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“Giacomo Joyce”: Envoys of the Other (review)

T book, a revised edition of a volume already published in 2002 by the Academica Press in the United States, is a collection of important essays entirely devoted to Giacomo Joyce. Here, Joyce’s short, complex text is discussed by recognized Joyce scholars: Fritz Senn, Vicki Mahaffey, Murray McArthur, Michel Delville, Kevin Nolan, Joseph Valente, John McCourt, Sheldon Brivic, M. E. Roughley, Renzo Crivelli, Richard Brown, and the editors themselves, Clare Wallace and Louis Armand. The essays are authoritative, show a high degree of analytical skill, and are held together by a shared web of references and a common critical background. In such a brief space, it is difficult to discuss the merits of each single contribution, some of which are particularly wide-ranging and profound. This is particularly the case for the essays by Mahaffey and McArthur and for Valente’s “(M)othering Himself: Abjection and Cross-Gender Identification in Giacomo Joyce.” The impetus behind Armand and Wallace’s edition is the recent need to read a “minor” text—one on the margins of the Joycean corpus and canon—as a work in its own right. It seeks “to see the object as in itself it really is,” as Matthew Arnold says in The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.1 For this reason, the two editors present a vast panorama of what has been written on Giacomo Joyce, from the first mention of the text and its 1968 publication by Richard Ellmann for the Viking Press to the 2006 second edition of Armand and Wallace’s book. The recent work by Lia Guerra, Fogli Triestini, also bears witness to the difficulties posed by Giacomo Joyce, as well as to its current relevance.2 James Joyce Quarterly 45.3-4 2008