He Again Used to Call on Her on His Visits to Joyce s Works
JAMES JOYCE
A long and chancy menstruum of probation seems to face a writer when, ceasing to be a gimmicky, he becomes a archetype. But in the case of James Joyce, perhaps because he was so rigorously tested during his lifetime, this further trial has been cut short. Already his work has weathered rejection by publishers, objection by printers, suppression past censors, confiscation by custom officials, bowdlerization past pirates, oversight by proofreaders, attack by critics, and defence force by coteries--not to mention misunderstanding by readers. Meanwhile he has won the most significant kind of recognition: fake by writers. His influence has been so pervasive that, to a large extent, it remains unacknowledged. How many of those who read John Hersey'southward Hiroshima recognize its literary obligation to Ulysses? In that location accept been other demonstrations, merely none and so pertinent, of how an original fashion of expression tin assistance u.s.a. to grasp a new phase of experience. Is it whatever wonder, when we live in such an explosive epoch, that even the arts have fabricated themselves felt through a serial of shocks?
Hence Joyce's books, which a few years ago nosotros had to smuggle into this country, are today required reading in college courses. Every bit we study them closely, we are less intimidated by their idiosyncrasies, and more than impressed not merely by the qualities they share with the great books of other ages, but by their vital concern for the bug of our ain historic period. In the low-cal of the political exile that has activated so many writers in recent years, Joyce's creative expatriation no longer seems a willful gesture. His escape from his native isle to the continent of Europe, every bit it turned out, was to merge his private career with what he chosen the nightmare of history. Information technology was easier for Flaubert, a sedentary bachelor with a comfortable manor and a regular income, to presume the stigmata of aesthetic martyrdom. It was excruciating for Joyce, a nomadic foreigner struggling to support a family by other means than his writing, to be spring--as he put it--"to the cantankerous of his ain roughshod fiction."
The temptations and distractions that sidetrack the creative person have multiplied, and examples of intransigence are rarer now than they were in Flaubert's day. What he represented to his younger contemporaries, nonetheless, Joyce has get for us: the Writers' Writer. The characteristics that enabled him to sustain his purpose are apparent in his very expiry-mask. Delicately merely firmly molded, the caput is long and narrow, the forehead loftier, the chin stiff, and the optics airtight. It is the face up of his Stephen Dedalus, of the perennial educatee, of a man who carries to the verge of his sixtieth year the agility, the curiosity, the sensibility of his youth. And, but as many of Joyce's fellow citizens are forever transfixed in the poses he defenseless--the priests maxim Mass, the barmaids pouring ale, the sandwich-men filing by, the midwives and undertakers plying their respective trades--then he has crystallized himself in our minds every bit the hero of Stephen Hero, the model for A Portrait of the Artist as a Boyfriend.
Setting down his memories of his blood brother in a current Italian periodical, Professor Stanislaus Joyce would caution the states confronting a as well complete identification. James Joyce was a rather more filial son than Stephen Dedalus, it appears, and his bodily adolescence was less dispiriting than his later depiction of information technology. This we might accept gathered by comparing the account of his academy days in Stephen Hero with the final chapter of the Portrait. The earlier version is more firsthand, fully rounded and factually detailed; the definitive treatment is advisedly shaded and dramatically sharpened. It is not enough for the novelist to possess, like a number of Joyce's characters, "an odd autobiographical habit." He must be able to trace a meaningful design through the welter of circumstances. Joyce has managed, by invoking an ancient myth, to conjure upward a modern one. Deliberately he has struck the attitude of Icarus--the classical posture of flying, the artist'due south revulsion from his middle-class environment, the youthful attempt to attempt one's father'southward wings.
The works of Joyce's maturity are less personal and more homo: in his own terms, they are further removed from his lyric cocky and closer to his godlike ideal of sympathetic detachment. Their emphasis shifts from flying to creation, accordingly, and from the son's role to the father-image: Dedalus, the fabulous artificer; Ulysses, the paternal wanderer; Finnegan, the architect of cities. The technical and psychological paradox is that Joyce, equally his comprehension of ordinary humanity increased, became less comprehensible to the mutual reader. He is commonly remembered non as the mature creator--forging, in mingled arrogance and piety, "the uncreated conscience of his race"--but as a winged effigy poised for a break with the dominating forces in his background. Language, religion, and nationality were envisaged past Stephen as a series of nets to restrain that initial impetus. When his trial flying succeeded, and the creative process began, the metaphor was calculated to alter. For the irreducible substances out of which Joyce created his monumental achievement were nationality, religion, and language.
The first consideration, with an Irishman, is nationality. Joyce, like Stephen, was "all likewise Irish gaelic"--all the more than Irish because he was a "wildgoose," because he resided mainly in foreign countries afterwards his twentieth year, seldom every bit long as a year in the same domicile. From kickoff to last, his underlying impulses were those of his racial endowment: humor, imagination, eloquence, belligerence. If other owned traits are less in evidence, notably gregariousness and bibulousness, information technology is considering they were so brilliantly exemplified in Joyce's father. A genial ne'er-do-well, a political task-holder, a homo nigh Dublin--only there can be no substitute for the label of Simon Dedalus by his eldest son. The Portrait begins with the child'southward earliest reminiscence, a story told by his parent; information technology ends with the fledgling'south departure from his parental roof. Its most dramatic episode occurs at the family's Christmas dinner. Here, in a vividly remembered argument, lies Joyce'due south bones premise: the long-delayed hope of independence that was frustrated once more with the downfall of Ireland's leading political leader, Charles Stewart Parnell.
The latent blood-feud with England had come to the surface, a few months afterwards Joyce'south birth, when ii high British officials were assassinated in the Phoenix Park. Though the attempt to incriminate Parnell had been legally exposed as a forgery, a private scandal was brewing which finally discredited him. The desertion of his clerical supporters, so vociferously defended by Stephen's Mrs. Riordan, was a particularly sore indicate. Parnell's expiry soon afterward was the occasion of Joyce'south offset literary attempt--a poem echoed in "Ivy 24-hour interval in the Committee Room," his own favorite amid his stories. The touch of the news upon Stephen, semi-delirious in the school hospital, is registered in the Portrait. The state of the nation during the menstruation that ensued, the menses in which Joyce gathered his lasting impressions of it, he has diagnosed every bit a spiritual and temporal paralysis. The cure was further violence, which led to the founding of the Irish Free State; which had started with the uprising of Easter Calendar week, 1916, 4 years afterwards Joyce left Ireland for the last time.
He left too early for the Revolution; he arrived likewise late for the Renaissance. His undergraduate idol, the subject field of his first published article, was not Yeats merely Ibsen. He greeted the Irish Literary Theater with a polemic confronting folksy aestheticism. He outraged his higher debating society by expounding the iconoclasms of European drama. On several visits dwelling from the Continent, between the ages of twenty and thirty, he considered whether some journalistic or pedagogical niche existed for him in the cultural life of his native urban center. In his single play, Exiles, as in authenticity, he pushed this trouble toward a negative conclusion. In his short stories, Dubliners, the recurrent situation is entrapment. The timid protagonists are trapped into marriage ("The Boarding House"), kept from eloping ("Eveline"), wistfully envious of colleagues who get abroad ("A Lilliputian Cloud"). In "Counterparts" a father makes his son the victim of his own frustrations. The plight suggested in "The Expressionless" is that of a manufactory equus caballus harnessed to a carriage, pulling it round and round a public statue.
Escaping from the treadmill of Dublin, Joyce spent the rest of his life brooding upon it and writing about information technology. His insistence on calling its citizenry by their names, and pointing out its local landmarks, held up the publication of Dubliners for several years. Ulysses, more comprehensively than Dubliners and more objectively than the Portrait, is saturated with "consciousness of place." The city is commemorated, street past street and hour by hr, as it stood on Th, June 16, 1904. The crones on Nelson's Pillar, spitting down plum-stones upon the pedestrians, sum up Stephen'due south departing mental attitude. His earlier description of Republic of ireland, "the one-time sow that eats her farrow," is acted out in the Circe's disorderly house, where men are figuratively turned into swine. No Dubliner will raise a hand to assist the drunken Stephen, excepting Leopold Bloom, with whom he has zilch in common but humanity. Bloom, the ineffectual advertising man, the modern Ulysses, is "Everyman or Noman," every inch the Human in the Street. He is suspected, among many other devices, of inspiring the Dwelling Rule announcer, Arthur Griffith, with his Sinn Fein program.
Stephen departs for Europe promising "to write something in ten years." Joyce, living through the next decade in polyglot Trieste, finished the Portrait and began Ulysses in 1914. He lived through the Offset Earth State of war in neutral Zurich, a denaturalized British subject amidst exiles from many lands. In cosmopolitan Paris, during the flow betwixt wars, the appearance of Ulysses and the parturition of Finnegans Wake were international events. The latter coincided with the Second Globe State of war; and Joyce, returning to Zurich, died upon the operating table in 1941. In Ulysses he had looked upon battle as a instructor viewing a playing field. In Finnegans Wake all the world's great battles are reduced to a grand Irish free-for-all: "history every bit she is harped." But Ireland is Joyce's microcosm; his gigantic hero is compounded of many heroes; H. C. Earwicker stands for "Hither Comes Everybody." "Easterheld," he enacts the regeneration of "Easter Isle." Thus Joyce's feeling for his country, long dormant, is never dead. To cite his inimitable phraseology once more, it is merely "hiberniating."
But racial inheritance is guided and shaped past cultural tradition, fifty-fifty as Republic of ireland has been by Catholicism. Where the father is the embodiment of nationality in Stephen's recollections, his female parent embodies religion. Her unquestioning credence is contrasted with her son's developing skepticism; their naturally affectionate relationship has all just reached an impasse when he leaves for Paris in 1902. 6 months later he is summoned abode to her deathbed. His refusal to take function in the family unit'due south prayers for her seems to accept stimulated that remorse of conscience, that "agenbite of inwit" which reechoes through Ulysses. Here Stanislaus Joyce interposes a revealing particular. Mrs. Joyce, he informs us, was already past praying for; information technology was non her request, but an officious uncle's, that James Joyce refused. Retrospectively, then, he has gone out of his style to sharpen the issue and dramatize the incident. His loss of faith becomes a credo. His enfranchisement brings its own discipline.
" Why? " asks Stephen's friend, Cadet Mulligan (Dr. Oliver Gogarty). "Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, but it'southward injected the incorrect mode." The Portrait derives its pattern from the successive stages of a Jesuit pedagogy. Joyce was a prize student, albeit an embarrassing protege, of zealous and thoroughgoing teachers. It was almost inevitable that they should propose, and that he should very seriously consider, the possibility of entering the priesthood. That he felt the intellectual attraction of theology, equally well as the emotional entreatment of ritual, is evident in everything he wrote. Both are submerged in the cold terror of Stephen's key dilemma between carnal sin and priestly absolution. Nature, which incites his heresies inspires his true vocation. Pride of intellect ultimately ranges him with the forces of Satanic rebellion. The cry Not serviam! is his protest against Ireland's condition of servitude, confronting its many masters: Britain not less than Rome, Mammon not less than Caesar.
With the self-dedication of the priest Joyce took the vows of the artist. His imaginative constructions are therefore grounded on the rock of his buried religious experience. His view of human nature is based upon the psychology of the confessional. His aesthetic theory is a stimulating mixture of Flaubertian naturalism and neo-Thomism. His literary technique is richly colored by ecclesiastical symbolism; a series of notes on the liturgy of Holy Week, for example, accompanies the manuscript of Stephen Hero. At that place as well he explains his conception of art every bit an "epiphany," a sudden illumination if not a divine revelation, a slight but definite insight into other lives, a fragmentary clue to the meaning of life as a whole. Even the stroke of the Ballast Office clock tin can have this effect, says Stephen, and we may regard Ulysses equally an extended commentary on his remark. God is manifest, Stephen at present believes, every bit "a dissonance in the street." The writer's vantage point is that of "Araby": an acolyte bearing his beaker through the streets of Dublin.
Typical of Joyce's Dubliners is Mr. Duffy in "A Painful Example," whose suburban existence lacks " any communion with others." Shivering with loneliness, as he walks amid the lovers on Magazine Hill, he resigns himself to being "an outcast from life's banquet." But Joyce does not, like Thomas Isle of mann, sentimentalize his artists by assuming their exclusion from a comfortable conservative earth. Joyce knows his petty bourgeoisie too well for that; he knows that they too are outsiders, estranged from each other. An inveterate stranger, his wandering Jew, Mr. Bloom, is obscurely involved in the destiny of Throwaway, the "outsider " that wins the Ascot cup. The other issue of Bloomsday, the sinking of a New York excursion steamer with five hundred passengers aboard, implies that the members of any customs are all in the aforementioned gunkhole. Pausing for a moment in a church building, Bloom envies the communicants considering they are "not then lonely." Later, in a tavern, an anti-Semitic nationalist, anonymously known as "the Citizen," attacks him as an campaigner of international peace and universal love.
The trouble of Ulysses is the age-quondam attempt to put Christian precept into practice. The consequence is all too palpably illustrated past the anecdote of ii drunks in Glasnevin Cemetery, who confound a statue of Jesus with their lamented friend Mulcahy. Offset as it does with the Introit, the book proceeds to a blasphemous climax with the celebration of the Black Mass. Notwithstanding, every bit Bloom foresees: "Longest way round is the shortest way home." The autobiographical hero of Joyce'due south before volumes is depicted pending the Eucharist; the universalized hero of Finnegans Wake, who literally presides over a public house, is himself a host in more ways than 1. Through the thickening intonations of his customers can be heard unexpected overtones of the Last Supper: "Pass the fish for Christ's sake!" The various rites of death and burial, which celebrate his wake, all culminate in some version of the Easter ceremony. Even the Phoenix, symbol of political desperation, fulfills its prophecy of resurrection. And the author, expatriate and excommunicate, reasserts his sense of community and communion.
Communication, nonetheless, brought farther difficulties, which it was his special triumph to overcome. If "his destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders," it was because he reserved his energies for order of another kind. "The first principle of artistic economy," he had plant, was isolation; he had discrete himself from his nationality and his organized religion; but he found his medium, language, pointing back to them. In the somber background, liturgical and scholastic, hovered the Latinity of the Church. In the embattled foreground loomed the Gaelic revival, though it never elicited more than than a half-hearted interest from Joyce. In his enthusiasm for Ibsen he had learned Norwegian, and had even used it to salute the dying playwright with a brave and touching alphabetic character. At University Higher he had specialized in Romance Languages, and had shown such proficiency that there had been talk of a professorship. During his hardest years on the Continent, before a benefactor endowed his literary work, he worked as a commercial translator and as a teacher in a Berlitz school.
It is a striking fact about English literature in the twentieth century that its near notable practitioners take seldom been Englishmen. The fact that they have so often been Irishmen supports, Synge's conventionalities in the reinvigorating suggestiveness of Irish pop spoken language. That English was not Joyce'due south native language, in the strictest sense, he was keenly aware; and it helps to explain his unparalleled virtuosity. But a more concrete caption is to be discerned amongst his concrete traits, one of which we normally allocate as a serious handicap. Joyce lived much of his life in varying states of semi-blindness. To preserve what eyesight he had, he underwent repeated operations and countermeasures. A schoolboy humiliation, when he broke his spectacles and failed to practise his lessons, is painfully recollected in the Portrait and again in Ulysses. His writing tends more and more than toward low visibility; his imagination is auditory rather than visual. If the artist is a human for whom the visible earth exists, remarked George Moore, then Joyce is essentially a metaphysician; for he is less concerned with the seeing eye than with the thinking mind.
We may add together that he is most direct concerned with the hearing ear. Doubtless the sonorities of Homer and Milton are intimately connected with their blindness. Information technology is scarcely casual that Joyce, almost unique among modern prose writers in this respect, must be read aloud to exist fully appreciated. In addition to his linguistic aptitude, and in compensation for his defective vision, he was gifted with an peculiarly fine tenor voice. Professional singing was one of the possible careers he had contemplated. His vocalist's taste inclined toward Opera and bel canto, romantic ballads and Elizabethan arrogance: non music but song, he liked to say. His poems except for a few excursions into Swiftian satire, are songs; lyrics which, without their musical settings look strangely fragile. Yeats, upon first reading them, praised Joyce's delicate talent, and shrewdly wondered whether his ultimate class would be verse or prose. Operating within the broader surface area of fiction, he was to retain the cadenced precision of the poet. Above all he remained an accomplished listener, whose pages are continually animated past the accurate recording of overheard conversation.
Joyce's style is distinguished not merely by the rise and fall of its rhythms, but by its feeling for the texture of the particular word. Words assert a magical power over things. Treasured phrases enable Stephen to transform "the dull phenomenon of Dublin," to transcend "the decayed city" by communing with a rapturous seascape. Jotted impressions are conceived as epiphanies, mystical visions which link the beholder to the object beheld. Betwixt the planes of inward speculation and external observation, Joyce maintains a serio-comic interplay. The narrative of Ulysses is identified with the internal monologue of 3 major characters; it also responds to such discursive influences equally newspaper headlines and fugal variations; one chapter comprises parodies of the chief English language stylists; and the whole may be studied as a comprehensive handbook of verbal techniques. In Finnegans Wake a universe of discourse, seemingly unlimited in space and time, is spanned by associations of thought and play upon words. Names of hundreds of rivers figure in the torrential dialogue, "Anna Livia Plurabelle," which took Joyce 1600 hours to concoct.
His pangs of composition have recently been described by Philippe Soupault as "a sort of daily damnation: the cosmos of the Joycean world. The perverse ingenuity of these afterwards experiments has been deplored more than frequently than deciphered. A long series of misunderstandings with the public inevitably reinforced those early vows of silence, exile, and cunning. Inhibited from writing naturally of natural instincts, Joyce ended by inventing an artificial language of innuendo and mockery. In Finnegans Wake he drew upon his linguistic skills and learned hobbies to contrive an Optophone--an instrument which, for the benefit of the blind, converts images into sounds. Out of it come, non merely echoes of the past, but warnings of the hereafter. Mr. Earwicker'south worldly misfortunes are climaxed by a lethal explosion: "the abnihilisation of the etym." Pessimists may interpret this enigma equally the anything of all pregnant, a chain reaction fix off by the devastation of the atom. Optimists will stress the creation of thing ex nihilo--and trust in the Word to create another world.
The alternatives that Joyce suspends, the nihilistic and creative potentialities that at present confront u.s., keep us in an ambivalent state of mind. He himself kept the remainder by moving from a negative position to a positive achievement. But, because his self-portrait was so explicit, and his masterworks were so elaborate, this development has not clearly been understood. Readers are bound to call up Stephen, "the eternal son," potent-kneed and self-doomed. They are less likely to recollect of the roistering alderman, the "folksforefather," who bears a closer resemblance to Simon Dedalus. Nor, until they penetrate Finnegans Wake, will they recognize that Joyce'south attitude mellowed as his stature increased; that he is finally to exist identified less with the prodigal than with the paterfamilias; he plays the demiurge, smiling down on his creations. Meanwhile, of class, the children continue to quarrel among themselves; the old issue betwixt the civic and the aesthetic is belabored through many rounds by the priest-politico, Shaun, and Shem--who is a veritable caricature of the creative person as a immature man.
Though the Portrait ends with a hitting gesture of denial, we must not forget that the outset word of Ulysses is an emphatic "yes," or that Mrs. Flower's affirmation is echoed past the conclusion to Finnegans Wake, in which nothing is concluded. The waters of the River Liffey, by wending once again to the sea, re-found the natural pattern of fertility. Hither was the horizon that first opened up earlier Stephen when, seeking the light, he walked along the shore. Flying, he and then realized, involved the take chances of falling; but he was pledged, like Faust, to strive and devious. The falling cadence at the end of "The Expressionless" is characteristic of Joyce's early on prose. His obsession with death gradually yields in Ulysses to a new business organization with life--the fall of man, colliding with the law of falling bodies, is transposed into scientific terms: "thirty-2 feet per sec." No fall but a rising, the reawakening of Finn MacCool and all the other sleeping heroes of Irish fable, is the theme of Joyce's literary testament.
Unlike the leprechaun-fanciers of the Celtic Revival, Joyce did not seek forgotten beauty; he evoked the past to illuminate the present. The results of this continual juxtaposition were an ironic mental attitude and an iconoclastic technique which temporarily aligned him with Ibsen and the naturalists. The stupor aroused past his incidental frankness is travestied in H. C. Earwicker, who reproaches himself for indecent exposure. Not exposure but synthesis is Joyce's final intention. His deeper affinities are with Dante, with the medieval iconographers, with the symbolic structures that fine art once built upon religion. But these, according to Aquinas, crave wholeness, harmony, and radiance. How tin can they be constructed out of the fragments, the discords, and the obscure details of modern life? By proceeding through what William James termed "the stream of consciousness" to what Jung terms "the racial unconscious," beyond individual dream to collective myth. From two Italian philosophers, from Giambattista Vico's cyclical theory of history and Giordano Bruno's dialectical concept of nature, Joyce learned how to reconcile the principles of unity and diversity: "the aforementioned anew."
A phrase from his notebooks, "centripetal writing," seems to indicate his direction. The municipal motto of Dublin, Obedientia civium urbis felicitas, gets rather freely translated in Finnegans Wake: "Thine obesity, O civilian, hits the felicitude of our orb!" However, urbi et orbi, all roads lead homeward for Joyce. The globe was his parish; his universe is parochial. The central human relationships, for him as for Proust, were warmly and tenderly domestic. Joyce's women tend to be either mothers or daughters, Goethean or Dantesque types like the rival heroines of Exiles, the maternal Bertha and the virginal Beatrice. His own outlook grew increasingly paternal, as he himself became intensively a family man. From 1904 his exile was lightened by the lifelong companionship of Nora Barnacle, who became his married woman. He shared his musical interests with his son, and was particularly devoted to his daughter, whose mental affliction saddened his last years. His ripest and perhaps his finest poem, "Ecce Puer," marks the double occasion of his father's death and the nativity of his simply grandchild, Stephen.
Those who misfile a writer with his material notice information technology all too easy to brand a scapegoat out of Joyce. They make Proust responsible for the collapse of French republic because he prophesied information technology and so acutely; and, because Joyce felt the contemporary need to create a censor, they charge him of defective any sense of values. Of course it is he who should be accusing them. His piece of work, though far from didactic, is full of moral implications; his example of artful idealism, set by abnegation and artistry is a standing rebuke to facility and venality, callousness and obtuseness. Less specially Joycean, and therefore fifty-fifty more usable in the long run, is his masterly command of social realism, which ingeniously springs the varied traps of Dublin and patiently suffers rebuffs with Mr. Bloom. The heroine of Stephen Hero, who has nearly disappeared from the Portrait, says farewell after "an instant of all but marriage." By home upon that interrupted nuance, that unconsummated moment, that unrealized possibility, Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our beau creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things.
Copyright © 1946 by Harry Levin. All rights reserved.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95sep/links/levi.htm
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