C110 review

Joyce in Art, Lilliput Press, 2004

Cover and inside views of Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes: Joyce in Art, Lilliput Press, 2004

Cover and inside views of Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes: Joyce in Art, Lilliput Press, 2004

This book is not a catalogue, although it accompanied an exhibition. It starts, after the co-curator Patrick T. Murphy's note, with the Foreword by Fritz Senn, who plays with Joycean "eriginating," a process of art generating art. It is closed by the Envoi by James Elkins, whose sensitive and exquisitely to-the-point judgement makes my review largely superfluous.

In between the two, the author has placed Introduction, five chapters, Notes, Bibliography (helpfully split into literary and art secondary sources), Index and 182 plates - all 408 pages of it.

This is an impressive 'epiphany', in the sense of 'putting on show' the scholar's research over some eight years. Luckily Lerm Hayes' sudden intuitive insights hardly ever slip into an emotional rhetoric; the nearest to it are sentences like that Joyce was a conceptual artist, or that he has inspired many current modes of thinking and scientific theories, e.g. the theory of relativity and indeterminacy, or stating that his instruction to read Finnegans Wake aloud is a sustained inspiration to performance art (p. 321). Or "[i]t seems to be no longer possible for many twentieth- or twenty-first century artists to deal with tradition - whether biblical, Homeric, or Modernist - without referring to Joyce for ways to go about it." (pp. 317-318). The book's phenomenological grounding renders such skidding almost enjoyable, especially if all else is faithful to the strict code of academic research. The author's work with sources is exemplary, vivid and economical. I loved the book from the first page, and love it still for its many delightful insights and surprises, whose energy reaches to future research by whomever feels inspired by it. And there will be many, given the vast material presented.

The book, however, is not just an 'epiphany' of material. It is a study of inspiration controlled by contact with Joyce and / or his oeuvre. Its corrective principles include a history of the insights into the manner in which parallels in thinking have avoided sameness. The assertion that the artists "think like Joyce" is impossible to prove. The author is aware that no work inspired by Joyce may be fully explained by that connection. Nevertheless, she offers with a gusto numerous correspondences and "coincidences" in a speculative and imaginative investigation of responses. She has adopted categories like high/low, universal, appropriation, kitsch and gesture, metamorphosis, sacralisation and secularisation, accumulation, appropriation, sigla, portmanteau, etc., to measure both responses and lack of them to Joyce's ways of thinking. In addressing the huge problem of art generating art, she does not overlook cases when Joyce is used irreverently or as a scaffolding, when his modes of work like constellation, fat and felt, maps, or the course of the day are taken up by a visual artist for a different task. In a phenomenological mode, Lerm Hayes painstakingly examines the essence of the experience each artist had with Joyce or his work, and what exactly was selected to be experienced.

The device in which one art tries to relate to another is known as ekphrasis (ecphrasis), a device which, by defining and describing the essence and form of that original art, speaks through its own illuminative liveliness. Its power is well known from Homer's description of Achilles' shield and of how Hephaestus made it. As far as nominal ecphrasis may describe or depict a work which exists in somebody's mind or imagination, it predicts conceptual art. In this book ecphrasis does something characteristic: in an analogy to Plato's Forms, the author seeks out "joyceness" in a multitude of qualities, all connected to an origin in a work of art.

Moreover, the author aims at something else as well: "It is my argument that artistic readings of Joyce have been instrumental in shaping norms and the course of art historical development." (p. 9). Happily, her thorough scholarly discipline keeps her alert to some of the constraints which the above claim contains, namely the models left to us by the Alfred Barrs of this world, but not enough to lead her fuller attention to anti-norms. Or to Mackie's INUS. Equally happily she leaves behind the dry "three systematic relationships" (pp. 7-8) she borrowed from Mieke Bal. Being a problematic reduction of the complex co-existence of many contexts and traditions, they cannot do the job demanded by the collected material. Lerm Hayes proposes, with conviction and courage, to measure the quality of the works of art in question against their achieving "Joyce's level of innovation and intensity," probably aware of the inherent difficulty. So instead, a much more workable proposition opens up many of the riches of this book: to expose "how artists keep re-negotiating the relationship between word and image" (p. 9, my paraphrase).

The author writes, "I will not stop short at identifying a Joycean iconography, but aim to extend my argument's scope to an iconology of the field." Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and Ernst Gombrich agreed that iconology included an iconographic collation of sources. Mia Lerm Hayes contributes, in parallel to Rudolf Wittkower, the fourth level to Panofsky's three, by developing specifically what Panofsky termed the "synthetic intuition."

Slavka Sverakova is a freelance writer on visual art.

Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes: Joyce in Art, Lilliput Press, Dublin, 2004

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.78–79
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