On receiving his B.A. degree with second class honors in Latin from University College, Dublin, he went to Paris, where he toyed with the idea of studying medicine. Lacking both the academic qualifications and the tuition fees, he quickly returned to literature, supported by small sums from his mother. Coming back to his dying mother in Dublin in 1904, he sold to a farmers’ magazine (for one pound each) three of the stories that would later go into The Dubliners. On June 16, 1904 (destined to be known in literary history as Bloomsday) he fell in love with Nora Barnacle, whom he had met only four days before. Though Joyce refused to go through a marriage ceremony, they left together for the Continent in October. He would never again live in Ireland. First he tried teaching in the Berlitz School in Pola, near Venice, before he and Nora moved to Trieste, where their two children were born. They were joined by his brother Stanislaus. There Joyce taught English to businessmen. Then on to a brief distasteful stint in a bank in Rome. He visited Ireland briefly in 1909, to try to publish The Dubliners, and to start a chain of Irish movie theaters, and again for the last time in 1912.
When Italy declared war in 1915, Joyce moved from Trieste to Zurich. There he remained for the duration, piecing out a living by teaching English, selling short pieces, and enjoying patronage—from the Royal Literary Fund (seventy-five pounds), from Edith Rockefeller McCormick, and from the bountiful Harriet Weaver (eventually some twenty-three thousand pounds). In 1920 Ezra Pound induced him to move to Paris, where he remained until his death in 1941. He and Nora finally went to London in 1931 to be married to satisfy his daughter. Though he made a career of writing, he never really made a good living from it, only surviving on meager fees from short pieces supplemented by patrons.
Joyce, most modern of novelists, encompassed time in autobiography, creating new ways to make the self universal. Despite his migratory life of self-exile, his writing remained rooted in Ireland. His first published work was a volume of verse, Chamber Music (1907), which already revealed his witty mastery of the beauty in words. And his writing had an unfolding logic, astonishing from so vagrant an imagination. His collection of stories, The Dubliners (1914), offered the background for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which was his autobiography, and Exiles (1918), an Ibsenesque play of emigrants returning to Dublin, which dramatized Joyce’s own marriage problems. His masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), was a personal epic, and finally came Finnegans Wake (1939), intended to be an epic of all humankind. Except for short experimental pieces and brief volumes of poetry, this was his whole lifework. He showed wonderful progress from the most objective and external ever inward and toward the self, finally penetrating to a new language of consciousness. Yet as his subject matter became more self-bound and his purpose and meaning ever broader, his style grew more arcane, his language more cryptic. His way of conquering time revealed the limits of the self, the need to reach out through community. But he was finally tempted to make language into a self-regarding ornament.
He brought together the two modern literary forms, the novel and biography, as none had done before. And incidentally, in the progress of his writing he provided a summary history of modern literature—from narrative in the human comedy of The Dubliners, to biography-autobiography-confession in The Portrait of the Artist, to ruthless exploration of the self in Ulysses. Unsatisfied by the unique self and its experience, he found refuge in the ancient community of myth. But his self-preoccupation did not leave him alone. Finally in Finnegans Wake he made his very language a toy, an embellishment and labyrinth, of the self. As his works became more self-absorbed they became harder to understand and less accessible until finally they reached the outer limits of intelligibility.
The Dubliners, a collection of stories about the daily life of his city, was mostly written in Trieste in 1905. And it shows what Joyce meant when he called Dublin the center of Ireland’s paralysis. Without melodrama or suspense, they reveal the everyday frustrations and disappointments of a disgraced priest, of an unconsummated love, of a compromised girl, of the electioneers for Parnell and Home Rule. This was Joyce’s album of the “moral history” of his country, of the faiths of ordinary people. The final haunting story, “The Dead,” he added, after his brief unhappy interlude in Rome, to fill out his portrait of Dublin. “I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality, the latter ‘virtue’ so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe.” He made the simple story of a Dublin Christmas party a parable of the rivalry between the living and the dead. His efforts to have The Dubliners published were a foretaste of his lifelong publishing tribulations. Publishers objected to his use of the word “bloody,” his disrespectful reference to King Edward VII, and his naming of actual streets and people. First refused by a London publisher, it was taken on by Maunsel in Dublin, who printed a whole edition. But then Maunsel decided to play safe, broke their contract, and had all (except one copy) burned.
Joyce had gone to Dublin in 1912 to hasten publication, but when Maunsel destroyed his books he resolved never to return to Ireland. And he never did. He had a Dutch printer set up a broadside that he wrote especially for this occasion to be circulated in Dublin:
… But I owe a duty to Ireland
I hold her honour in my hand,
This lovely land that always sent
Her writers and artists to banishment
And in a spirit of Irish fun
Betrayed her own leaders, one by one.…
O lovely land where the shamrock grows!
(Allow me, ladies, to blow my nose) …
The Dubliners was published after all in 1914 by Grant Richards of London, who had reneged eight years before. The reviews were not unfavorable, but in the first year after publication, only 379 copies were sold (120 to Joyce himself). The publisher reassured Joyce that no books were selling well in wartime.
“Why did you leave your father’s house?” Leopold Bloom would ask Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. To which Stephen replied, “To seek misfortune.” “The Dead,” as his biographer Richard Ellmann notes, was Joyce’s first song of the exile that proved to be his proper element. On leaving Ireland with Nora in 1904, he had promised a great book within ten years. The year 1914 was indeed his annus mirabilis, on which his lifework converged—when The Dubliners was published, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was substantially finished, Exiles was written, and Ulysses was begun. All were products of his residence in Trieste.
With the outbreak of the war in 1914, instead of being interned by the Austrian government Joyce was allowed to go to Zurich, which became his headquarters for the next five years. A Portrait of the Artist which bore at its conclusion “Dublin 1904/Trieste, 1914” was Joyce’s first plunge into himself, an autobiography in the character of Stephen Dedalus of the first twenty years of his life. He recounted his infancy, his childhood, Clongowes School and the university with unprecedented fluency and candor.
The line between Stephen Dedalus’s consciousness and his external experience is dissolved. After this immersion Joyce could not withdraw. His friend Herbert Gorman, who knew him when he was writing Ulysses, saw A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as “the coffin-lid for the emaciated corpse of the old genre of the English novel. It was a signpost pointing along that road which led to Ulysses and which still stretches wide and inviting albeit stony and difficult for other novelists who would be among the outriders of our intellectual progress.”
Just as Boswell opened the gates of biography by recounting the trivial idiosyncrasies of an unheroic figure, so Joyce first dramatized the fantastic resources in the consciousness of a boy. So he made a narrative art of the flow of consciousness. Its grandeur came not from significant external events nor potent antagonists, but from the inner mystery. Proust, too, had found the well of involuntary memory rich and deep in childhood. Joyce finds drama and suspense in the inner struggles of young Stephen Dedalus’s discomfitures on the playground, his bewilderment before arcane Jesuit propositions, his pain at unjust puni
shment for his broken eyeglasses, his malaise of disbelief and of insecure belief, haunted by the terrors of hell. And his unease at hearing the priest tell him that he might have been destined for the Church. Dedalus’s conversations cover death, love, art, salvation—all the topics that figure in Joyce’s later works. Foreshadowing Ulysses, the style varies and progresses, from the familiar opening, “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road, and this moocow … met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.…” gradually toward the mature finale:
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
27 April. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
Dublin 1904
Trieste 1914
In Dedalus’s encounters at school and the university we meet some of Joyce’s most elegant, most eloquent, and often-quoted aphorisms.
Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air.… a symbol of the artist forging anew and in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?
Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
And even in this straightforward narrative of a boy’s education, word and idea interpenetrate. Words become ideas, the self’s inward product of a blurred vision of the outer world. Not in re-creating the outer world but in making words their own world Joyce the creator imitated God.
Words. Was it their colours?… No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
The continuity of thought in all Joyce’s writing is not surprising, for it is all autobiography. He would expand the application of his ideas from childhood and adolescent tribulations to personal epic, and on to his epic of world history. Stephen Dedalus, whose young consciousness is chronicled in A Portrait becomes a hero of Joyce’s next book. A Portrait ends on April 27, 1904, and Ulysses picks up the autobiography in a new mode on “Bloomsday,” Tuesday, June 16, 1904. During the short omitted interval, Stephen has been in Paris, until his dying mother brings him back to Dublin. And as Ulysses opens, Stephen is living in the Martello tower at Sandycove with his friend the medical student Buck Mulligan.
Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:
—Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful Jesuit.
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awakening mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head.
And Ulysses re-creates Joyce’s personal story in a new world of myth and symbol.
But why Ulysses? Joyce’s reading had opened to him the world of biblical and classical myth, of Irish legend and history. At school, when his English teacher asked him to write an essay on his “favorite hero,” he had chosen Ulysses. So the vagrant Ulysses must have lingered on when Joyce sought a frame for his work about 1914. By then his own experience of exile had given the most famous ancient exile a special intimacy. Back in 1906 he had thought of a work to be called Ulysses at Dublin (in place of Dubliners) recounting the ordinary day of an ordinary Mr. Hunter. And then, halfway through A Portrait he began to see how Ulysses might provide the frame of his next book. The only competition might have been Dante’s frame for his Divine Comedy, which had engrossed Joyce and left its mark on all his work.
“I am now writing a book,” Joyce explained to his friend Frank Budgen in 1918, “based on the wanderings of Ulysses. The Odyssey, that is to say, serves me as a ground plan. Only my time is recent time and all my hero’s wanderings take no more than eighteen hours.” When Budgen seemed puzzled, Joyce asked him if he knew “any complete all-round character presented by any writer.” Budgen ventured Goethe’s Faust or Shakespeare’s Hamlet. To which Joyce retorted that not these but Ulysses was his “complete man in literature.” It could not be Faust. “Far from being a complete man, he isn’t a man at all. Is he an old man or a young man? Where are his home and family? We don’t know. And he can’t be complete because he’s never alone.”
No-age Faust isn’t a man. But you mentioned Hamlet. Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy, but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at the war the conscientious objector became a Jusqu’auboutist [bitter-ender]. When the others wanted to abandon the siege he insisted on staying till Troy should fall.
The Odyssey became Joyce’s way of measuring his hero against “the complete man.”
Later, when Joyce said he had been working hard on the book all day, Budgen asked if Joyce had been “seeking the mot juste.” He already had the words, Joyce said, but was seeking “the perfect order of words in the sentence. I think I have it.”
I believe I told you that my book is a modern Odyssey. Every episode in it corresponds to an adventure of Ulysses. I am now writing the Lestrygonians episode, which corresponds to the adventure of Ulysses with the cannibals. My hero is going to lunch. But there is a Seduction motive in the Odyssey, the cannibal king’s daughter. Seduction appears in my book as women’s silk petticoats hanging in a shop window. The words through which I express the effect of it on my hungry hero are: “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.” You can see for yourself in how many different ways they might be arranged.
Joyce went on to explain that his book was also “the epic of the human body.” The thoughts of the characters cannot be recounted otherwise. “If they had no body they would have no mind.… But I want the reader to understand always through suggestion rather than direct statement.”
In his Odyssey of the eighteen hours of Bloom’s and Dedalus’s day Joyce combined a scrupulous verisimilitude with extravagant symbolism. He pored over maps of Dublin and made sure that his book could be read in the same length of time in which the events occurred. In 1920, writing to the critic Carlo Linati, Joyce attached a Homeric title to each chapter, along with its own hour of the day, a dominant color, a technique, a science or art, an allegorical sense, an organ of the body, and symbols. After revising the scheme in 1921, he sent it to a few critics and to Stuart Gilbert to be included in his James Joyce’s Ulysses (1930). But when Sylvia Beach published Ulysses in Paris in 1922, Joyce had suppressed the Homeric tags, leaving his reader the challenging Joycean opportunity to explore for himself.
Joyce did generally follow the Homer
ic story of the wanderings of the heroic warrior. Homer’s first four books (the Telemacheia) tell of Odysseus’ son Telemachus, unhappy at home in Ithaca, then visiting the mainland for news of his father. The eight following Homeric books recount Odysseus’ wanderings and adventures in the twenty years after the fall of Troy that took him from Calypso’s island to the encounter of the naked hero with Nausicaa, and the legendary encounters with Polyphemus and Circe. Finally, Homer’s concluding twelve books (the Nostos, or Homecoming) tell how Odysseus returns home and recovers his kingdom.
Joyce adapts this Homeric scheme to his own purposes. His first three chapters (his Telemacheia) offer a prologue of the daily life of Stephen Dedalus. When the book opens at 8:00 A.M. on Tuesday, June 16, 1904, Stephen is at home in the Martello tower in Dublin with his roommate, the medical student Buck Mulligan, and their visiting Englishman Haines. We see Stephen teaching his class at the school and the headmaster Deasy (Nestor) asking him to help secure publication of his article on the foot-and-mouth disease. En route Stephen is tempted by girls on the beach at Sandymount (Proteus). Then in Book II the other Ulysses-hero, Leopold Bloom, appears, also at 8:00 A.M. on the same day, preparing breakfast for his wife, Molly.
—Milk for the pussens, he said.
—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature.
Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the Chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 99
