Gregory Castle

My Self, My Other: Modernism and Postcolonial Bildung in Assia Djebar's Algerian Quartet

In recent years, Bildung and the Bildungsroman genre have attracted considerable attention, especially in modernist and postcolonial studies, which have re-evaluated the former’s conceptual relevance and the latter’s formal efficacy. In postcolonial fiction, the fissure, or contradiction, in classical Bildung and modernity itself becomes the source of new forms of identity and community. Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet explores alternative means of achieving cultural and aesthetic wholeness through new modes of auto/biographical writing. In her nonlinear, polyvocal, and syncopated narratives, we find instead alternatives to conventional Bildung that are more adaptable to non-Western modes of social belonging.

Coming of Age in the Age of Empire: Joyce's Modernist Bildungsroman

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which depicts the development and exile of a quintessentially modernist artist-hero, has not often been read in terms of the challenge that it issues to the classical Bildungsroman and the space it affords for a radical reconfiguration of Bildung, the “inner culture” theorized by German Enlightenment thinkers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. This essay looks closely at Joyce’s depiction of his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and argues that a colonial society like Ireland in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was inhospitable to the culture of Bildung. Family life and education fail to offer Stephen the means for harmonious self-formation and thus the vocational opportunities (particularly the priesthood) for integration into the larger social world. The colonial subject, internally split and alienated from that social world, must pursue self-development along different pathways. Joyce’s articulation of this critical and subversive “colonial Bildung” paradoxically takes place within the bounds of a narrative that adheres mainly to the formal limits of the classical Bildungsroman. In this way, Joyce’s Bildungsroman is able to critique immanently the very imperialist assumptions and attitudes about the individual and his relation to society that legitimates the classical form. By examining Stephen’s experiences with significant father figures and the women and girls he meets, by looking closely at the alternative vocation of “priest of eternal imagination” that he evolves out of an elaborate profane aesthetics and confessional performativity, I demonstrate that Stephen’s struggle with the processes of socialization, together with Joyce’s struggle to represent those processes, indicates some of the problems the modernist Bildungsroman faces—and not just in the colonial territories but in the entire field of late modernity.

Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (review)

1 A supreme example: at the 18th International James Joyce Symposium, Terry Eagleton told the audience that “the failure of socialism proves that Marx was right,” leaving one to wonder, “And what, pray tell, would the success of socialism have proven?” Academics as a class not exactly being profiles in courage, nobody present, your reviewer included, asked that question or even so much as hooted in derision. 2 W. H. Auden, “Foreword to A Change of World,” Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-Visions, 1951-81, ed. Jane Roberta Cooper (1984; Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 209-11. 3 Christine Boheemen-Saaf quotes here a well-known phrase used by John Keats in a letter-—see “To George and Tom Keats,” John Keats: Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings with Jon Mee (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), p. 42. 4 Fritz Senn, Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce, ed. Christine O’Neill (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995), pp. 2-3.

The Consolation of Objects in Joyce's: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses

“The Consolation of Objects” takes seriously Nietzsche’s call to embrace what is, to love necessity. Amor fati for him entails the ability “to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them.” Stephen Dedalus, in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, shows us how this love of fate is tied to the object-world. He first learns, in A Portrait, that words are linked to objects, and then learns that both objects and words harbor a secret significance. He learns that objects and things are not always congruent and that they possess radically different ontologies; the “thingness” or quality of being essential or “noumenal” that belongs to the object or word as object is not available for human perception, which must settle for the brute being of the object as given. He tries to understand what lies beyond this given reality, the quidditas (literally “whatness”) or thingness of the object. In Ulysses, Stephen learns a more valuable lesson: what lies in the liminal territory of his apprehension constitutes a knowable element of the object that lies beyond its sensible appearance. The “esthetic image” that illuminates his mind in A Portrait is now understood to be the dialectical image of the object’s withdrawal into being. He learns to accept the promise of the object’s being in the beauty of its necessary withdrawal. The consolation of objects is that they offer artists like Stephen an opening into worlds other than their own, a pathway toward what cannot be known, a half-step toward what all objects conceal.

The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (review)

1 See Samuel Beckett, Lessness (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970). 2 See, for instance, Israel Shenker’s interview with Beckett on 5 May 1956, reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1997), p. 148. 3 Friedhelm Rathjen, ed., In Principle, Beckett Is Joyce (Edinburgh: Split Pea Press, 1994). 4 See generally Giordano Bruno, “Cause, Principle, and Unity” and “Essays on Magic,” ed. Richard J. Blackwell, Robert De Lucca et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). 5 Beckett, “Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of “Work In Progress,” ed. Beckett et al. (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1929), p. 6. 6 Beckett, “Neither,” The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), p. 258. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 7 Beckett’s “Neither” was originally published as a poem in the Journal of Beckett Studies, 4 (Spring 1979), vii. 8 Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: J. Calder, 1983), p. 53. 9 All translations are mine. 10 See Beckett, Mehr Prügel als Flügel, trans. Christian Enzensberger (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989). 11 See Beckett, Quad: et Trio du Fantôme . . . que Nuage . . . Nacht und Träume, followed by L’Épuisé, by Gilles Deleuze, trans. Edith Fournier (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1992). 12 Beckett, Poems 1930-1989 (London: J. Calder, 2002), pp. 113-15.