|
Bruce Stewart, “James Joyce: Irish Modernist” - being a chapter in J. W. Foster, ed., Cambridge Companion to Irish Fiction (Cambridge UP 2007).
I: Joyce the Modernist It was not, of course, until after he had left Ireland that he made any personal contact with modernists, and then it was the modernists who contacted him in the person of its leading Anglo-American exponent, the poet and critic Ezra Pound. In December 1913 Pound wrote to Joyce in Trieste seeking permission to include a poem shown him by W. B. Yeats in his collection Des Imagiste (1914). Thus began a literary association that resulted in the serial publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and afterwards Ulysses (1922) in the literary journals where Joyce’s international reputation became established. In promoting the Irish writer, Pound insistently compared him to French standard-bearers of modern literature, writing in one place that Joyce ‘produces the nearest thing we have to Flaubertian prose in English today’ while, in another, expressing dismay at his national origins (‘It is surprising that Mr. Joyce is Irish’) before putting matters on a properly international basis: ‘Joyce has fled to Trieste and into the modern world [...] He writes as a European, not as a provincial’. [1] After 1919, having passed the First World War in Switzerland where he wrote much of Ulysses, Joyce moved to Paris at Pound’s suggestion, there to remain until the Second World War drove back him to Zurich, where he died in 1941. For Valéry Larbaud and others in the Paris of the 1920s, it was the ‘interior monologue’ which gave Joyce his salient position in the avant garde. In 1923 T. S. Eliot confirmed his importance for Anglo-American modernists when he wrote that the ‘mythic order’ of Ulysses had ‘the importance of a scientific discovery […] making the modern world possible for art’. [2] “;Work in Progress” (later published as Finnegans Wake in 1939) was, however, a discovery too far for Pound who wrote to Joyce in 1926: ‘ Nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all that circumambient peripherisation.’ [3] At about this time Eugene Jolas, the editor of transition, identified Joyce’s latest experiment with ‘the revolution of the word’ and took on the publication of “;Work in Progress” from April 1927. For a still later generation associated with Tel Quel, the Wake would serve as primary evidence for deconstructive philosophy associated with Lacan and Derrida. [4] For the wider readership t hroughout all this, Joyce’s art was implicitly associated with the psychoanalytical movement identified with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. This was an often hostile association as when, for instance, the Dublin Sunday Express announced that Ulysses had been ‘adopted by the Freudians as the supreme glory of their dirty and degraded cult’. [5] Yet Joyce’s attitude to psychoanalysis was essentially ambivalent and there is little question of direct influence. For, while he prided himself on the modernity of his ideas, he was often scornful of his imputed affinity with those whom he called ‘the Swiss Tweedledum [and] the Viennese Tweedledee’ [SL282], asking why they were always talking about the unconscious and what did they know about the conscious mind? There is no doubt however that, like Freud, he placed the sexual instinct at the centre of human life and that mental processes (especially those involving parataxis or operations curtailed for neurotic reasons) greatly interested him. It did not always suit Joyce to be thought a modernist as the term was understood by contemporaries and, once this aspect of his work was widely recognized, he began to speak of his conservatism along with it. Talking to an Irish friend in Paris in the 1920s, for example, he insisted that he was a mediaeval writer just as the Irish were a mediaeval people. [6] There is some truth in this: in his youth Joyce had laboured to convert a ‘garner of slender sentences’ gleaned from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas into an aesthetic philosophy [AP180]. In later life he identified the Book of Kells as a precursor of his own sense of literary design. (A lengthy passage in Finnegans Wake takes the form of a parody of Sir Edward Sullivan’s introduction to the Studio facsimile, a copy of which Joyce sent to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver at Christmas 1922 [FW119-23].) Much of this was camouflage on the part of a writer who disliked the suggestion that his ‘discoveries’ had been anticipated by contemporaries and equally a check on too easy identification with the Anglo-American and essentially Protestant version of modernity identified with the liberal and implicitly imperialist themes of civilisation and progress. At the same time it can be taken as alluding to a paradox that underlies his art at every point: Joyce was Irish and therefore implicitly pre-modern; yet he was also European in his own estimation, regarding Ireland as ‘an afterthought of Europe’ [SH52] and the Irish as the ‘most belated race in Europe’ [CW70], living on an island ‘twice removed from the mainland’ [SL124]. Just as he aimed to make Ireland European, effecting a juncture between mediaevalism and modernity might be regarded as the chief intellectual task that he set himself in early manhood. According the abandoned first draft of A Portrait (posthumously published in 1944), Joyce was unique among his educational peers in his openness to modern ideas; yet, while most of those who stayed at home when he went into exile remained in the combined grip of Catholic and nationalist orthodoxies, they were hardly members of the ‘shivering society’ that he castigates in Stephen Hero [SH38]. Con Curran, a college friend, gave the lie to that unflattering estimate in an impressive memoir. [7] The most telling difference between Joyce and his contemporaries at University College lay perhaps in his peculiar biographical circumstances. The sharp decline in his family’s social status brought about by his father’s gregarious alcoholism, combined with an unshakable sense of his own worth seem to have set up a reaction in Joyce’s mind that produced the air of intellectual superiority reflected in the autobiographical writings. As a young man he knew himself to be excluded from the courtship rites of his school and college fellows and was correspondingly dismissive about the ‘colleen’ dress of ‘marriageable daughters’ in the households he frequented through their friendship [SH45]. At the same time he espoused the politics of sexual liberation, perhaps to justify a habit of frequenting brothels which in itself marked his sense of remoteness from the prospects of a ‘good match’ in middle-class Dublin. The decision to leave Ireland in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a sexually-aware young women who was working as a chamber-maid when they met, was therefore the outcome of a social alienation produced by the familial consequences of his father’s economic downfall. [AP245]. If Joyce was radicalized by his father’s failure, his critical intelligence found an apt focus in the moral poverty to which he was exposed in the localities where the family was forced to live. On arriving in the inner-city he found that the ‘dull phenomenon of Dublin’ [AP68] offering ‘a new and complex sensation’ to which he responded by reading ‘subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings’ [AP80]. Besides these writers (nationalists and anarchists), Joyce’s self-directed reading lead him towards such modern authors as Gustave Flaubert and Henrik Ibsen, excluded from the timid syllabus of the Royal University. From both he learned about the place of sexuality in the human mind. From Flaubert—whose Trois Contes (1877) he knew by heart—he also learnt the novelistic technique known as style moyen indirect which excerpts phrases from the consciousness of the characters in order to convey reality as they experience it. Joyce knew Flaubert’s letters too, and a famous sentence which Stephen lavishes almost verbatim on Cranly in A Portrait, asserting that the artist must remain ‘within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’ [AP219]), is taken from the Correspondence.[8] Greater by far than the influence of Flaubert, however, was that of the Norwegian playwright whose name was synonymous with the over-turning of bourgeois convention at that time. In Joyce’s account of it, the mind of ‘the Old Norse poet’ and that of ‘the young Celt’ met ‘in a moment of radiant simultaneity’ [SH41] in 1899. In 1900, Joyce wrote a review of Ibsen’s latest piece When We Dead Awaken, and this was published the April issue of Fortnightly Review. On learning that Ibsen approved, he studied Norwegian sufficiently to write a letter in that language which characteristically ends with a suggestion that he himself will succeed the object of his homage. In the summer of 1901 he translated two plays by Gerhart Hauptmann for the Irish Literary Theatre, but these were refused, however. Other European authors who attracted him at this time included Turgenev and Maupassant, Herman Sudermann and Gabriel D’Annunzio. Of Irish contemporaries he read Yeats most closely; of English contemporaries Meredith and Hardy—though without abandoning the conviction that he had ‘little or nothing to learn from English novelists’, as he told Stanislaus in a letter of November 1906 [SL124]. At the same time, Joyce made a close study of Dante Alighieri while still in Dublin and, in an important departure, the sixteenth-century philosopher Giordano Bruno. For if his literary instincts led him to the moderns, the actual building-blocks of his mind were very different. Joyce remained, in important ways, the product of a Jesuit education, versed in the terminology of scholasticism rather than any more modern brand of philosophical thinking. His readings in Hegel, for example, though they greatly influenced his theories of art, were virtually restricted to an article on “;Drama” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th Edn.) If Joyce’s intuitions were modern, his vocabulary was mediaeval. The best example of this tendency is his application of the term ‘epiphany’: a word employed in Christian liturgy to mean the ‘shewing-forth of Jesus in the temple’ but redefined by Joyce to mean ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation’ in which the significance of some ordinary person or object is revealed with such clarity that the artist is obliged to record it exactly ‘seeing that [it is] the most delicate and evanescent of moments’ [SH188]. It is pertinent, moreover, that the location of the first epiphany in is Eccles Street, afterwards the ‘home’ of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses and at any time a common abbreviation for ecclesia (church)—though actually named after the land-owner Sir John Eccles. Joyce’s strategy was thus to found his own church in rivalry to the one which he regarded as ‘the tyrant of the islanders’ [SH52]. (Joyce was fascinated by Yeats’s monkish aesthetes Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne whose likewise attempted to ‘inhabit a church apart […] having chosen to fulfil the law of their own being’, as he puts it in Stephen Hero [SH178].) The role that Joyce had in mind for himself was part that of a ‘priest of the eternal imagination’ [AP225] and part that of a literary messiah who would ‘forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race’ [AP257]. Yet, in spite of the juvenile egoism of this conception, the underlying idea was essentially realistic and, more precisely, intellectually grounded in the Realism of Aristotle (also known as ‘hylomorphism’). In 1903 Joyce sat in the Bibliothèque de Ste. Genèvieve in Paris reading Aristotle’s De Anima (or Psychology) in French, and from this he derived the terms ‘form of forms’ and entelechy—both of which Stephen bandies in episodes of Ulysses—which allowed him to define the ‘soul’ of the individual and its process of development. When it came to applying these in practice, Joyce made the stylistic discovery that governs the literary structure of A Portrait. Here each successive episode is written in a style that corresponds to a definite embryological stage in the development (or telos) of the central character. From childhood through adolescence to early manhood along a line that reveals his growing awareness of his mission as an artist, the narrative prose imitates the mentality of its living subject. The effect is very like what Joyce had earlier called ‘the curve of an emotion’ in his first attempt at defining the methods proper to autobiographical writing in his “;Portrait Essay” (1904)—an opaque piece which he had submitted to the literary journal Dana, whose editor refused it on the grounds that he would not publish what he could not understand [PSW211]. To many of its early readers A Portrait was especially shocking for the scene in which Stephen visits a prostitute but hardly less so for the ‘hellfire’ sermon which occupies eighteen pages in the standard edition (about one fifteenth of the whole). This serves as an extended specimen of Catholic authoritarianism, religion being one of the ‘nets’ which Stephen is determined to elude—the others being ‘nationality’ and ‘language’ [AP207]. (The last refers to the way in which conventional ideas imprison the growing mind but also, more specifically to the Irish-language movement increasingly gaining ground among young Dublin intellectuals of the day.) Contemporary Irish reviewers objected to A Portrait on the grounds that, ‘instead of pointing to the stars overhead’, Joyce had ‘degraded’ it into ‘a muck-rake’.[9] This was at once true and false: in Dubliners and A Portrait Joyce had indeed begun to forge the bond between literary art and the psycho-sexual realism which was to be the hallmark of his work in decades after and ultimately the reason for his lasting reputation. It is in Ulysses that this new ethos was to be most comprehensively displayed. The most important strands of modernism to be met with in Ulysses concern its psychological realism and its literary experimentalism, these being closely combined in the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique brings the sexual instinct to the surface of the text along with all the bric-a-brac that makes up the the ordinary human mind. The profusion of such materials calls for some organising principle other than the elements of plot and motivation common to all naturalistic novels. Ulysses possesses these in modified degrees—the main ‘events’ happen off stage, for instance—but is artistically structured by means of an extended parallel between the events of a single day in Dublin and the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey as retold in Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1803) which Joyce knew from school. Hence, if Bloom is Odysseus, Michael Cusack (‘the citizen) is Polyphemus or the Cyclops in the episode of that name. By the same token Stephen is Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, but also Hamlet, the betrayed prince walking through the cathedral of himself (in Baudelaire’s phrase). Eliot calls this the ‘mythic method’ but intertextual is a better term since little about Joyce’s way of handling the Homeric parallel reflects Eliot’s concern with ‘controlling […] the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ [JJ541]—an anxiety that the American poet shared with W. B. Yeats, as “;The Second Coming” shows. Nor was Joyce interested in symbolism in the same sense of the others. In sharp contrast to the poetry and prose of Yeats, for instance, the greater part of Ulysses is given over to stylistic parodies whether the subject is the mentality of a given character such as Fr. Conmee [U248] or the thirty-two samples from George Saintsbury’s History of English Prose Rhythm (1912) which Joyce parodied at chapter-length in the “;Oxen of The Sun”, which is itself resembles an embryological chart of the development of the language. (T. S. Eliot saw this characteristically, if erroneously, as a revelation of ‘futility of all styles’ [JJ490]). “;”Sirens”, at the half-way point, marks the beginning of the more remorselessly experimental chapters of Ulysses; all before, excepting “;Oxen” and Aeolus” is in what he called the ‘initial style’—a clear development of the style moyen indirect. Henceforth parody and pastiche are the governing laws. Probably Joyce would not have taken things to such lengths had he not been in serial publication with avant garde magazines. Yet, even in this context, he saw his styles as essentially mimetic—that is to say, each was representationally appropriate to its subject. In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver he spoke of the challenge of writing the chapters of Ulysses from ‘eighteen different points of view and in as many styles’ [SL284]. From this we may infer that style is primarily connected to the idea of psychological perspective. In conveying the state of mind of a young man traumatized by his mother’s death alongside the disquiet of a middle-aged man whose wife is engaged in a sexual affair with the aptly named Blazes Boylan, Joyce plumbed the depths of psycho-sexual life in an entirely new way. In intention and effect, the thrust of Ulysses is at one with the principle Joyce enunciated in a letter to his brother in speaking of a host of Dubliners and others better known in the world of letters: ‘I am nauseated by their lying drivel about pure men and pure women and spiritual love and love for ever: blatant lying in the face of truth’—at which point he turns the focus on himself: ‘If I put down a bucket ‘into my own soul’s well, sexual department, I draw up [their] dirty water along with [his] own’, adding immediately after, ‘I am going to do that in my novel’ [SL129]. Although the novel that he meant was Stephen Hero, it is Ulysses that most relentlessly explores human sexuality in both its normal and abnormal aspects—constructing in the “;Circe” chapter, for example, a series of hallucinatory scenes involving sado-masochistic and trans-sexual episodes where Bloom’s and Stephen’s underlying anxieties are acted out in a kind of Walpurgisnacht or Witches’ Sabbath reminiscent of Goethe’s Dr. Faust. In “;Penelope” Joyce gives us immediate access to Molly Bloom’s consciousness through a stream of unpunctuated sentences which embrace her sexual history (real and imagined), and which still retains the capacity to shock through its intense psychological realism, culminating in the life-affirming ‘yes’ with which she ends the novel. The exceptional materiality that Bloom, Stephen, Molly and all the others in Ulysses possess as literary characters derives in large measure from a host of encyclopaedic details which Joyce methodically transposed from such sources such as Hely Thom’s Dublin Directory for 1904. These permitted him to make the claim that if Dublin were destroyed it could be rebuilt from the pages of his novel. Joyce told Arthur Power that if he could get to the heart of Dublin he could get to the heart of all the cities of the world, in the belief that we can only reach the universal through the particular [JJ650]. In his next book, however, he abandoned the naturalistic method that anchors Ulysses firmly in temporal and physical reality in order to construct a kind of literary cosmology that embraces all times and places through the sheer multiplicity of its cultural allusions. In 1926 Joyce offered Miss Weaver this explanation of the experimental language of Finnegans Wake: ‘One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutandry grammar and goahead plot.’ [SL318]. Whether or not the subject of the book is a dream, it certainly exhibits a dreamlike texture. This is produced by a fabric of multi-lingual puns, portmanteau words and Freudian ‘slips of the tongue’, all born out of Joyce’s knowledge of European languages and supplemented by samples from others such as Burmese, thanks to a word-list supplied by his ex-colonial friend Frank Budgen. The result sounds very much as if humanity itself were speaking through the text in all its ‘diversed tongues’ [381.20]. If plot is called for, Joyce supplies it in the notion that everything that happens passes through the sleeping mind of an Irish giant stretched out in the Dublin landscape ‘like a god on pension’ [FW024]. This explains the structure of the book only in a very provisional way, however, and must be measured against the implications of the title—a well-kept secret up to the day of publication—which derives from an Irish-American ballad about a bricklayer called Tim Finnegan who falls to his death but is suddenly revived by a splash of whiskey during the ructions at his wake. The theological implications of this are made quite clear at the outset: ‘Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.’ [004.17]. In this view, reproduction and resurrection are ultimately the same—a view in which Artistotle concurs (as Joyce carefully recorded in an early notebook [JJ212]). At the same time, the topological setting, bounded by the River Liffey and Howth Head, provide a backdrop for a vast census of Wake ‘characters’, though each in turn appears to correspond to one or other member of the primordial Wake family: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), Shem, Shaun and Issy (of Tristram and Isolde fame). Relations between these are variously amorous and bellicose, fratricidal and parricidal, incestuous and oedipal. At an even deeper level, however, the ‘characters’ themselves are little more than sigla (Latin ‘letters’) in a schematic counterpart of a map of Dublin scratched graffiti-wise in the jakes of the Chapelizod pub, like the ‘ outwashed engravure that we used to be blurring on the blotchwall of his innkempt house’ [FW013]. As such it is inevitably scatological, being labelled the ‘whome of your eternal geomater’ [FW291] in a sex-lesson taught by one of the siblings to the others in the “;Night Lessons” episode of the Wake. This is the stuff that dreams are made of, at least in a Freudian universe, and the whole movement of the work can consequently be described as ‘a sot of a swigswag, systomy dystomy, which everabody you ever anywhere at all doze’ [FW597]. Notes
|
|||||||||