No More Learning

The title of the British edition of Re Joyce is Here Comes Everybody. It comes from Finnegans Wake, whose hero Humphrey
10
Foreword
Chimpden Earwicker very frequently has his initials filled out to
s~me appropriate phrase or slogan, like Howth Castle and En. Vlrons or Haveth Childers Everywhere, I do not mean to imply that Earwicker. is Joyce's wry portrait 01 himself; rather, I want to stress the um~ersalityof Joyce's creations, the fact that they are as demotIc as a come-all-ye'. Also I enfold there the hope that it
W ill not be long before everybody comes to Joyce, seeing in him not tortuous puzzles: dirt, and jesuitry gone mad, but great comedy, large humamty, and that affirmation of man's worth that more popular writers stamp on in order to make money.
Chiswick August 1965
A. B.
11
? PART ONE
THE STONES
? I: Solemnisations
I START THIS BOOK ON JANUARY 13TH, '964-THE TWENTY-THIRD - anniversary of the death of James Joyce. I can think of no other writer who would bewitch me into making the beginning of a spell
of hard work into a kind of joyful ritual, but the solemnisation of dates came naturally to Joyce and it infects his admirers, Indeed, this deadest time of the year (the Christmas decorations burnt a week ago, the children back at school, the snow come too late to be festive) is brightened by being a sort of Joyce season. It is a season beginning in Advent and ending at Candlemas. January 6th is the Feast of the Epiphany, and the discovery of epiphanies-'showings forth' -of beauty and truth in the squalid and commonplace was Joyce's vocation. February 1st is St Bridget's Day. February 2nd is Joyce's birthday, and two massive birthday presents were the first printed copies of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; it is also Candlemas Day and Groundhog Day. One is being very Joycean if one tempers the solemnity by remembering the groundhogs. Overlooked by Christmas shoppers, Saint Lucy, Santa Lucia, celebrated her feast on December 13th. T o Joyce, who struggled most of his life against eye- disease, she had a special meaning, being the patron' saint of sight, and his daughter Lucia was named for her. The theme of the whole season is light-out-of-darkness, and it is proper to rejoice (Joyce was well aware of the etymology of his name) in the victory of the light. We are to rejoice even in the death of the first Christian martyr on Boxing Day, and we remember why Joyce appears under the name of Stephen in his autobiographical novels. He too was a martyr, though to literature; a witness for the light, self-condemned to exile, poverty, suffering, vilification and (perhaps worst of all) coterie canonisation in life, that the doctrine of the Word might be spread. He was a humorous martyr, though, full of drink and irony. Out of the stones that life threw at him he made a labyrinth, so that Stephen earned the surname Dedalus. The labyrinth is no home for a
'7
? The Stones
Solemnisations
monster, however; it is a house of life, its corridors ringing with
song and laughter.
In January, 1941, when the news ofJoyce's death filtered through
from Zurich, the world was distracted by other preoccupations, other deaths. Few of his admirers could take time off for a wake. I myself, a private soldier in snow-bound Northumberland, learned the news when I was polishing the windows of the Sergeants' Mess with a week-old copy of the Daily Mail. There it was, on the front page, rightly dwarfed by the bombing of Plymouth.
'Good God, James Joyce is dead. '
'Who the hell's he? ' asked a sergeant.
'A writer. Irish. The author of Ulysses. '
'Aaaaah, a dirty book that is. Get on with the job. ' So Joyce's
quizzical photograph polished away, looking out at the snow ('faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead'. A great writer modifies everything).
Ulysses, then, was generally known of among the so-called non- intellectuals, even though the name Joyce meant only an English traitor, broadcaster of Nazi propaganda. Ulysses (heavily accented on the first syllable) was one of the great dirty books, too dirty to be easily accessible, one of the trilogy ofliterary dirt completed by Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Well ofLoneliness. Most ofus are prurient and will buy the latest piece of literary erotica to be released by a court judgement; we will not join the queue, but we will watch for the queue to die down. I have never felt inclined to condemn people who look for dirt in literature: looking for dirt, they may find some- thing else. I do not think that those of my fellow-soldiers who read paperback pornography for masturbatory thrills saw that sort of stuff as of the same order as The Decameron or Joyce's dirty book. In literature (recognisable as such through bulk, hard words, long stretches of boredom) they wanted confirmation that sexual desire, sexual exercise, and sexual obscenity were valid aspects of life. A solid book in hard covers solemnised the day of the groundhog and showed that holy candles were still phallic. Often it was enough for them just to find the word (sex' in an evidently serious book. For a whole month, in my unit, there was talk ofa dirty book in the guard- room-a book that was never, unsportingly, removed but left there to beguile the tedium of guard-duty. It turned out to be my lost copy of Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious, a work of jaw- locking dullness.
The author of Ulysses, at the time of his death, was not, then, 18
regarded as a pornographic writer even on the lowest level: he was
rather the creator of a big book in which, like ore in dull rock, dirt nestled. Twenty-three years after, thanks to the popularising media, his name is generally known and his other work is at least known of. Paperback copies of his earlier fiction, and even Harry Levin's The Essential James Joyce, may be bought on railway bookstalls; Stephen D-a dramatisation of Stephen Hero and A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man- has been seen at peak-viewing hours on BBC televi- sion. ' The glamour of smut has worn off Ulysses since Henry Miller and the didactic pornograpliy of the East have appeared on the open market. Joyce is available as Ian Fleming is available, and at no higher price. But he remains, to the majority of library-borrowers and paperback-buyers, suspect. He is obscure, crafty, not straight- forward. The low priest of dirt, unfrocked, is the high priest of difficulty.
No one who has wrestled with Finnegans Wilke will deny the diffi- culty there; after ton-loads of exegesis, parts of Ulysses still have to be puzzled out. But is the early work, the latest of it fifty years old, really difficult? In a way, though not an obvious way, yes. The stories in Dubliners are different from the stories of O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, and W. Somerset Maugham: nothing seems to happen in them, there are no plots, they are not really stories at all. Anyone who has ever read a Dubliners story aloud to a class of adolescents or even adults will know the embarrassment of, at the end of the read- ing, meeting a wave of incredulity, disappointment, even anger: is it really all over ? -why, there is no denouement, no resolution, no twist. Joyce isn't playing fair; he's a confidence trickster; he pretends to be in the tradition but he's really walked out of it. As for A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man, the very opening breaks the rules; this is not how an adult story ought to begin:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was corning down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . .
But even the surface of his writing offends. After Dubliners, he de- cides to reject both inverted commas and hyphens. His lines of"
lialogue begin with a dash, in the Continental manner:
- Hello, Stephanos!
- Here comes The Dedalus!
- Ao! . . . Eh, give it over, Dwyer, I'm telling you or I'll give you a stuff in the kisser for yourself . . . Ao f
1 So has Bloomsaay-Allan McClelland's dramatisation of Ulysm (June lOth, 1964). 19
? The Stones
Solemnisations
- Good man, Towser! Duck him!
- Corne along, Dedalus! BOlls Stephanoumenos! BOlls Stephaneforos! - Duck him! Guzzle him now, Tawser!
-Help! Help! . . . Ao!
His compound words have a German look about them: 'softhued',
'slateblue', 'darkplumaged', 'earsplitting', Later, in Ulysses, he 15 to pervert conventional word-order as Milton did: 'Perfume of em- braces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore. ' He is to pack and tighten his sentences as the Elizabethans used to: 'Ben Dollard's loose blue cutaway and square hat above large slops crossed the quay in full gait from the metal bridge. ' Or, better, 'She dances in a foul gloom where gum burns with garlic. A sailorman, rustbearded, sips from a beaker:rum and
eyes her. A long and seafed silent rut. ' He hates pure fill-m words,
a. guacities; he presses every drop o f water ? ut. of hi~ ~o? ~ed ~abbag. e. His prose thus often looks odd when Its mtelhpblllt! ' IS not m doubt. It is a special kind of oddness which he shares with a poet- Gerard Manley Hopkins. These two, the renegade Catholic and the Catholic convert, the Jesuit-taught and the Jesuit, teacher, ~ave more in common than critics have been prepared to notIce. Hopkins taught Greek at University College, Dublin, but long before Joyce was a student there: Joyce was only seven when Hopkins died. Hopkins's verse was not published till 1918, when Joyce's mature style was already formed. They were, independently and one ahead of the
other on the same track. 'Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west:her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height waste'-that is Hopkins, but it could be Joyce. 'Isabel, she is so pretty, truth to tell, wildwood's eyes and primarose hair, quietly, all the woods so wild, in mauves of moss and daphnedews, how all so still she lay, neath of the whitehorn child of tree, like some losthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled'; here Joyce seems almost to parody Hopkins. 'For- wardlike but however and like favourable heaven heard these' is the Joycean'last line of Hopkins's 'The Bugler's First C~mm':ln. ion" written in 1879. Joyce's 'whitemaned seahorses, champmg, bnght- windbridled' would have delighted Hopkins.
There is more to it than a love of packed sentences and a dislike of hyphens. Joyce and Hopkins were led to a common view of art be- cause of a common belief in the power of ordinary life to burst forth -suddenly and miraculously-with a revelation of truth. Joyce talked of 'epiphanies" Hopkins of 'inscape'; Joyce adopted Aqu~nas as his philosopher, Hopkins took to Duns Scotus; the one rejected the
20
Church (or thought he did), the other gave up all for it (or tried to:
literature got in the way); both were so acutely aware of the numi-
nous in the commonplace that they found it necessary to manipulate the commonplaces oflanguage into a new medium that should shock the reader into a new awareness. The language of both of them- priest-poet and free-thinking fabulist-is fitted for naked confronta- tion with a world that seems newly created. It is the lack, not merely of the cliche, but of the rhythm that suggests a cliche, that makes both writers seem odd. Yet this oddness springs from nature: Eng- lish is never abused, never given exotic flavouring; the compressions, re-orderings of the sentence, compound coinages, alliterations are native to the language. 'Our heart's charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord': so Hopkins addresses Christ, and we are listening to English rhythms that were old-fangled before the coming of the Reformation. 'Dead breaths I living breathe,' writes Joyce, 'tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead', and the Norman Conquest is not long behind us. Both writers build, not on the accumulations of the centuries, but on the freshly un- covered roots of English. This, then, makes them look odd.
Oddness is more easily excused in a poet tharr in a novelist. The poet's trade is with words, an odd trade anyway, and he has to arrange them oddly to draw attention to the mystery oflanguage (a mystery which is a distraction in the market-place). But the novelist's trade is less with words than with people and places and actions. Most novel-readers want to get at the content of a novel without the intermediacy o f a kind o f writing that seems to obtrude, rivalling the plot in its claim to be looked at. In the works of the late Nevil Shute there is no such distraction:
He called the front basement room his clean workshop, and this was his machine shop. Here he had a six-inch H. erbert lathe for heavy work, a three-and-a-half-inch Myford, and a Boley watchmaker's lathe. He had. a Senior milling machine and a Boxford shaper, a large and a small dnll press, and a vast arr~y of tools ready to hand. A l. 0! lg bench ran across the window a tubular lIght system ran across the ceIlIng, and a small camera and flashgun stood ready for use in a cupboard, for it was his habit to take photographs of interesting processes to illustrate his articles,
That is from Trustee from the Toolroom, a novel so readable that it slips down like an oyster. Consider also a passage from the late Ian Fleming's Moonraker:
The amenities of Blades, apart from the gambling! are sO,desirable. that the Committee has had to rule that every member IS reqUIred to wm or
21
? The Stones
lose ? 500 a year on the club premises, or pay a~ annual fine of ? 250. The food and wine are the best in London and no btIls are presented, the cost of all meals being deducted at the end of each week pro rata from the profits of the winners. Seeing that about ? 5,000 cha:nges hands each week atthetablestheimpostisnottoopainfulandthelosershavethes~tisfac- tion of saving something from the wreck; and the custom explams the fairness of the levy on infrequent gamblers.
The solidity of such prose is more apparent than real:' it derives
from the content, the hard inventories of fact; otherwise it is pedes-
trian enough. But the average novel-reader can only take descriptive prose of a static nature (that is, prose that is not dialogue and prose that does not present physical action) if it evokes the market-place. If a novel attempts static analysis of a scene, a situation, or an emotion, the average novel-reader becomes uneasy: if you cannot give us action, then give us an inventory. If the covers of a novel could contain a film rather than a book, such readers would be pleased. The film, the comic-strip adaptation, the Reader's Digest summary-these are, in order of easiness, the easiest ways of getting at the heart of a novel. They agree in finding many novels too wordy; words, a necessary evil in the days of primitive art, are rendered supererogatory by the new, mostly visual, media. This is the general view: it is wrong for the novel to be literature. The popular novel
never has been literature, and that is why it is popular: the language
is transparent, a window on to generalised situations and generalised characters. Joyce's novels are all too literary, his language horribly opaque.
All this means is that Joyce is a sort of prose-poet, and to be that is to be a cheat-the dry bread of a good yarn seems to be offered, but it turns out to be the stone (precious but still inedible) of words or symbOl. The thing to do is to forget that the field of the novel is as limited as the cult of the contemporary best-seller is making it, and to consider that Joyce may be within his rights in turning language into one of the characters of Ulysses (perhaps in Finnegans Wake the only character). In Ulysses, the poeticising and the pastiche and parody serve, as we shall see later, a dramatic enough purpose; they also deepen the human characters by adding to their ordinary human dimensions the dimension, first, of history, then of myth. Here is the hero of Ulysses seen in his primary, Nevil Shute, aspect, though the language ofthis inventory has, in sheer sound, in sheer organisa- tion of consonants and vowels, a distinction few popular novelists could reach:
22
Solemnisatians
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fO'~vls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, l. lver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he lIked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Here he is seen in relation to one phase of past history:
Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.
And here he is in one of his comic-mythic aspects:
And there carne a voice out of heaven, calling: EliJah! Ellj? ah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohue's in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.
'Comic' is the key-word, for Ulysses is a great comic novel-though comic in a tradition that has been obscured by 'popular' cpnceptions of comedy-Po G. Wodehouse, Richard Gordon and the rest. The comedy of Joyce is an aspect of the heroic: it shows man in relation to the whole cosmos, and the whole cosmos appears in his work symbolised in the whole of language.
One idea that should now be emerging is that Joyce is a very traditional writer: he belongs to a period in which the warring notions offine'art and pop-art had no place; he antecedes, certainly, the popular novel in the sense in which we are using that term. He is very close to novelists like Cervantes, Fielding and Sterne, masters of the mock-epic. There is a great deal of Rabelais in hlm and not a little Dickens. He belongs, in fact, to the comic-heroic tradition of Western Europe-a tradition based on a kind of qualified humanism. Man is interesting and important enough to be examined in great detail and at great length, but he is not by any means the Lord of the Universe. The universe can be a mystery or an antagonist: against it the comic-epic hero opposes all he has, and it is not much-merely free will and a capacity for love. His defeats are inevitable but always
contain the seed o f a victory that the universe, a vast mass o f organised
ironmongery, is not equipped to understand. It is the victory of the
stoic who, though the gods themselves crush him with superior weight, knows that his values are right and theirs are wrong. The heroes ofthe great mock-epics are, by an ironical twist, always more admirable, because more human, than the demi-gods of true epic
23
? The Stones
Soiemnisations
It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry-in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little ortho- doxies which are now contending for our souls.
No face shines through the novels of James Joyce, and this is dis-
turbing. He is cut off from his own creation, as he is cut off from God's, and he has no comment to make about either. He cannot be enlisted in the cause of Irish nationalism, Fascism or Communism, though-like Shakespeare, a man legitimately faceless because he wrote plays and not novels-he has been invoked in the name of every ideology. Perhaps, among novelists, only Flaubert approaches him for self-effacement.
But, to the novel-reader brought up in a cosier tradition, such
self-effacement looks like hauteur, the nose in the air, the swollen head, the snob. It ought not to look like that. Joyce's aim was the ennoblement ofthe common man, and this could best be achieved by letting the common man speak for himself. T o watch over one's hero, coddle him, discuss him with the reader, offer him praise or pity- is not this perhaps the real posture of superiority, the imitation of God? We are given Leopold Bloom and Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker without apology and without the intermediacy of attitudes imposed on the reader. We have to make up our own minds as to whether we like them or approve of their actions (Bloom's masturba- tion, for instance, or Earwicker's incestuous fantasies); ultimately, liking and approbation do not apply-we become concerned with the harder discipline of love.
The priest is the agent of solemn cere- monies, and we are never drawn to look at his face or consider what thoughts and feelings move behind it. Joyce, without blasphemy, saw his function as priestlike~the solemnisation of drab days and the sanctification of the ordinary. .
It is this preoccupation, even obsession, with the ordinary that
should endear him to ordinary readers. Nobody in his books is rich or has high connections. There is no dropping of titled names, as there is in the novels of Evelyn Waugh, and we enter no place more exalted than a pub or a public library. Ordinary people, living in an ordinary city, are invested in the riches of the ages, and these riches are enshrined in language, which is available to everybody. Given time, Joyce will flow through the arteries of our ordinary, non- reading, life, for a great writer influences the world whether the world
25
whom they parody. Odysseus and . I? neas are all for imposing their weight, little Mediterranean kings; they try to imitate the cosmos, and the cosmos is flattered into supporting them with occasional miracles. Don Q1ixote and Leopold Bloom merely want to improve society with decent acts. But the cosmos sees human society as a model of itself and does not want it disturbed, hence its resentment- expressed in thunder, practical jokes, gross coincidences.
It is evident that the mock-epic novel is not just spinning a yarn and cannot be content with the language appropriate to a plain tale. The difficulties of Ulysses and, very much more, of Finnegans Wake are not so many tricks and puzzles and deliberate obscurities to be hacked at like jungle lianas: they represent those elements which surround the immediate simplicities of human society; they stand for history, myth, and the cosmos. Thus we have not merely to accept them but to regard them as integral, just as the stars overhead are integral to the life of the man who, micturating in the open air, happens to look up at them. What is difficult in Ulysses and Tristram Shandy is meant to be difficult: the author is not coyly withholding a key.
James Joyce, starting on his literary career, said that one of his
artistic weapons was to be that of the labyrinth-maker-not brute cunning but human cunning. The average reader, coming to Joyce for the first time, resents the cunning. Perhaps even more he resents another of the author's declared weapons-silence. No writer was more autobiographical than Joyce, but no writer ever revealed, in the telling of his story, less of himself. He keeps silent, he never judges, he never comments. I am convinced that many novel-readers go to a book not merely for the story but for the companionship of
the teller of the story-they want a friend with a somewhat greater knowledge of the world than themselves, one who knows the clubs, a good cigar, Tangier and Singapore, who has perhaps dallied with strange women and read odd books, but remains friendly, smiling, tolerant but indignant when the reader would be indignant, always approachable and always without side. Read Nevil Shute and you will meet the no-damned-nonsense engineer who has no arty preten- sions; read Ian Fleming and you will meet the globe-trotting club- man who is one of the lads; read Somerset Maugham and you will meet the sceptical raisonneur with a well-hidden heart of gold. These images are sometimes an unforced expression of nature, sometimes (as with Maugham) a very cleverly made persona. In the works of Dickens George Orwell saw a face:
24
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likes it or not and the blessing of the ordinary must eventually trans- figure it. W; see Gerard Manley Hopkins in cor. nflake advertise- ments ('gold-toasted, sugar-tossed, hghter-than-alr, 0 cnsp, they crunch and crackle') and we hear Joyce's interior monologues in the 'think-tape' of television plays and documentaries, even hear SO~~- thing of his word-play in radio shows. But 'Introibo ad altare De:' IS the first spoken statement in Ulysses, and we are Wlsest If we get up early and deliberately go to the great comic Mass, rather than n:;erely let its deformed and thinned echoes trickle through to us. It IS not a Black Mass, even though Guinness is drunk and bawdy songs punctuate the golden liturgy; it is a solemnisation without solemnity.
2: Inheritances
BESIDES SILENCE AND CUNNING, JAMES JOYCE NEEDED ANOTHER condition for expressing himself in art-exile. It was, on the face of it, a more thorough exile than, say, Ovid or Dante had known; it looked like an almost sacramental disowning of family, city, race, and religion. But such gestures are usually less drastic and dramatic and self-denying than they sound, nor could this one be wholly ful- filled: Joyce ended his days as a son and a brother, a walking guide to Dublin past and present, an expatriate Irishman, a Mass-missing Catholic who knew as much as the priests. Exile was the artist's stepping back to see more clearly and so draw more accurately; it was the only means of objectifying an obsessive subject-matter. Joyce wanted to 'forge the uncreated conscience' of his own people, and exile was the smithy.
The heroes of Joyce's two greatest books are both family men. Family was important to Joyce, and he expressed its importance by cutting himself away from his father's decaying house and starting a family of his own. As for the umbilical cord, it does not seem to have exerted a very strong pull. Amor matris is a big theme in Ulysses, but only in one of its meanings. Stephen Dedalus remembers his mother with pity, but, when she rises from the dead in the late-night brothel scene, she is the enemy, making her son cry: 'The corpse- chewer! Raw head and bloody bones! ' and smash the chandelier with his ashplant. She seems to provoke the same feelings as those two greater mothers, Ireland and the Church-. a mixture of guilt, anger terror and disdain. That earlier, remembered, incident where Stephen refuses to pray at his dying mother's behest, is not an exact representation of what happened in Joyce's own life, but it stands for the non serviam he wanted to shout at all his mothers. Joyce, unlike D. H. Lawrence, was no mother's boy. But the father- son relationship is a different matter; it was one that Joyce was able to enter into in both capacities and it had for him a 'mystical'
27
26
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significance: Bloom and Stephen come together despite the lack of
a biological tie or even a cultural or racial affinity.
Of all the numerous family he hegot, John Joyce seems to have been liked only by his eldest son James. Perhaps 'liked' is too strong or too weak a word: tolerance in youth gave place to a sort of gmlty love in middle age. I f Joyce's mother represented the yin side of. the Irish psyche, all pregnancies and forbearance. and supe~StltlOn, Joyce's father was very much the yang-charm, vmhty, dissipatIOn, improvidence, bibulous shiftlessness, the relics of~Iddace~cy,tale~t let run to seed. In A Portrait Stephen enumerates ghbly his father s attributes' :
- A medical student an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician a smalliancllord a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storytelle;, somebody's sec;etarJ;, somet~ingin a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praIser of hIS own past.
The variousness which the son put into his art the father put into his life, though to no profit. Andyet he ends up, the eternal father-figure, in Earwicker in Finnegans Wake. More than that, only such a father could have begotten such a son, for ~ames Joyce is his father with genius added the peculiar chaos of his father orgamsed mto a cos- mos. Stephe~Dedalus says that Socrates learned dialectic from his shrewish wife Xantippe, and from his midwife mother 'how to brmg thoughts into the world'. He does not say what he learned from his father. What Joyce learned, or inherited, from his own father was a voice, the gift of song and the gift of rhetoric. .
John Joyce was not just a tenor but a fine tenor~ an? his eldest son v'as almost a great tenor. The importance ofsong ": his books c. ann~t be exaggerated. Ulysses sings all the way or, when! t does not smg,! t
declaims or intones. It has been turned into a stage-play-Bloomsday; it could also be turned into an opera. The 'Sirens' episode is com- posed in the form of a fugue, but the symp~O! :ic~atureofthe whole work only appears when we come to the Circe. chapter-here we have a free fantasia or development seetlon which gathers all the whirling fragments of the long day together and, in the sphere of the special logic of the imagination, relates one w t\Ie other. As for Finnegans Wake, parts of it are essentlOlly bard! c: they req~1fe the voice and the harp. But joyce's father could do more than. smg; he could speak as well. He had the gift of eloquence, especlOlly m ab~s;, and this was heard at its best when he was denouncmg his wife s family ('0 weeping God, the things I ~arried into'). The denuncia- tory rhetoric of the 'Cyclops' episode m Ulysses! S pure John Joyce,
28
while the highly idiosyncratic tropes of Simon Dedalus ('Shite and onions', 'Melancholy God', 'Jesus wept, and no wonder, by Christ') are no more than transcriptions of actuality.
The ear and the voice ofJoyce's father produced, in his son, a pro- digious appetite for langnage. Joyce wrung the English language nearly dry in Ulysses and, in Finnegans Wake, had to devise a new medium-a composite tongue, a kind of pan-European, in which the vocabulary was drawn from all the languages Joyce knew-a very considerable number. Joyce's urge to learn foreign languages began
with "a desire to communicate with the great Europe 'out there': he had no interest in learning Erse, a very insular tongue. While still an undergraduate, he wrote a Jetter of admiration to Ibsen in Dano- Norwegian. Italian was becoming his second language (later it was to be his first, and that of his wife and children). He could be creative in French. He learned German in order to translate Hauptmann. Even before he began to write his characteristic works, his world was becoming a world of sounds-meaningful or otherwise, though, as Leopold Bloom points out, everything speaks in its own way. Whether the primacy of the ear and the tongue in Joyce is, building on a natural endowment, fate's way of compensating him for weak sight and, later, near-blindness-this is a matter which it is not profitable to debate. Blind Homer is a strongly visual poet, blind Milton is not. The weak-sighted . cherish what little they can see; the near-sighted turn themselves into microscopes. I am myself a novelist classified as 'partially sighted', but the visible world exists for me, especially in the close print of cigarette-ends in a dirty ashtray, segs on potato-peeling fingers, the grain of wood, the bubbles in tonic water, a painter's brushwork. There are plenty of visual minutiae in
Joyce's novels but (contrast him here with another poor. . . ighted author, Aldous Huxley) there is not much interest in the visual arts- not because of poor vision but because of poor provision on the part of the world that reared him. The dim fairy water-colours of George Russell (AE) represent the approach of fin de siecle Dublin to the painter's art. Joyce as a young man knew pornographs and hagio- graphs-dirty pictures hidden up his bedroom chimney, the Sacred Heart and the BVM above the mantelpiece; what works of art he possessed in later life were dear to him because of their literary or verbal associations-weaving Penelope; a view of Cork framed in cork. The Dublin of his youth nourished his auditory gift. It was
very much his father's city, keen on rhetoric and Italian opera; it found its colours and shapes in sounds.
Inheritances
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Inheritances
Joyce left his father's house in order to convert his father into myth, but he encouraged one member of the family to follow him into exile and stay in exile-his brother Stanislaus. If James Joyce brought his father's voice and ear to his art, he took his father's capacity for disorder and improvidence into his private life, Trieste (his first place of exile) apparently encouraging him to promote the vices ofshiftlessness and squalor on a spectacular, Continental, scale. Stanislaus, 'brother John" had been inoculated against all this: he was solid, reliable, and had a great appetite for order and responsi- bility. Against incredible odds he helped to keep the new Joyce menage afloat, and his book about James was well-titled-My Brother's Keeper. But his importance to those who want to read
Joyce, not just read about him, is mythical. Finnegans Wake pre- sents, as one o f its themes, the eternal opposition o f brothers: Shem is an autobiographical study (Shem~James), the hard core of Shaun (=John) is Stanislaus.
Despite his temperamental inability to be solid, reliable, an earner of good wages, James Joyce had it in him to be a good husband and father. Though he ran off with Nora Barnacle in '904, they did not legally marry till '93' (at a London registry office, 'for testamentary reasons'). They were glued together by affection, not form. If John Joyce rightly saw that a girl with a name like that would never leave his son, James's need for Nora was beyond all fancy. She was un- literary, had no patience with her husband's bizarre projects (why couldn't he write an ordinary story that people could understand 1), but she is firmly planted in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake-not
biographically but mythically. Joyce saw in her the essential virtues
o f woman. She was down-to-earth, anti-romantic, common-sensical,
loyal, forgiving. If Stanislaus was his foil, she was his complement. As for Joyce's paternal gifts, these were as powerfully developed as we should expect from the creator of Bloom and Earwicker. One of the most affecting relationships in the whole of modern biography is that between himself and his daughter Lucia, the poor girl who in- herited her father's genius in the form of dementia.
Joyce's unwillingness to 'regularise' his menage had less to do with an antipathy to the forms of marriage than a total rejection of the Church. Marriage was a sacrament, therefore not for him. The alternative of a purely legal wedding would not do. Leaving the Catholic Church did not mean becoming a Protestant, for that would be merely the exchange o f a logical absurdity for an illogical one; similarly, one did not spurn religion in order to fly into the arms of
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the State. 'Non serviam' meant what it said. Joyce, who admired William Blake, had a lot of Blake in him: all laws were bad; damn braces, bless relaxes. And yet Joyce's rejection of Catholicism was far from absolute. The Jesuit's boast about conditioning a child's soul for ever is not an empty one, and Joyce was brought up by the Jesuits. He might refuse to take the sacraments, matrimony along with the Eucharist, but the disciplines and, in a tortured renegade form, the very fundamentals of Catholic Christianity stayed with him all his life.
There is a sense in which the novels ofEvelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, both Catholic converts, are less Catholic than the works of the great Jesuit apostate. Waugh looks for an unbroken tradition of English Catholic aristocracy with a terrible hunger for certitude, but it is less an eschatological certitude than a social one; he wants a code of behaviour and a code of taste that are sponsored by the oldest possible tradition. Greene is a Jansenist, and Jansenism, with its emphasis on man's impotence to do good or obey the command- ments, is too close to Calvinism to be good Catholicism, and, indeed,
the Church has repeatedly condemned Jansenism as a heresy. But Joyce's residual Catholicism never really leaves the norm. As Buck Mulligan says of Stephen Dedalus, he has the Jesuit strain injected the wrong way. The blasphemies of Ulysses are a kind of affirmation (the following is a statement about discipline in the British Navy):
They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth, and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.
That is meant to shock, just like 'The Ballad of Joking Jesus' and the story of Mary and Joseph and the pigeon. All through Ulysses and Finnegam Wake we catch echoes of the liturgy in parodic form ('Hail Mary, full of grease, the lard is with thee'), but we also meet learned chunks of theological speculation, as well as close Thomistic reasoning. It is typical of Joyce that, creating a religion of art to replace his Catholicism, he has to formulate his aesthetic in the terms of the schoolmen, and that his very premises come out of Aquinas. He cannot slough ~he Church off, he can never become completely emancipated. In Ulysses he is obsessed with the mystical identity of Father and Son; in Finnegans Wake his only real theme is that of the Resurrection.
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Inheritances
The first words spoken in U! ysses are the opening words of the Mass. Buck Mulligan, robed, bearing a razor and a mirror crossed, ascends to the top ofa tower to perpetrate the first blasphemy ofthe book: 'For this, 0 dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. ' But the blasphemy belongs to the character; the liturgical tone belongs to the book. Here, Joyce seems to say, a rite of solemn meaning, however comic the surface, is about to begin. And both of his major works are rituals: there is a hidden substance, a cunning planting of occult symbols, there is more than meets the eye. Every chapter of Urysses performs several functions at one and the same time: it tells the story, signifies an, art or science, stands for a part of the human body, has an appropriate symbol, is even dominated by an appropriate colour and (but this is not quite so esoteric, since the title of the book gives us a huge clue) has a parallel in Homer's Odyssey which is worked out in rich and secret
detail. Behind the 'accidents' of a mock-epic lies a substance qualita- tively different: in a sense, a sacrament is being administered. This very Catholic desire for the certitude of an organic system-and that seems to be one of the motives for writing Ulysses-is cognate with a priestly love of mysteries.
Joyce's attitude to Catholicism is the familiar love-hate one of most
renegades. He has left the Church, but he cannot leave it alone: he attacks it to the priests but defends it from the protestants. Despite all the mockery and blaspheming, it is safe to put Joyce's works into the hands of the devout believer. The Church may be an absurdity, but its 'logic is not denied j nor is there any institution less absurd. The Church stands that it may be battered, but the fists that batter know their own impotence. And, even in small particulars, Joyce seems to add to the literature of the Church rather than the literature
of the unbeliever:
The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen'S memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et unam sanetam catholicam et aposto/ieam ecclesiam: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for Pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the co"nsubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sa. bel- lius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulhgan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. ~he
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void awaits. surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a'disarming and a worstmg f~om those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host, who defend her m the hour o f conflict with their lances and their shields.
Joyce's intellectual grasp of Catholicism was as beyond his mother's simple faith as his refusal to make his Easter duty. But there are shreds of peasant Catholicism left in him. His governess, Mrs Conway (,Dante' in A Portrait), taught him to make the sign of the cross when there was a flash oflightning and say, 'Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, from a sudden and unprovided for death deliver us, 0 Lord. ' In Joyce's books thunder is always the voice ofa wrath- ful God. In Urysses it rumbles while the students in the maternity hospital are mocking the forces of life. The language used for it is full of primitive terror: 'Loud on left Thor thundered, in anger awful the hammerhurler. ' In Finnegans Wake thunder appears as one of the characters, symbolised in a word of one hundred letters (like 'bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthu- nntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnukl'), the power which drives men to shelter but makes them start building civilisa- tions. Joyce himself always trembled at the noise of thunder and, to those who asked why, he said, 'You were not brought up in Catholic Ireland. '
As for Joyce's Irishry, we need not make too much fuss about it, for it is perhaps the least important element in his make-up. His means of creating for Ireland the conscience it did not want was to drag Ireland-into Europe and, later, use Ireland as the nucleus of a universa~ myth. He spent his nationalistic ardour very early in life, though he retained throughout his exile a profound knowledge of the history of Ireland's struggle for home rule. His work derives from no Celtic originals (the part played by the Book ofKells in Finnegans Wake is the least of the reader's worries); he had no role in the literary movement which Yeats glorified; he did not even, like Synge, eavesdrop on the flavoursome speech of the peasantry. His Irishry was passive, merely innate, unpromoted; his aim was to be a Euro- pean artist rather than the bard-senator of a backwater republic. Dublin pub-crawlers claim him as their own, but official Ireland rejects him. This is as it should be. Joyce's purpose in life was to glorify the Dublin of pubs and poverty, not to further a shining national image. He was a Dubliner as Bloom and Earwicker are Dubliners, and both Bloom and Earwicker are foreigners.
Joyce's books are about Dublin, all of them. In the earlier sections of A Portrait we visit other Irish places, but briefly. We home back
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to Dublin with relief. But we are wrong if we think that Dublin encloses the work of Joyce, that a knowledge of the city is the key to understanding. The living Dubliner claims a superior appreciation of Joyce because he knows the distance from Sir John Rogerson's Q;tay to Mount Jerome Cemetery. This is a delusion. Dublin, in Joyce, is turned into an archetypal city, eventually into a dream city. Moreover, the Dublin of 1904 is, with romantic Ireland and O'Leary, dead and gone. Davy Byrne's is a smart bar now, not a boozer. The Martello Tower is a Joyce museum, an omphalos of petrifaction. It helps us to know something about Dublin, the real city of Joyce's memory, when we tackle the myths he has made out of it, but it is by no means essential. The real keys to an understanding of Joyce are given to the diligent reader, not to the purchaser ofan Aer Lingus ticket. My own best claim to an appreciation of his work, apart from application to it, is a Lancashire Catholic upbringing, a superstitious grandmother called Finnegan, and a strong auditory bias. Dublin is a city I know far less intimately than Singapore or Leningrad.
But, plunging into Joyce's books, we plunge into a kind of Dublin.