Joyce, Synopticist

For all its reputation for iconoclasm, modernism, says Robert Alter in Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series) , is more accurately described as a “paradoxical amalgam of iconoclasm and hypertraditionalism” (p. 8). Alter’s book explores this phenomenon, along with the “double canonicity” (religious and literary) of the Hebrew Bible, in Kafka, Haim Bialik, and Joyce.

Joyce’s debt to canonical Homer is on the surface of Ulysses , but Alter argues that the Bible, and the Old Testament, plays a constitutive and not merely decorative role in the novel: “Joyce . . . imagines an intricate coordination and complementarity between the Odyssey and the Bible – more like the relation between two of the Synoptic Gospels than between, say, Prometheus Bound and the Passion Narrative as Milton would have imagined it.” The two stories of exile and return echo off one another: “The domestic plot of the Greek story reappears as national narrative in the Hebrew story” (p. 159).

Alter’s Joyce ends up pretty much an iconoclast, apt to employ the Bible for pastiche and parody, breaking the Bible’s double canonicity to leave only the literary.