Gayle Rogers

Spain, Galicia, and the "Atlantic" Joyce

I mythology tells of the migration of the Milesians, who were Gaelic Celts, to Ireland through the northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula—thus, the “Hiberio-Miletians” mentioned in Finnegans Wake (FW 309.11). Some of them stayed in what became the Roman province of Gallaecia (present-day northern Portugal and northwestern Spain), whose inhabitants shared with Irish Celts similar languages and mythological cycles.1 Contemporary scholars in the Spanish province of Galicia have invoked this narrative often both in their research and in the broader spirit of their attention to James Joyce, a northern-Atlantic neighbor who attracted considerable attention from his Galician contemporaries as well. Indeed, as the books at hand demonstrate, Spanish Joyceans, especially in the past two decades, have developed a complex array of practices and critical idioms focused on issues of reception, translation, adaptation, and exegesis. Even as that is acknowledged, however, there is no uniformity among Spanish Joyce scholars: the field is, in fact, robust enough to have subdivisions, and these three books belong to what might be called more precisely “Galician Joyce,” which is related to but distinct from the work of Catalan or Andalusian critics—and is itself a heterogeneous community. Together, the titles considered here comprise a sampling of this work, pointing interested Joyceans toward new avenues for archival investigations and other forms of inquiry. Non-Spanish REVIEW ESSAY