Vicki Mahaffey, an American professor of some acclaim, has made James Joyce her life’s work. And yet, after decades of scholarship, she has produced in The Joyce of Everyday Life an innovative new lens through which to view Ireland’s most iconic literary export anew.
Her objective with this book is to provoke appreciation for the joy that can be derived from reading Joyce, to mitigate the sustained perception that reading his work is a challenging, intellectual exercise of great seriousness.
Mahaffey’s overarching idea is that “everyday life is akin to everyday reading: both can be deadened by habit”. The antidote to this malaise, she suggests, is to rediscover delight in the playfulness of language, to engage in acts of imagination and creativity that elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary, as Joyce did.
Mahaffey demonstrates that, by embracing Joyce’s writing with a spirit of lively amusement, we can revitalise life itself; that we should read his work not necessarily seeking enlightenment through comprehension but instead embrace inspiration through the excitement of the language.
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Mahaffey unpicks the techniques Joyce uses to jolt the reader from complacency such as his instinct to “turn the narrative from a window into a mirror” and by deploying multiple points of view. In essence, what the reader is offered is a glossary of Joyce’s language, themed together in chapters such as On Writing by Hand, On Dirty Sheets and On Adultery and Virginity.
Although this book is a work of academic scholarship with citations galore, Mahaffey writes with great energy and creative flair. As such, anyone who is interested in Joyce, in philosophies of language or literacy, or who desires an injection of intellectual stimulation will find much to satisfy them here.
Mahaffey, winner of the American Conference on Irish Studies’ Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature, has accomplished something remarkable with this work: she has managed to translate the extraordinariness of Joyce into something brilliantly ordinary so that the work can breathe anew in less rarefied air.
For those who have struggled to finish Ulysses or Finnegans Wake in the past, with this friendly guide, Mahaffey may offer you an alternative entrance.
