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To the Editor,

I HAVE JUST BEEN GIVEN a review of my Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce that appeared in the ILS recently (and written by Coilin Owens). I realize that in this business you can always find someone who disagrees with you. But I was stunned by the malicious and mean-spirited nature of the attack. What makes it worse is the fact that he has obviously misread portions of my book and then used it against me. I realize that you have high standards for your reviews and your reviewers, so I don't quite understand how you could let anyone get away with using terms like "howlers" (for mistakes) and comparing one of them with a Monty Python skit. He even has the audacity to claim that Joyce never applied for a position at the University of Padua! Of course he did. And it's also true that Mangan was reappropriated as a hero for Irish nationalists at the end of the 19th century (How about Yeats's edition). And who, nowadays will really argue that the British colonization of Ireland did not speed up the Anglicization of Ireland. It's preposterous that Owens has completely checked out and is frustrated by his own intellectual abilities.

It's apparent to me that you've selected a bitter old man for this review. It is now in circulation and will certainly be read by people in my field. It's just a shame that they will have been misled into thinking somehow that I'm unfamiliar with Joyce and Irish history. It's more the case, I think, that Owens' familiarity with literary criticism on Joyce, and on literature more generally, has stopped somewhere around 1960. In the future, I would recommend that the next time you need someone to review a Joyce book, you will find someone who can act more responsibly and professionally. I'm disgusted by what passes for a review of my book here in your journal.

Sincerely yours, Eric Bulson

Coilin Owens replies.

MY OBSERVATIONS ON THE DEMERITS of Mr. Bulson's Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce were confined to his misrepresentation of historical facts, inattentive readings, and careless phrasing. Reluctantly, but in view of the charges, professional and personal, I respond.

Joyce never applied for a teaching position at the University of Padua. The University merely facilitated the examination required of potential secondary teachers in Italy.

James Clarence Mangan was admired by Irish literary nationalists, Yeats and Joyce among them. But he had none of the public standing that earns one the title "hero."

My objection to the sentence, "During the nineteenth century a number of nationalist groups blamed the rapid Anglicization of Ireland on centuries of British colonization" (54-55), is not, of course, to challenge the broad observation, but to protest its ineptitude! All (not "a number of") nationalists--and many others who were not nationalists-objected to British colonialism. Since Irish nationalism is by historical definition anti-colonial, it is tautologous to observe that it takes exception to British interference in Irish affairs. Second (unless we are expected to entertain the possibility that this interference was undertaken in behalf of native institutions and culture) that Anglicization is a consequence of centuries of British colonialism, is another tautology. Third, the use of "rapid" and "centuries" with respect to the same process is both historically and logically impossible. This cumulation of non sequiturs constitutes a howler.

The assertion that Joyce's article, "Ireland at the Bar," "was inspired by current events back in Ireland: the shooting of innocent people in Belfast by British troops and a series of cattle raids in England (for which the Irish were blamed)" (24) is the wildest of fantasies. Into its thirty-two words, Bulson has managed to squeeze (depending on how you count), seven, eight, or nine errors of fact. Unless this is some sort of satire on Joyce's partiality to Irish nationalist plaint, the sequence must set a nonsense record.

Looking back at my review copy, I see that I report but a fraction of the misinformation and misrepresentation that permeates this farrago. I had a word limit, and was writing about two Cambridge Introductions. Readers who doubt my judgment are invited to compare it with John Gordon's in the James Joyce Literary Supplement (Fall 2007, p. 10). While I admit that he is more genial than I, his list of errors and misreadings, without repeating any of mine, is much finer and longer.

In answering the charge that he was a trivial writer, Joyce calmly replied that while some of his words were trivial, more were quadrivial. He imagined himself a student of the medieval academy, and of the schools of Aquinas and Dante. Every detail in his work can be accounted by reference to three or four systems of meaning. The responsible reader, therefore, has several tasks: to be sure (s)he is reading accurately with regard to the lexical and historical records, and to verify these readings scrupulously in the light of the literary, philosophical, mythological, and theological patrimony which Joyce considered his own. These references need to be sorted, classified, and then arranged in order of relative weight bearing upon any given passage. To the naive (or postmodern) reader, Joyce's texts may all appear to be a chaotic or meaningless jumble where every chance observation is as valid as any other, and therefore harnassable to any wagon going our way. This cynical relativism is Buck Mulligan's view of art, a reflection of Oliver St. John Gogarty's view of Joyce's art as "a giant legpull."