Abstract
Wyndham Lewis was one of the few early critics of Ulysses to see that, like Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom is a Joycean self-portrait.1 Driven by his anti-Semitism, Lewis was irritated by the sympathy Joyce garnered by portraying himself as a Jew. In Time and Western Man, he complains that Bloom has too much dramatic power: As it is, of course, the author, thinly disguised as a middle-aged Jew tout (Mr. Leopold Bloom), wins the reader’s sympathy every time he appears; and he never is confronted with the less and less satisfactory Dedalus (in the beau role) without the latter losing trick after trick to his disreputable rival. . . . It is a sad affair, altogether, on that side. (101) A similar dynamic operates in the sections of Finnegans Wake in which Shem is attacked by his twin brother Shaun. In Book I, Chapter 7, and Book III, Chapter 1, readers sympathize with the victimized and pathetic Shem, who, though he is not a Jew in any strict sense (neither, of course, is Bloom), can claim Jewishness as one among his myriad identities. While Joyce critics have traced in detail how Joyce’s contact with and attitudes about Jews shaped the portrayal of Leopold Bloom,2 we have yet fully to explore Joyce’s subsequent imagination of himself as a “semisemitic” Shem (FW 191.02-03).3 This essay, though certainly not a full account of such an imagining, traces one strand of the Wake in which, as in Ulysses, Joyce uses the figure of the Jew to conjure his enduring sense of persecution as a writer.
Date of this Version
2008
Recommended Citation
Linett, Maren, "The Jew’s Text: “Shem The Penman” and “Shaun The Post”" (2008). Department of English Faculty Publications. Paper 10.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/englpubs/10
Comments
This is the author-accepted manuscript of Linett, M. (2008). The Jew’s Text: “Shem The Penman” and “Shaun The Post”. James Joyce Quarterly 45(2), 263-280. Copyright The University of Tulsa, it is shared with permission here, and the version of record is available at DOI10.1353/jjq.0.0056.