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Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder (review)

R. B. Kershner's important study of the influence of popular literature on Joyce's early works through Exiles is a first-rate follow-on to Cheryl Herr'sJoyce's Anatomy of Culture, which appeared three years earlier. Herr's book discussed the popular press, the music hall, and the clergymen's guides to popular sermons as expressions of the popular culture of Joyce's day which were incorporated into his books as naturally as the Dublin atmosphere he breathed. Now Kershner has filled in another important part of the popular mosaic of tum-of-the-century Ireland, with a sweeping and detailed comparison of the popular or "entertainment" literature which Joyce would have read as a schoolboy and later in his most productive periods of composition. Kershner's study is not wildly speculative, relying principally on texts either direcdy alluded to by Joyce or a part of his library at one time or another. The author's approach to the tricky business of differentiating between "serious literature" and "popular entertainment" initially draws upon revisionist Marxists Fredric Jameson and Louis Althusser, who see popular culture as an "ideological state apparatus" (pp. 12-13), but immediately refined by Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, the "conflicting multiplicity of languages" of "officialdom, vernaculars, occupational jargons, technical, literary, and subliterary languages"; and diahgism, a method ofassimilating a coherent picture or knowledge of the world through a dialectic logic which forms the relationship between or among the different languages present. Because the resulting consciousness is for Bakhtin always itself language, its process and perception of the world is always dialogical. The "official" voices of the culture—both its high art and its popular politically sanctioned voices—are opposed by the "carnival" atmosphere of folk-wisdom and antipathy to artificially created orders, resulting in the parodies and burlesques of the lower bodily poles, closer to earth and reality and, as such, more profound than the hierarchies of official sanction and custom. Thus the affinity of Bakhtinian criticism for Marxist revisionists, whose proclivity is to expose similar attitudes.