Joyce's Grandfathers: Myth and History in Defoe, Smollet, Sterne and Joyce Book

Deriving its title from Stephen Dedalus's observation in "Ulysses" that the artist is the "father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather", "Joyce's Grandfathers" is a study of literary relationship and the ways in which a truly new work of art can shed new light on the themes and techniques of older ones. John M. Warner first places "Ulysses" within the tradition of the English novel and then reads the works of earlier writers - Defoe, Smollet and Sterne - "through the lens" of Joyce's masterpiece. The result is a significant addition to the study of both 18th- and 20th-century literature. Warner contends that Joyce's experimentation with narrative form was in large part a reaction against the realistic, diachronic mode of fiction that predominated during the 19th century. In Defoe, Smollet, and Sterne, Joyce found not only earlier challenges to that mode but also "a revolutionary nostalgia for myth that paralleled his own response to his rationalistic culture". Yet their works also revealed a clear responsiveness to historical circumstances, creating a tension between the timelessness of myth and the chronology of history. Unlike the realists, these particular 18th-century novelists "did not try to conceal the tensions between the synchronic and diachronic thrusts of their fiction but rather explored them openly, unafraid of jagged edges and cacophonous effect". It was these explorations that Joyce found especially useful in the writing of "Ulysses". By compelling us to look backward and to see what he saw in his 18th-century forebears, Warner argues, Joyce "recreates" them for us. This study is thus as much an effort to recontextualise the writing of Defoe, Smollet, and Sterne as it is to place "Ulysses" within the tradition of the English novel. The usual mode of the literary historian is to locate the influence of an earlier work on a later one. By deliberately evoking a double perspective on literary history, however, Warner enables us to understand how Joyce both uses and creates a tradition for his novel - how he "fathers his own grandfathers".Read More