John M. Bishop

We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the  

[From Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.]

Professor John M. Bishop, a faculty member of the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1979 until his retirement in 2011, passed away on May 15, 2020 in Syracuse, N.Y. He was born in Auburn, N.Y, on September 5, 1948. He graduated from Cornell University (B.A. English) and Stanford University (Ph.D. Modern Literature, 1981). His personal interests included playing classical piano, the geology of Central New York, travel, camping, hiking, comedy, and family. After a stroke in 2010, John retired from teaching and spent the final decade of his life in Syracuse nearby his sisters Jeanne and Anne, and not far from his hometown of Auburn. During those years, he continued to read James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and other favorite writers, and he gave several guest lectures at conferences and local colleges, several times co-teaching with Professor Michael Davis of Le Moyne College. His unparalleled knowledge of Joyce never diminished and he never gave up on the idea that he would, one day, return to teach again at Berkeley. John demonstrated that the passion for literature and for learning can not only survive extreme medical emergencies and conditions, but also contribute substantially to recovery.

In the international community of literary scholars, John Bishop was widely regarded as one of the most learned, astute, and creative among those who write about James Joyce. His book, Joyce’s Book of the Dark (1986), is an influential and much-beloved examination of Joyce’s notoriously challenging novel Finnegans Wake. By showing that the famous obscurity and impenetrability of the Wake’s ceaselessly punning and densely multilingual prose is not meant to simply baffle or frustrate readers, but rather is essential for a book that explores the “noughttime” realm of evening, sleep, and dream, John freed a generation of readers and scholars to take the Wake at once more seriously and more playfully. Elucidating the surface-level complexities of Joyce’s palimpsestic sentences as well as the conceptual systems and texts that galvanized Joyce’s “NIGHTLETTER” — among them The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Vico’s The New Science, and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams — John’s capacious reading clarified the Wake by taking seriously its “clearobscure,” “Sheeroskouro” method. He demonstrated that a book so polyvalent as the Wake requires an equally open reading practice if we are to register fully both the monumental significance of Joyce’s masterwork and the great pleasure of its “blotch and void” pages. Over the course of his career, John’s ability to demonstrate what it means to read Joyce led to many invitations to speak at prestigious conferences and institutions in Europe and North America, invitations prompted by a widespread hope that his fire might be caught by listening, and it often was, to judge by his reputation.

John was equally successful in the classroom, where his task was the same as the one he set for himself in his book. Rather than transmitting to his students his own monumental erudition and insight, he was primarily concerned that the students themselves become adept readers of the books that he put before them. His presentation of what he knew and what he’d thought was aimed at provoking students to embark on literary voyages such as his own by demonstrating that doing so was a possible and deeply enticing option for them. Whether in his legendary Joyce seminars, his other seminars on literary modernism, his lectures on contemporary literature, or his lectures in his introductory survey class, John led his students to discover unsuspected intellectual potentialities in themselves, and earned their sincere gratitude in response. As a consequence of John’s teaching, quite a number of Berkeley students became intelligently conversant with literary works that continued to baffle faculty colleagues, many of whom left John’s Charles Mills Gayley Lecture in 2005 wishing that they too could have listened to him for a semester or two, rather than only for that one evening in the early spring. As luck (and the Internet Archive) would have it, John’s lectures from a 2008 course on modern literature are available to listen to, as is an interview he gave in 2009. 

He is survived by his sister, Dr. Jeanne Bishop; niece, Katherine Shaw (Adam Dieck); and brother-in-law, Dr. Kenneth Shaw. He was predeceased by his sister, Dr. Anne Bishop.

Eric Falci
Mitchell Breitwieser
2020