
One of the many problems with this conviction of Schlegel’s significance to Joyce, is, as 
Cosgrove himself admits, that there is no evidence that Joyce ever read Schlegel – indeed, apart 
from a couple of phrases in Finnegans Wake which would seem to imply that Joyce at least knew of 
Schlegel, there is no firm bibliographical or biographical ground from which to argue that he gave 
Schlegel much thought. This lacuna causes Cosgrove to introduce a dramatic (and dramatically 
flawed) loop into his argument – a convolution which, compounding anachronism with uncertainty, 
seriously undermines the book’s logic. Cosgrove’s stratagem runs like this: given that ‘a feasible 
connection’ (not a phrase to inspire scholarly confidence) has been established, principally by 
Thomas J. Rice and Peter F. Mackey, between twentieth-century chaos theory and ‘Joyce’s sense of 
the world as found in Ulysses’, and that ‘points of similarity’ (again, not a phrase to allay scholarly 
doubt) may be found between the Schlegelian worldview and that later implied by chaos theory, ‘if 
Joyce can be shown to have some affinity’ with chaos theory, then ‘he may also be seen as close to 
Schlegel’. The book’s argument risks splitting at the seams under the pressure of such an arbitrary, 
wide-ranging and tenuous syllogism. 
 
Subsequent parts of Joyce’s Negations are devoted to demonstrations of the indeterminacy 
of meaning with which the reader of Joyce’s works is confronted. ‘A Painful Case’, ‘The Dead’, 
Nausicaa, Sirens, Ithaca, and Penelope, and a passage from Finnegans Wake are considered in a 
series of illustrative case studies. The choice to structure the study by way of such close-ups makes 
for a rather fragmented sense of the Joycean corpus’s resistance to singular interpretation. This 
sense of disjunction is reinforced by the fact that Cosgrove’s positions change kaleidoscopically as 
his arguments unfold, perhaps in emulation of his overarching concern with the indeterminacy of 
Joyce’s texts. Cosgrove’s attacks on feminist readings of Gretta Conway and Gerty MacDowell are 
laced with exasperation, for example, yet his own views regarding Joyce’s treatment of women are 
remarkably unstable. Cosgrove takes great exception to compassionate responses to Gerty. ‘Even as 
intelligent a critic as Margot Norris’, he writes, fails to understand Nausicaa by offering a 
sympathetic reading of the episode, and ‘a critic normally as alert as Denis Donoghue’, he bemoans, 
is sorely mistaken insuggesting that Joyce’s irony in the episode is mitigated with tenderness. 
Some of Cosgrove’s own interpretations are dumbfounding. Thus, ‘I shall be obliged to argue’, he 
states in a discussion of ‘The Dead’, that ‘Gretta is quite perverse in her rejection of Gabriel’s 
passion’. And while Gerty’s imagination is deemed ‘wanton’, her investment in sentimentality 
‘dishonest and hypocritical’, male critics who have expressed bewilderment at the uncensored 
sexual frankness of Molly’s monologue are criticized for not being ‘man enough to allow the free 
and honest expression of female nature’. 
 
Many of the points Cosgrove seems eager to make in Joyce’s Negations – that life is 
complex and contradictory, that Joyce as an exceptional writer managed to capture this in prose – 
read like truisms or well-worn received ideas. Clichés of Joyce criticism are offered up as new 
discoveries: it seems unbelievable, for instance, that Cosgrove should think himself the first to 
register the Wagnerian derivation of Stephen’s cry of ‘Nothung!’ in the Circe episode of Ulysses, or 
that the importance of ‘retrospective arrangement’ as a leitmotiv should only have been brought to 
his attention by Rice’s relatively recent book. 
 
There are some surprising lacunae of reference. In a book concerned with contradiction and 
indeterminacy, virtually no mention is made of the foundational importance of Giordano Bruno to 
the constitution of Joyce’s views on such matters. Similarly, only few and passing allusions are 
made to either Philip Herring’s Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle, or to Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Joyce 
Upon the Void, which are concerned with similar questions. Strangely, Kenner’s Stoic Comedians, 
which so compellingly examines Joyce’s elaboration of Flaubert’s ‘comedy of the closed system’ 
(thereby countering Cosgrove’s vision of a humourless Flaubert) is not cited. 
 
All in all Joyce’s Negations is a disconcerting, uneven, book, which sets out on an ambitious 
agenda which it does not fulfil. Although the opening pages, with their stated interest in the 
examination of Joyce’s philosophical irony, negation, indeterminacy, and nihilism resonate 
powerfully, what follows leaves the reader craving for the new reading which is so tantalizingly 
adumbrated, but ultimately not proposed. 
 
 
Scarlett Baron 
Magdalen College, Oxford