James Joyce Quarterly

Abstraction, Emptiness, and Much Critical Information

Already intriguing us with its title—Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce—this remarkably innovative exploration begins to challenge us with the first sentence in its "Introduction": "This book paints a picture of James Joyce's fiction in which hope and future assume the primary colors" (1). "Hope" and "future" have colors? The text goes on to say, "Nor have critics sufficiently acknowledged that hope constitutes a major part of Joyce's textual politics and political vision," and this directs us to the first footnote which lets us know that we have entered a critical field here termed "utopia studies" (22).¹ The term "utopia" refers to imaginary societies, but ones with positive implications, also embedded in the word "hope" although less so in "future." The author, David P. Rando, makes it clear that his book will "characterize hope as central to Joyce's fiction," and he concedes that "[h]ope and future are not the terms with which Joyce has usually been read" (1). He then offers a brief history of Joyce criticism that has over time explored the pessimism in much of his work, known to us from the earliest focus on the role of "paralysis." Rando notes that the early perception of negativity in the spirit of Joyce's work has waned historically, and this has inspired him to look to the work of Ernst Bloch, a contemporary of Theodor Adorno, for support.² He considers Bloch "a thinker whose ideas have seen a resurgence of interest as scholars look to liberate their sense of hope, future, and utopia from the reigning critical paradigms" (24). Following Bloch's direction, Rando intends to have his book offer "a future-oriented, inventive, and restless Joyce, a Joyce whose hope, expressed both formally and thematically, is mediated through material conditions, with hunger at their core" (3-4). He claims that Joyce's experience with poverty and colonialism nonetheless allowed him to create "new spaces and vistas of hope from which out of the already-known the not-yet might emerge." In response, "[r]eaders must become Joyce's partners in vision and invention" (4).

And so this book continues with substantial discussions of hope, form, and future in every chapter as it slowly works its way through Joyce's publications. Before leaving the "Introduction," we are given a section titled "The Dark Matter of Hope: Giacomo Joyce," in which Rando describes this relatively unfamiliar and posthumously published [End Page 399] "prose poem" of Joyce's as a "generative and imaginative space out of which emerged specific images, phrases, preoccupations, and techniques that found their way into A Portrait, Ulysses, and later poems" (14). The word "space" takes on an immediate significance in this description, when Rando explains that the prose poem "visualizes interstitial or liminal spaces of hope via its blank spaces that are irregularly laid out on the page" (15). How do we visualize something "interstitial" (occurring in an intervening space) or "liminal" ("relating to or situated at a sensory border or threshold") as a space of hope? Apparently we view it as empty, like a white space on a piece of paper or a blank space between printed words. An interesting point, but one that also directs us to one of the problems with this study, is the way Rando's discussion of hope, form, and future in this book frequently focuses on abstractions without giving us examples or illustrations in Joyce's work that would make these concepts more clear and understandable. Fortunately, in some of the later chapters, this difficulty will improve, and throughout the volume Rando's large number of references and footnotes—forty-nine just at the end of the "Introduction"—give this work a scholarly richness that stands in curious contrast to the emptiness of its sections of abstraction.

After this "Introduction," chapter 1 focuses on...