James Joyce: Commentary (11)

[ top ]

Declan Kiberd, ‘Story-Telling: The Gaelic Tradition’, in Terence Brown & Patrick Rafroidi, eds., The Irish Short Story, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979): ‘[…] the greatest collection of short stories to come out of Ireland, Joyce’s Dubliners, bears positively no trace of the oral tradition. Where the oral tradition took the spectacular as its subject, Joyce finds poetry in the commonplace. Where the oral tales climaxed in blood-baths and supernatural reversals, Joyce’s epiphanies describe nothing more momentous than the passing of a coin. Nor is Joyce alone in this proud immunity to the Gaelic tradition. George Moore and John McGahern might also be cited as writers of real class whose work bears no trace of the folklore of the rural Ireland in which they grew up. One reason for this may lie in the [21] fact that a tales which had previously been told in the Irish language passed over into English only to a very small extent.’ (p.21; note: Kiberd’s footnote at this point refers to Seán O’Sullivan, The Folklore of Ireland, London 1974, p.15.)

[ top ]

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape 1995): ‘Joyce’s Stephen Hero, noting the willingness of the Catholic clergy to support the [Gaelic] League, said that the priests hoped to find in Irish a bulwark against modern ideas, keeping “the wolves of unbelief” at bay and the people frozen in a past of “implicit faith”. This was rather sour response from a Joyce whose experience of the League had been fatally narrowed by his attendance at the Irish classes of Patrick Pearse [who] in his youthful days found it impossible to praise Irish without virulent denunciations of English (…; p.141.) ‘Finding himself nowhere, Stephen attempts to fabricate an environment: “signature of all things I am here to read”. But the problem is that his learning is more dense than his setting. He is a dire example of the provincial intellectual weighted down by the learning of the European tradition. (…; 346.) Yet what he finds, almost at once, is that there is no “society” to report, even within Bloom’s own household in Eccles Street. A few pages of interior monologue are sufficient to make clear that the Blooms can never [know] one another as the reader will come to know them. Indeed the tragedy of the interior monologue will be revealed to lie in the counterpoint between the richness of a person’s thoughts and the slender opportunities for sharing those thoughts with others in conversation. What is depicted in the ensuing chapters can hardly be called a society in the conventional sense, being rather a gathering of fugitives, of submerged groups, of clamorous competing voices and of speakers who do not often listen to one another. If the traditional European novel has a plot which hinges on a number of crucial dialogues, then this is not such a narrative at all, being constructed more around monologues, soliloquys and reveries.’ (pp.346-47.) ‘Joyce concludes that there can be no freedom for his characters within that society: they exist in their interior monologues with a kind of spacious amplitude which proves impossible in the community itself. So his refusal to provide a “satisfactory climax” […] is his reject of the obligation felt by realists to present a coherent, stable, socialised self.’ (p.354).

[ top ]

Declan Kiberd, on the Penguin Joyce publishing project, gen Ed. Seamus Deane (UCD): ‘The task is to situate Joyce in his immediate context before returning him to the wider modernist world … to historize him.’ (Q. Source; Irish journalism.) Note: introductions in the series were provided by Deane, Kiberd, Terence Brown, et al.

Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London: Faber & Faber 2009): ‘It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people. […]. Whereas other modernists feared the hydra-headed mob, Joyce used interior monologue to show how lovable, complex and affirmative was the mind of the ordinary citizen.’ (p.11.) Further: ‘Acting out is one response to repression; keeping things in is the other. If the healthy person is one in whom every internal impulse is balanced by an external one, this raises the question of a pathological element in Bloom’s monologues. […] Stephen in “Proteus” is anything but healthy in its level of self obsession; and “Aeolus”, by mocking Bloomian telegraph-language, opened the possibility that even his monologues may contain a satiric element.’ (Ibid., p.127; both quoted in Jonathan McCreedy, PhD [draft], UU 2009).

[ top ]

Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge UP 1995): ‘Joyce [chose] to reject the Celticism within Irish Nationalism, founded as it was on this binary trap. As I have suggested, his argument that the Irish should look beyond their narrow provincialism and their affairs with England and develop a more international consciousness was an attempt to break out of such constricting dynamics and terms, in which an Irish essence could be defined only on the conqueror’s terms (such as [55] those posited by [Matthew] Arnold) and in reaction/response to English claims. For Joyce rejected wholesale the Celticist argument for racial purity and national characteristics, which he found to be as specious as the English stereotyping of the Irish character as the “baboon-faced figures” (SH 64) and “the unbalanced helpless idiots we read about” (CW 171) in the English papers and magazines. […; here Cheng quotes: ‘Our civilisation is a vast fabric […] the race now living in Ireland’ (CW165-66), also cited at paragraph-length on p.217.] / In rejecting the argument that the “race now living in Ireland” has somehow remained “pure and virgin”, Joyce is rejecting the ideological foundation behind the Citizen’s, the Gaelic League’s and the Literary Revival’s motivations. In arguing that in Irish civilisation [“]the most diverse elements are mingled”, Joyce is acknowledging the hybridity and collaboration of discoursive influences and cultural formations. His works, as we shall see, become increasingly informed by his sensitivity towards the nature of hybridity, ambivalences, and interpetrations involved in hegemonic and discursive formations. This is, of course, the understanding of discourses that Foucault advanced in The Order of Things when he suggested that the histories of the Same (Self) and the Other were [56] inextricably implicated and interpenetrated […] as Shem/Mercius would say to Shaun/Justius in Finnegans Wake, “the days of youyouth are evermixed minine” [FW194.04].’ (pp.55-57.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Vincent Cheng (Joyce, Race and Empire, 1995) - cont.: ‘For the pacifist, exiled, and multilingual Joyce, the “spiritual liberation” of Ireland and the creation of the “conscience of my race” involved getting out of the binary structure and into an internationalist, multilingual, and multiculturalist perspective.’ (p.52; quoted in Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz, ‘Joyce and the Tradition of Anti-Colonial Revolution’, Working Papers Ser., Washington State Univ. 1999, p.11.) Further, ‘Stephen’s resentment at the English [sic] occupation of the tower for which he pays the rent is suggested, not only in his opening question to Mulligan [“… How long is Haines going to stay in this tour?”] but again in his response to Mulligan’s Wildean witticism about Stephen’s face in the mirror being “the rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in the mirror” [U 1.143]. While Buck may be willing to condone the English racialisation and simianisation of the Irish as native “Caliban”, the Irish response […] was often the rage of the Irishman precisely at seeing his face represented in the English mirror as Caliban, and the parallel rage of not seeing in one’s reflection oneself as one’s own master. For Stephen’s response to Buck is that the mirror is “a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant” [U 1.146], a comment which voices and reasserts the [152] resentment of the Irish at being forces (and racialised) into the servitude of Caliban. (…; p.153.)

[ top ]

Vincent Cheng (Joyce, Race and Empire, 1995) - cont. Here Cheng quotes: “Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea […]”, and remarks: ‘This is the delighted response of the native informant who has discovered something else he can peddle to the ethnographer […] a touch of local colour, a native witticism.’ (p.153.) On Bloom’s postcolonial hybridity: […] ‘It is inevitable that Bloom is both a consumer and a product/propagator of the dominant (and racist) cultural discourse about otherness; but - perhaps because he is himself repeatedly being typed by his fellow Irish as just such a reified Other - he is repeatedly sceptical of such images and sensitive to the cultural processes by which they are erected. / Bloom, we discover, has an intense fascination with and awareness of the viewpoint of the other, of cultural difference - as evidenced in his interest in the customs of other peoples. […; 176] Not only does Bloom repeatedy show an interest in foreign customs and cultural difference, be he seems always to accept them without having to label or type them as barbaric, perverse, or unacceptable - in stark contrast to the way we repeatedly see his xenophobic fellow Irishmen, frearing foreignness, label him with the stigmatised marks of an absolute difference. Bloom is able to hold sumultaneous perspectives, to imagine being other and thus to transcend the monologic narrowness of a single, cycloptic perspective […] This is a multivalent perspective (and imaginative courage) in which many of his fellow Irishmen (such as those he will encounter later in the “Cyclops” episode) are lacking.’ (pp.176-77; see further extracts in Ricorso Library, “Criticism”, infra.)

[ top ]

Thomas C. Hofheinz, Joyce and the Inventions of Irish History: Finnegans Wake in Context (Cambridge UP 1995): ‘The Free State thereby enshrined as law the predicament that appears again and again throughout Joyce’s fiction: Irish homes in which fathers crippled with alcoholism, impotence, and rage beat, neglect, or drive their wives into states of enervation and despair and throw their children to the wolves. Joyce agreed with De Valera that the foundation of Ireland is the patriarchal family, but that concept for him was one laced with horror and outrage. / The awakening of Ireland into modernity is thus wedded in Joyce’s last novel to a resurgence of patriarchy, the primary organising principle of metaphysics and social formation in the Western world. An Irish father’s accountability or lack of it, evoked in jagged edges of narrative expressing the patriarchal order’s knots of contradiction and pain, laces upward through the blindness of Irish habit into the historiography of Finnegans Wake, an anamorphosis waiting to materialise behind the screen of historical discourse. [… &c.]’ (p.38.) [Cont.]

Thomas C. Hofheinz, Joyce and the Inventions of Irish History: Finnegans Wake in Context (Cambridge UP 1995) - cont.: ‘Irish historians of the late colonial era, in their question to resurrect a lost Ireland that would clarify their living present, sought to decipher the epitaph of an Ireland buried alive. The crytology involved in topological history - the working backwards from the scattered topoi of a shattered past - depends upon the logic of a crypt, a hidden space where one seeks to wake the dead. The writing of history, though, obviates such a question. Writing cuts the epitaph for the past’s translation into the present. Whether Irish historians and antiquarians of the late colonial period read ancient Irish documents in the “original” or in English translation, they affirmed the destruction of the Irish Gaelic they sought. Such a loss of the Irish past through inscription may be the reason why Joyce cited Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies both by Moore’s titles and the names of the Irish airs to which his poems were adapted. […] the search to find concrete centres for Ireland’s competing names and claims, consequently gave oppsoing Irish parties common mode of reference, a mutual agreement ot encrypt the present in topics of the past.’ (p.73.) ‘Gabriel’s vulnerability to the Irish dead on his journey west is precisely what Stephen Dedalus attempts to avoid on his abortive journey East to the European continent. […] Joyce’s insistence that Ireland either wake up or lie down in the grave forever is not so much a scornful dismissal of his country as it is a concise utterance of the question raised throughout his work with irony and compassion: the difference between a wake and an awakening, between locating oneself in the past and finding oneself in the present, depends upon an existential assessment of names and claims wound into one’s identity.’ (p.73; for longer extracts, see RICORSO Library, “Major Authors”, James Joyce, infra.)

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Allegory, History and Irish Nationalism’, in Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork UP 1996), pp.146-47: ‘It is these restless shades, and the culture of the west imbued with the memory of the dead, which come to haunt Gabriel Conroy in the closing scenes of the story “The Dead”. When the thoughts of Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, turn westwards, opening up an irreparable gulf between them, it is because of her hearing “The Lass of Aughrim” [144; …] political resonances in view of tendency to allegorise Ireland as a female […/…] Revenants of the Williamite past [145]; notes that Joyce spoke of ‘a “double struggle”, the anti-imperialist struggle, on the one hand, and, on the other, an internal struggle “perhaps no less bitter”, between constitutional nationalism and a dissident, insurrectionary tradition beginning with the Whiteboys and passing through the Fenian (IRB) movement.’ (Critical Writings, 1966, p.188.) The Hegelian standards of clarity and abstraction prescribed for political consciousness in the metropolitan centre do not exhaust all possibilities of national identity. The owl of Minerva may only fly at dusk, but Dedalus was able to wing his way through the Celtic twilight, albeit by flying close to the ground.’ (p.147).

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’, in Field Day Review, 1 (2005), pp.71-86: ‘[…] a question arises here: Is Dublin, or for that matter, the Ireland out of which Joyce emerged as a writer, to be defined solely, or even primarily, in terms of space as conceived by high modernism? Certainly there have been enough studies of geographic and topographical relationships in Joyce, but for the most part they assume the sovereignty of space in Joyce’s imagination, as if Dublin were simply another metropolis like Paris, Berlin or Boston. In Ulysses, Robert M. Adams writes, “Joyce does not seem to have an antiquarian eye for old Dublin”, but is it indeed the case that Joyce’s Dublin is confined to the extended present which modernists claimed to be the product of the spatialised drive of painting and of cinematic form? is the past simply erased and, thereby, are the disparities of time removed from the public sphere to the domain of what Edmund Husserl referred to as “internal time-consciousness”?’ (p.72.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’ (2005) - cont.: ‘At one moment Fr. Conmee is on the Malahide Road; the next he has travelled back in time to his period as rector at Clongowes: but whether the latter is a subjective memory on his part, or an objective flashback, remains unclear as intrusions from the past disrupt the apparently homogeneous spatial form of the present. that the logic of spatial form no longer applies amid the switching currents of time in the “Wandering Rocks” episode is finally evident as the episode draws to a close with the slow procession of the viceregal cavalcade through the opposite side of Dublin. […] Further: ‘The breakdown of simultaneity in Joyce’s Dublin, the dislocation of the synchronicity by aberrant senses of time, is nowhere more evident than in the phenomenon of parallaz, which Hugh Kener and others have rightly identified as one fo the key organising (or disorganising) motifs in the novel.’ (p.79.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’ (2005) - cont.: ‘As Bloom understands it, the timeball on the top of the Ballast Office registered Greenwich Mean Time as an aid to shipping and for communications with England, but the clock on front of the building [fig.6] registered Irish (Dunsink) time, which was twenty-five minutes behind London, was established at the Washington Conference in 1884. So while modernity sought to standardise time to facilitate synchronic timetabling at a global level, the imperial connection and the need to facilitate shipping from Britain imposed another time scale on Irish society, undermining that simultaneity. [Gibbons quotes Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe (2001), and Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason (1994)] As Bloom understands it, the timeball on the top of the Ballasth Office registered Greenwich Mean Time as an aid to shipping and for communications with England, but the clock on front of the building [fig.6] registered Irish (Dunsink) time, whcih was twenty-five minutes behind London, was established at the Washington Conference in 1884. So while modernity sought to standardise time to facilitate synchronic timetabling at a global level, the imperial connection and the need to facilitate shipping from Britain imposed another time scale on Irish society, undermining that simultaneity. (p.80.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’ (2005) - cont.: ‘The paradox here, however, is that in the very sundering of the past from the present, new media technologies such as cinema also created - or articulared - ways of reliving memory with unprecedented, almost visceral immediacy. the issue here is not one of residual traces of the past: the remnants from other eras whcih have survived into the present, like the herding of those chattle through the streets of Dublin for the boat to Britain whcih the mourners at Paddy Dignam’s funeral momentarily glimpse on their way to Glasnevin. As Chakrabarty points out elsewhere [Habitations of Modernity, 2002], to speak of the “survival” of such practices is not to challenge “stagist” or stadial theories of progress, for it is clear that their days are numbered; they can “be seen as leftovers from an earlier period, still active, no doubt, but under world-historical notice of extinction.” (Habitations, p.12.) By contrast, the instablities of time that surgace in Joyce’s Dublin inhabit public sapce and co-exist with, or may even be actively produced by, the dislocations of colonial modernity. (p.83.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time through Times of Space: Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’ (2005) - cont.: ‘The alternative histories with which Ulysses abounds (many of which trace the genealogy of an independent Ireland) were still part of a contested public sphere in Ireland, and were not therefore in a position to accept their relagation by modernism to private, pyschological space. Rejecting Kern’s assertion of a clear boundary between inner and other worlds, public and psychological space, the new mass media infiltrated not only the conscious but even the unconscious, leaving little space beyond the reach of art. [Cites Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, Harvard 1983, espec. pp.60-64.] It is not even a matter of finding in the public sphere the equivalent of trauma, or related notions of “involutary memory” that are normally allocated to personal experience; rather, the true measure of psychic dislocation under colonial modernity is that both public and private are permeable, and that the unrequited past comes across with the lived intensity of experience. Whatever about the ahistorical triumph of space over time in metropolitan modernism, in Ulysses space, both outer and inner, is historicised through and through. This is the true nightmare of history to which Stephen bears witness: “Fabled by the daughters of memory […] one livid flame. What’s left to us then?” [2U, .9.-10; End].

[ top ]

James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (Conn: Greenwood Press 1997), ‘Intelligentsia Fiction, 1900-1922’ [Pt. II]: ‘Joyce’s fiction offers the most subtle version of non-intellectual discourse in Catholic Ireland. For him, discourse within Catholic Ireland is a matter, not of the interplay of arguments, but of the exchange of what might be termed theological anecdotes, maxims, and metaphors whose purpose is to secure loyalty and reinforce an emotional identification, rather than to establish a reasonable case. A version of this process is to be found in “Grace”, the penultimate story in Dubliners(1914; refs. to Penguin Edn. 1992). In their efforts to persuade Kernan to agree to attend a retreat for businessmen in Gardiner Street Church, Power, Martin Cunningham and M’Coy try to enmesh Kernan in the web of anecdotes, maxims and metaphors on which their own faith is based in the hope that it will reinforce Kernan’s commitment. It turns into a form of anecdotal guerrilla warfare. Cunningham begins with a maxim, “The General of the Jesuits stands next to the Pope”, and later backs it up with an anecdote, “Every other order in the Church had to be reformed at some time or other, but the Jesuit Order was never once reformed. It never fell away.” (Dubliners, p.163) / However M’Coy’s maxim, “The Jesuits cater for the upper classes”, inadvertently allows Kernan to counter-attack with a remark about “those secular priests, ignorant, bumptious”. Nor is Cunningham able to retrieve the situation with his complacent, damage-limitation maxim, “The Irish priesthood is honoured all the world over” (Dubliners, p.163). Kernan presses home his counter-attack in the middle section of the persuasion, when the conversation turns to Fr. Tom Burke, the famous preacher. Cunningham repeats rather vague generalisations about him to the effect that “he wasn’t much of a theologian [… &c.]”.’ [Cont.]

[ top ]

James H. Murphy (Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922, 1997) - cont.: ‘In the end Cunningham persuades Kernan into going to the retreat with the pièce de résistance of theological anecdotes of religious loyalty and submission, the apocryphal story of Archbishop John MacHale [sic] of Tuam’s submission to the doctrine of papal infallibility in spite of his reservations about it.’ [/ …]. Murphy goes on: ‘It is an irony of intelligentsia fiction that characters seeking to change Catholic Ireland by means of reason generally ended up railing against it, the transition from reason to emotion marking Catholic Ireland’s victory against them. In the end they renounce their attachment to Catholicism. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) deals with the processes that end in extreme rejection of Irish Catholic identity.’ (pp.144-45.) Murphy identifies the dinner-table argument over the treatment of Parnell by the Church as ‘the locus classicus for the rejection of Catholic Ireland in Joyce’s novel [A Portrait]’ (p.145.) Further, ‘In this passage of the novel competing anecdotes and maxims, which deteriorate into crude slogans and even cruder name-calling, mark a characteristically emotional polarisation in which each side tries to exclude the other from participation in Irishness.’ (pp.145-46.)

[ top ]

R. F. Foster, W . B. Yeats: A Life - I: “The Apprentice Mage” (OUP 1997), ‘National Dramas 1901-1902’ [Chap. 10]: ‘[…] Joyce had already made his mark with a clear-sighted attack on the Irish Literary Theatre in “The Day of the Rabblement”, but he passionately admire WBY’s literary achievement: he could recite “The Adoration of the Magi” off by heart and the mesmeric beauty of certain poems (notably “Who Goes with Fergus?” from The Countess Cathleen) remained canonical for him. After glamorous but slightly scandalous career at the Royal University, he was following a haphazard course as a medical student. In October Russell told him that WBY would be in Dublin the following month and would like meet him (he had already dined at the Nassau Hotel on 4 November with Gregory and JBY). There was accordingly a rendezvous outside the Nation Library, followed by an awkward encounter in an O’Connell Street café. It was an intense occasion, much recapitulated and mythologized; Ellmann compared it to the meeting between Goethe and Heine, a symbolic conjunction in the history of world literature. More immediately apparent was mutual suspicion between an established Irish Protestant aesthete and a Jesuit-educated Catholic Dubliner with a preternaturally mordant eye for social pretensions. Soon afterwards WBY wrote (but never published) a slightly fictionalized account of their meeting. ‘He asked me “Why did I make speeches? Why did I concern myself with politics? Why had I given certain of my stories and poems a historical setting?” . all these things were a sign that the iron was getting cold.’ Joyce’s own affiliations and energies were strange to him; WBY realized that he was dealing with a new force, something that could not be predicted. His version betrays the wistful tone of a man nearing forty, confronted by the ruthlessness of youthful genius. ’Presently he up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, I am twenty. How old are you?’ I told him, but I am afraid I said I was a year younger than I am. He said a sigh, I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.”’ Joyce in later years denied this, but at a stage of life when good manners meant to him than they did in 1902.’ Their disagreement was inevitable. One of the points WBY recalled making to Joyce involved a defence of folklore a the ‘sterility’ of urban culture, Great Memory against individual consciousness. Joyce’s lofty and laconic reply rankled enough for WBY to repeat it than once. ‘Generalizations aren’t made by poets; they are made by men letters. They are no use.’ (p.276; see longer extract in Ricorso Library, “Criticism / Major Authors” - James Joyce, infra.)

[ top ]

Christine Van Boheemen, ‘Joyce’s Sublime Body’, in Vincent J. Cheng, et. al., ed., Joycean Cultures/Culturing Joyces (Delaware UP; AUP 1998), writes of Joyce and ‘the pain of linguistic dispossession, of the radical severance at the point of origin that belongs to growing up Irish’ (p.23): ‘‘The avoidance of pain, or death, or disfigurement, the awareness of mutability and embodied existence in general, would seem itself a characteristic feature of late-twentieth-century culture. This narcissism is, in turn, a form of belated complicity with Eugene Jolas’s proclamation of a new linguistic reality. His “new artist of the word,” recognizing the “autonomy of language,” had “hammer[ed out] a verbal vision that destroys time and space [Eugene Jolas, “James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word”, in Our Exagmination [ … &c.], 1929, NY 1972, p.79.]. Even Joyce himself (and not just Stephen Dedalus) might be understood as a votary to a poetics of linguistic transcendence in desiring a “language which is above all languages, a language to which all do service,” [Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982 Rev. Edn., p.397] betraying the dream of an ahistorical language, unmarked by difference or local embodiment. Finnegans Wake may well be considered the product of such an idea of language - an essential image beyond national language, time, and space; but its complex textuality also forces the reader to the realization that language cannot do mute service to the projection of a transcendent, disembodied subjectivity. It constantly rubs the reader’s nose in his or her limitations as a reader, and in our imprisonment in the linguistic web. Read with awareness, Finnegans Wake is a cure for narcissism. It forces even nonnative speakers of English into reading it out loud with an Irish accent. / ‘What strikes me as ironic is that the more pressing and clear this pedagogy becomes, the more that same text seems to serve as fetish to alleviate the very castration anxiety that it evokes and illustrates. It provides an ideal playground in which to forget that, for all its linguistic display, even Finnegans Wake is the product of flesh, blood, sweat, and pain - no creativity, especially not such obsessive creativity, without pain. In what follows, I have chosen to try to articulate the, obsessiveness of Joyce#3’s engagement with language - in connection with his obsessive fascination with speech about the body - as a symptom of loss, a record of trauma.’ (pp.23-24; for longer extracts, see Ricorso Library, “Criticism”, infra.)

[ top ]

Jean Kimball, Odyssey of the Psyche: Jungian Patterns in Joyce’s Ulysses (Southern Illinois UP 1997): ‘Ulysses is a book without a hero but with two protagonists who are together its subject. It is a critical truism that Stephen and Bloom are opposites, but together […] they represent Joyce’s vision of the artist as a divided self working towards integration.’ (p. ix.) Further, ‘In Ulysses Joyce split his autobiographical subject into two opposite persons, each of whom could reveal a part of the contradictory truth about himself. A Portrait had traced the development of Stephen, the self-conscious artist of Joyce’s original conception of his autobiographical fiction. The 1909 experience, however, including both the unfounded jealousy and its aftermath in the pornographic letters, which wallow in the excremental language and mawkish sentimentality at the same time, had revealed to Joyce, as an essential part of his true personality, “those poisonous subtleties which envelop the soul, the ascending fumes of sex”, which he associated with the modern theme. Stephen simply could not encompass the whole, for this realm of Joyce’s psyche does not belong to the artist-self that has been developed through Stephen in A Portrait, a basic incompatibility that Joyce must have realised when he attempted to attach this particular “poisonous subtlety” to Richard Rowan.’ (p.39.)

[ top ]

Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press 1998): ‘Joyce’s work is parodic, as many have remarked. But it is a subverse parody in which he has seized the rules of dominant decolonising discourse and disrupted what he sees as its flawed identitarian message. The creative artist cannot escape the languages of liberal and radical decolonisation; [83] indeed, Joyce does not actually want to “escape” them as he remains affiliated to a certain notion of Irishness which can only be imagined in terms of those discourses. However, by exposing them as discourses, as formal and historical organisations of signs, he can displace them so as to ward off, at least temporarily, the disabling structures into which they are locked. And the most disabling structure which Ulysses exposes is Irish literary criticism and the twin assumptions upon which it rests: a natural link between culture and nation, and a natural aporia between the primary (imaginative) and secondary (critical) discourses.’ (pp.83-84.) [Cont.]

[ top ]

Gerry Smyth (Decolonisation and Criticism, 1998) - cont.: ‘Joyce’s resistance to Irish decolonisation takes the form of a challenge to a tradition of literary criticism organised around the notion of an indissoluble link between national culture and nationalist politics.’ (p.87.) Further, ‘In so far as he was an Irish writer, Joyce was a radical critic of English domination of Ireland; but in so far as he refused the limitations of both Irishness and Englishness, he managed to incorporate both these categories into a writing practice which itself refused incorporation into any dialectical discourse predicated on a subject who, like the critic, purports to stand outside his own constitution in discourse. After Joyce’s revolution of the word and [87] Ireland’s revolution of the sword, both the role of the national subject and the function of a critical discourse in which such a subject was constituted had to be renegotiated.’ (pp.87-88.)

[ top ]

Denis Donoghue, ‘Ireland, Race, Nation, State’ [Part 1], in Partisan Review, Vol. LXVI, No. 2 (1999), pp.223-34: There is no reason to think that he is being ironic at Stephen Dedalus’s expense when he has him exclaim: “I go to encounter … race.” It is possible to read that declaration ironically, but the irony soon becomes ashamed of itself.’ (p.229.)

[ top ]

Len Platt, ‘Corresponding with the Greeks: An Overview of Ulysses as an Irish Epic’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 36, 3 (Spring 1996): ‘the identification between Ulysses and Homer is not, as some critics have suggests, a subscription to the premier culture of civilised Europe but rather the exact opposite: a h8ilarious subversion of the toruous academic and creative practies by which both the English and the Irish establishments attempted to “correspond” with a culture that for Gilbert Murray embodied “the progress of the human race.” [Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, 4th edn. OUP) 1934, p.3.; Platt, op. cit., p.511.) Further: ‘[...] after some account of Murray and Matthew Arnold’s neo-Hellenist outlook]: But the Literary Revival played essentially the same game as the Oxford professors [e.g., Matthew Arnold]. In its aristocratic defense of feudalism, its conceptions of nobility and service, and its attack on modernity, the Revival exposed its elitist and hegemonic roots. The ridiculous pontifications that attempted to transform modern Ireland into ancient Athens, like the English varieties of correspondence, were ideological and fundamentally conservative. / This climate of revivalist Ireland with its Hellenist obsession is reflected throughout Ulysses as a specific revivalist practice so that, for instance, “the revival of ancient Gaelic sports ... for the development of the race” is modeled on “physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece” (U 12.899-901, 900). [...; 518] It is not just at the edges of Joyce’s structure [...] that the issue of correspondence somehow becomes compromised. It is compromised from the very beginning, in the title of the book that is itself Romanised and that establishes correspondence not in terms of consensual tradition but in terms of cultural appropriation. With this title, Joyce disputes the very idea of the cultural thoroughbred from the outset. / Stephen’s discourse on the politics of culture in the early episodes of Ulysses then is hardly self-contained. It spreads into the architectonics of Ulysses and continues in the ridiculously appropriative Bloom/Odysseus parallel. Bloom is neither a Greek nor an Irish Celt but an Irish Jew. He is neither aristocratic nor rural but bourgeois down to his boots and utterly urban. He does not heroically resist the temptations of women; on the contrary, he will go to great lengths for a flash of underwear. He is no displaced traveler, desperate for return, although he does take a pleasure cruise round Dublin bay on a boat called “Erin’s King” (U 4.434). His Penelope is simultaneously his Calypso and his home the prison from which he initially “escapes.” These and many other variants are not simple artistic license; they are far too embedded to be so. Distortion and discordance expose the obscurities, contradictions, and absurdities that are inherent in conventional correspondence. It may be that Bloom embodies some standard of personal heroism held to by Joyce, but this would not be inconsistent with the fact that in every conceivable respect Bloom is a deep affront to the aristocratic notions of heroism and heroic action that were fundamental to the Revival’s version of correspondence with the Greeks. Joyce’s uncomfortably relationship with the Homeric event and Homeric geography is similarly incongruous. [...]’ (pp.518-19; see further extracts under Matthew Arnold, Commentary, supra.)

[ top ]

Michael Malouf, ‘Forging the Nation: James Joyce and the Celtic Tiger’, in Jouvert: Journal of Postcolonial Studies [Special Irish Issue], 1, 4 (Fall 1999): ‘[... The] production of a symbolic autonomy is even more pronounced with Joyce’s image which appeared in 1993, around the same time that Ireland was preparing itself for inclusion in the European Union and the common currency. Like the mostly middle-class emigrants returning to work for the Celtic Tiger, Joyce, too, has returned from his exile. On the front side there is a contented image of Joyce with Howth hill next to his head. On the other, non-Gaelic side there is an image of Anna Livia and a quote from that most cosmopolitan of texts, Finnegans Wake, superimposed over a map of Dublin. The two sides of the ten-pound note illustrate Tom Nairn’s celebrated description of the ambivalence of nationalism as “Janus-faced”: one side healthy, rational, modern; the other side morbid, irrational, ancestral. On one side there is Joyce as the face of modernity, liberal democracy, postnationalism; on the other, Anna Livia, Celtic ethnicity, and the “mythic-realism” of Dublin. It is ironic that Joyce, who created in the Circe chapter of Ulysses a critical demystification of commodity fetishism, has become such a magical object himself. But the relevant text here is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as the state-sponsored image is that of the reified Artist “above and beyond his creation, paring his fingernails.” Not that this is without any ambivalence. The green-shaded portrait with its calm demeanor and half-smile replaces the notoriety of the blasphemous artist for a kinder, gentler figure. In fact, juxtaposed with the “mother language” and a traditionally feminized landscape, Joyce as a patriarchal, castrating figure is removed once he is reconstituted as a national symbol. Phrases such as “simpering, genial figure,” and “avuncular and mawkish,” describe the “wry grin” which appears in Robert Ballagh’s portrait. It is as if Ballagh, a well-known Irish artist and Republican activist (he has been accused of being the “arty wing” of the IRA), had reinvented Joyce for the pounds note. While this neutered image is a response to the contradictions of using the heretical Joyce as a national icon, the portrait also makes an historical argument by erasing the critical status that comes with exile. While the dates under his portrait, 1882-1941, suggest that his lifetime encompassed the major events of Irish history in the twentieth-century, they repress the fact that he was absent for all of them. Yet it is precisely this absence that marks Joyce’s social value; he is valued for transcending traditional sectarian divisions rather than for expressing a critical perspective by virtue of his exile. And while he is made uncontroversial within Irish history, his value as a Modernist hero is sanctioned from Europe. Even the new pounds note was accused by one dissatisfied customer as merely “in the mainstream of the contemporary currency design” and, in replacing the earlier, more unconventional designs were meant to “bring us into line with Europ” (Paul Hogan, ‘New Banknotes and Old’, letter to Irish Times, 9 May 1994, p.17). Thus, just as paper money receives its value against an external measure, so Joyce’s social and economic value comes against a European standard.’ (Available online; accessed 11.10.2010.)

[ top ]

Terence Killeen, review of James Joyce, Occasional Critical and Political Writings, ed. Kevin Barry [Oxford World Classic] (OUP 2001), in The Irish Times (3 March, 2001), calls Joyce’s essays on “Art and Life” and “Mangan” ‘a fine illustration of Oscar Wilde’s dictum on the importance of seeing the object as in itself it really is not. Joyce needed a safe precursor figure, a prophet, and Mangan conveniently filled the bill. These pieces should be read in conjunction with Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; when they are they fill perfectly. They are continuation of fiction by other means.’ [Note that they both of course ante-dated those writings.] Killeen remarks that Joyce was a ‘hopeless reviewer’ who gives the ‘impression of a determined withholding of personal involvement, a refusal to engage with the works under review’. He quotes Joyce on the Ireland of the literary revival as ‘a land almost fabulous in its sorrow and senility’. Of the Triestine pieces: ‘those who have wished to promote a nationalist view of Joyce have been happy to use them as evidence, but there is a great deal of ambiguity in what the pieces actually say [… a]long with a more passionate ambivalence towards the Irish themselves and the mess they have got themselves into.’ He concludes, ‘no coherent political or ideological stance can really be taken from this very mixed bag.’ Killeen notes that the editor refers to distortion of readings seeking for a political message; commends Barry’s introduction as valuable in tracing the ‘complex process whereby Joyce, in his Triestine writings, began to liberate himself from the fixed antinomies and stereotypes that were the norm of Irish history and to embark on a process of crossing-over and inversion of such antinomies that he took much further, in his creative work’.

[ top ]

Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts 2000), summarising remarks of Seamus Deane: ‘Deane demonstrates Joyce’s difference from Arnoldian cultural liberalism, which embraced the Hellenisation of England and the Celticisation of Ireland. To reject the latter is also to reject the former, and this is what Joyce achieved. He famously had no time for the Celticism of Yeats and the Revivalists, but he also saw that it was derived from Arnold’s opposition of Hellenicistic and Beraix culture. In Joyce’s repudiation of Celtic heroicism, essentialism, even racism, he was at the same time effecting a critique of the Arnoldian idea of culture as discourse that could help bind the English middle classes to their poorer countrymen. To this extent, Joyce becomes an anti-hegemonic writer, since Arnold was never less than sure that culture was a force for the state, the stating being the material manifestation of man’s best self.’ (217.)

[ top ]

Patsy McGarry, ‘Once a Catholic, Always’ (The Irish Times, 16 June 2001), raises the question whether James Joyce died a Catholic on the basis of the belief held by his siser Gertrude Mary Joyce, who lived as a Mercy nun in New Zealand and received letters from Joyce, destroyed at her death. Joyce saw her off at Kingston in 1909, when she took the surplice he had worn as a boy. She held him to be the most religious of the family, claiming that he never read [books] during Lent, and called him the inspiration of her own vocation. She received a call from a Jesuit on the death of Joyce in 1941, telling her that he died with a priest in attendance. The informant is a Fr. Feehan and the priest purportedly bearing the news a Fr. Leonard.

(Query: doesn’t this rather raise the question of the Jesuits’ long-term interest in Joyce and their willingness to deceive a Catholic nun for her own good and that of the congregation?)

[ top ]

David Fuller, James Joyce’s Ulysses (Harvester Wheatsheaf 1992), on Joyce and Yeats: ‘Yeats was antithetical to Joyce in his politics. Joyce’s seedy urban realism is a kind of answer to Yeats’s idealising picture of an authentic rural Ireland of aristocrats and pesanta, heroic myth and widely disseminated imaginative legend. Joyce and Yeats offer competing versions of Ireland and, beyond that, competing versions of what it is to be human, as Yeats acknowledged by attacking Joyce in the first edition of A Vision (1926): Joyce is an example of the fractured modern consciousness against which his own work strove.’ (p.14.) Further, on Ulysses and Dubliners: ‘Joyce also portrays the city by drawing in a number of characters from Dubliners. It is fiction referring to fiction, but, amongst so much realistic Dublin detail, the knowledge that these characters exist outside Ulysses heightens the feeling of reference to an actual world. The Dubliners characters bring with them Dubliners’ themes: emotional paralysis and religious factionalism.’ (Ibid., p.42; the foregoing quoted in Laurie Magowan, UG Diss., UUC, 2006.)