Matthew Creasy

Errears and Erroriboose

Joyce was fascinated by error throughout his writing career, from the malapropisms of characters in Dubliners, through to misquotations and misappropriations in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the errors and gaffes committed by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. This interest culminates in the ceaseless perversions of language, perspective and fact in Finnegans Wake. Error is not, however, something that Joyce only writes about: it happens to him and his texts in the form of misprints and inadvertent factual errors, through the interventions of others and through lapses in Joyce’s own practice. Indeed, part of the richness of this topic for those who are interested in Joyce’s writing is the difficult process of disentangling deliberate features of the text from unintended slippages. Errears and Erroriboose is the first major collection of essays to address the topic of Joyce and error. It brings together eight essays in order to provide readers with an understanding of the diverse ways in which error features in Joyce’s writings. A variety of different critical perspectives and approaches to the topic can be found here and the volume is of interest to students of Joyce’s work at all levels. These include archival and genetic study of the role of error in the composition of Joyce’s works; consideration of the psychological implications of error; work on the material and historical consequences of error; and close readings of the verbal effects of errors and mistakes.

Inverted volumes and fantastic libraries: Ulysses and Bouvard et Pécuchet

James Joyce and Gustave Flaubert are famous for the assiduous note-taking and documentation which informed their imaginative fiction. Michel Foucault was moved to exclaim that, following Flaubert, “the imaginary […] is a property of the library.” It is not always widely acknowledged that much of this preliminary gathering of facts and documentary sources was destined to shape deliberate factual inaccuracies and errors of judgement in the texts of their novels. This essay compares the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses with the gardening projects of Flaubert’s eponymous characters in Bouvard et Pecuchet in order to trace a common aesthetics of error within their use of source material. Subtle forms of disruption to the texture of their writings amount to a critique of the kind of encyclopaedic writing these novels are sometimes thought to epitomize.

Error and education in Ulysses

Errors committed by characters in Joyce’s fiction often coincide with allusions to their educational circumstances. This essay elaborates upon the connection by exploring the history of education in Ireland, a key context to Joyce’s writing. Focussing upon Leopold Bloom, it traces a nexus of allusions to education in Ulysses and their relation to error. Important questions are raised about determining material influences on Joyce’s characters, such as class, religion and sex. Joyce uses Bloom’s errors and mistakes as a means of assimilating such material to the imagined life of this character. At the same time, Joyce’s evocations of error also resist determinist reductions of this kind. The essay shows how Joyce uses fictionalised mistakes to explore the tensions between human agency and historical contingencies.