At the center of this book is Murphy’s theory of “victimage,” which he defines as a cultural logic built on the necessity of exclusion (27). He argues that Joyce recognized the systematic perpetuation of victims as early as his moving letter to Nora Barnacle shortly after his mother’s death (LettersII 48). In this letter, Joyce recognizes the cultural forces that had made his mother a victim and in which he himself had participated. Murphy writes:

That Joyce in his letter yokes victims to “the system,” to the cultural formations that reproduce oppressive conditions through erasure, repression, and violence, indicates the extent to which he realizes the obvious interrelations of politics, religion, art, economics, gender, sexuality and citizens’ lived everyday experience, relationships often concealed within the naturalized status of ideologies. (18)

Murphy proposes that the dominant forms of western rational thought are based on binary (oppositional) and ternary (dialectic) structures that necessitate hierarchy or exclusion, producing victims as an integral part of their function. He argues that Joyce recognized the structure of exclusion on the levels of nation and race, of gender and sexuality, and of religion, and that he was committed, throughout his oeuvre, to inventing an alternative, “quadratic logic” that would produce community and inclusion in the place of victimage (145). Joyce’s quadratic logic is demonstrated on a number of levels from the four-part structures of Dubliners and Finnegans Wake to a semiotics more flexible than the three-part construction devised by Ferdinand de Saussure to an understanding of subjectivity that levels the play of conscious and unconscious, of desire and directive, and of private aspiration and public duty.

Murphy posits, in a slightly more familiar move, that the open textuality of Joyce writing works against the logic of exclusion by undermining mastery: “The stories of Dubliners, for example, contain so many textual blanks that readers are encouraged to surrender their desire for mastery and focus their attention instead on the predicament of Irish Others, on agency, and on Others’ dreams of escape from colonial confinement” (25).

James Joyce and Victims provides a highly theoretical analysis of victims’ collusion in their own victimization and explores the motivations for the logic of exclusion: “[T]he totality demands that adults misrecognize the material conditions that engender their consciousness. A stable identity comes from a stable material base, so citizens will invest in superstructural ideologies that underwrite economic bases that benefit only a few and that detract from many, including the citizens who prefer stability to chaos” (56). In rapid-fire readings of the Dubliners stories, for example, Murphy notes that the emphasis on hospitality in “The Dead” is ironic; it is the hospitality of “an oppressed people graciously welcoming their oppressors” (70). His very thoughtful, if tantalizingly brief, reading of the overlooked story “After the Race” suggests that Jimmy Doyle’s losses in the cosmopolitan card game at the center of the tale are “symbolic of the price subalterns pay for associating, whether willingly or not, with colonizers” (50-51).

But James Joyce and Victims also considers how figures in Joyce’s texts find empowerment and eschew victimization through unorthodox means. Characters such as Molly and Leopold Bloom and Gerty MacDowell “negotiate positions endowed with the power to deform ideological directives, to refute discourses, and to create pleasure” (30). In a delightful reading of the virtual seduction in “Nausicaa,” Murphy considers the imperial situation of Ireland in relation to the sexual condition of its subjects in order to argue that the “colonial condition perpetuates binary thinking and promotes the self/Other division, a division that Joyce undermines in Ulysses by celebrating individuality and togetherness, by exploiting the manner in which private desire originates in the public Other” (134). It is a measure of Murphy’s optimism that he never rests on the politics of victimization without positing the possibility of agency: “When victims assume subjectivity within religious, nationalist, and linguistic networks, they also assume a modicum of agency, thus complicating the relationship between victims and eternal epistemologies of exclusion” (113).

In his most interesting chapter, on Finnegans Wake, Murphy argues that this last of Joyce’s books is not so much about night and dreams, as many of us have concluded, as it is a recycling of international myths of origin parodied in Joyce’s invented language in such a way as to expose the logic of exclusion at the heart of many cultural grand narratives. He argues that “the Wake becomes a point of ‘origin’ for a different logic, not only of dream analysis, but also of representation in general” (159).

Murphy’s book will be a welcome addition to the vast body of work on James Joyce. It will be of interest to readers invested in the crux where politics and subjectivity meet and are represented in modernist literatures. It also presents the question of victimization in a way utterly different from the current work on trauma, and in this departure it promises to enrich discussions of trauma and literature.

--Marian Eide, Texas A&M University

James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 41, Iss. 3