Simply Joyce
Margot Norris
Simply Charly
New York
Copyright © 2016 by Margot Norris
Cover Illustration by José Ramos
Cover Design by Scarlett Rugers
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
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ISBN: 978-1-943657-05-6
Contents
Praise for Simply Joyce
Other Great Lives Titles
Series Editor's Foreword
Preface
1. Introduction: Life and Career
2. Dubliners
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
4. Ulysses
5. Finnegans Wake
6. Joyce’s Legacy
Suggested Reading
About the Author
Afterword
A Note on the Type
Praise for Simply Joyce
“Simply Joyce is a perfect introduction to the complex work of one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century. Margot Norris, who has devoted her professional life to opening Joyce’s canon to all levels of readers, has produced a lucid, erudite, and entertaining overview that will engage those who have heretofore been intimidated by Joyce’s reputation and will revive in others a recollection of the pleasures that have derived from his writing. Although Norris offers a compact overview, it is by no means reductive or simplistic. Rather, in deft but accessible language, she lays out the marvelous range of possible responses to Joyce’s work. Her book is a wonderful gift to all readers who love Joyce’s writing.”
—Michael Patrick Gillespie, Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities in an Urban Environment at Florida International University
“This new book by Margot Norris, one of the world’s leading James Joyce scholars, is a remarkably thorough and yet concise introduction to Joyce and his four major works. Norris’s commentaries on Joyce’s language are particularly useful, and as she works her way from Dubliners to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, she calls attention to crucial elements of each book, including their experiments with literary form and the values they embody.”
—Patrick A. McCarthy, Professor of English, University of Miami and editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement
“In Simply Joyce, Margot Norris, a world-renowned Joyce scholar, provides a succinct, enticing and informative overview of Joyce’s works. Her dexterous accounts of his challenging texts underscore how they openly invite us to immerse ourselves in them and interpret them. She comprehensively introduces readers to the intricacies of all of Joyce’s writings, including his fiction, poetry and his single surviving play, Exiles, at once taking stock of their fundamental structures and crisply commenting on them. Norris’s engaging primer never shirks the difficulty of Joyce’s masterpieces. But she triumphantly shows that the pleasures of reading Joyce are open to everyone, both novices and scholars alike.”
— Anne Fogarty, Professor of James Joyce Studies, University College Dublin, Ireland
“Simply Joyce is a smart, sensible, clear, and useful introduction to the revolutionary and innovative—but also controversial and challenging—20-century masterworks by James Joyce.”
—Vincent J. Cheng, Shirley Sutton Thomas Professor of English, University of Utah and author of Joyce, Race, and Empire and other studies
Other Great Lives Titles
Simply Austen by Joan Klingel Ray
Simply Beckett by Katherine Weiss
Simply Beethoven by Leon Plantinga
Simply Chaplin by David Sterrett
Simply Chopin by William Smialek
Simply Darwin by Michael Ruse
Simply Descartes by Kurt Smith
Simply Dirac by Helge Kragh
Simply Dostoevsky by Gary Saul Morson
Simply Edison by Paul Israel
Simply Eliot by Joseph Maddrey
Simply Euler by Robert E. Bradley
Simply Faulkner by Philip Weinstein
Simply Freud by Stephen Frosh
Simply Gödel by Richard Tieszen
Simply Hegel by Robert Wicks
Simply Heidegger by Mahon O’Brien
Simply Hemingway by Mark P. Ott
Simply Hitchcock by David Sterrett
Simply Machiavelli by Robert Fredona
Simply Napoleon by J. David Markham & Matthew Zarzeczny
Simply Nietzsche by Peter Kail
Simply Newton by Michael Nauenberg
Simply Riemann by Jeremy Gray
Simply Tolstoy by Donna Tussing Orwin
Simply Turing by Michael Olinick
Simply Twain by R. Kent Rasmussen
Simply Wagner by Thomas S. Grey
Simply Wittgenstein by James C. Klagge
Simply Woolf by Mary Ann Caws
Series Editor's Foreword
Simply Charly’s “Great Lives” series offers brief but authoritative introductions to the world’s most influential people—scientists, artists, writers, economists, and other historical figures whose contributions have had a meaningful and enduring impact on our society. Each book, presented in an engaging and accessible fashion, provides an illuminating look at their works, ideas, personal lives, and the legacies they left behind. Our authors are prominent scholars and other top experts who have dedicated their careers to exploring each facet of their subjects’ work and personal lives.
Unlike many other works that are merely descriptions of the major milestones in a person’s life, the “Great Lives” series goes above and beyond the standard format and content. Every book includes not just the biographical information, such as the little-known character traits, quirks, strengths and frailties, but, above all, focuses on each individual’s extraordinary professional achievements.
In its exploration of famous lives that have sometimes been shrouded in secrecy, surrounded by myths and misconceptions, or caught up in controversies, the “Great Lives” series brings substance, depth, and clarity to the sometimes-complex lives and work of history’s most powerful and influential people.
What can a reader learn from the “Great Lives” series? These volumes shed light on the thought processes, as well as specific events and experiences, that led these remarkable people to their groundbreaking discoveries or other achievements; the books also present various challenges they had to face and overcome to make history in their respective fields.
We hope that by exploring this series, readers will not only gain new knowledge and understanding of what drove these geniuses, but also find inspiration for their own lives. Isn’t this what a great book is supposed to do?
Charles Carlini, Simply Charly
New York City
Preface
James Joyce is considered one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. But is he one of the most widely read? This question is prompted by what many consider the extraordinary difficulty of some of his works, which daunted readers from the very beginning of their publication. The Irish writer George Moore was sent a copy of Ulysses shortly after it was published, and immediately complained about it. “I was told I must read it, but how can one plow through such stuff?” he tol
d a friend. A century later these works remain difficult for many readers approaching them for the first time, and Simply Joyce has this readership particularly in mind as it offers discussion and analysis of Joyce’s writing. The project of this book is not to simplify Joyce by putting aside the remarkable complexity that makes his themes and language so aesthetically and intellectually rich, but to make his unique work accessible. The approach that will enable this is to offer an introduction to Joyce’s life and career, followed by a systematic study of each of his major works: the short stories of Dubliners, his coming-of-age novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his classic Ulysses, and the highly experimental Finnegans Wake. Readers will be led through each of these works consecutively, from beginning to end, with descriptions and summaries of the themes, but also with attention to the language, not only to what it says but also to what it does not say, to its mode of expression, the often layered meanings of the words, the humor of its puns and double entendres, and the beauty of its sound. In the process, attention will focus on the surprisingly ordinary traits and circumstances of Joyce’s numerous characters among the colorful population of Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century: the thoughtful children at the beginning of Dubliners, the young artist of Portrait struggling with ambition and family poverty, the Jewish advertising canvasser and his outspoken wife in Ulysses, and the complicated men, women, and children in Finnegans Wake, who are not only humans but also rivers and landscapes, animals and clouds, and illuminating symbols. The challenge for Simply Joyce will be to present this rich array of literary life without losing sight of the aesthetic and intellectual complexities of the language in which it is vested.
Given the challenges posed by the four major works, and particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, it may be helpful to ease into our discussion of Joyce’s life and writings by noting that these ambitious texts were not Joyce’s only accomplishments. He also produced a collection of poems, assorted insights or ‘epiphanies’, a series of critical essays, a notebook titled Giacomo Joyce, and a play called Exiles. These diverse writings do not share the fame of the later productions, but they have their merits and serve as a useful prelude to his more classical texts. Joyce’s verses, in particular, have a lyrical quality, and the distinguished Irish poet W.B. Yeats appears to have found some of the early poems highly promising. They, therefore, function as an indicator of the poetic quality of Joyce’s later prose, the way words are selected for the effects of their sounds and rhythms, creating a form of verbal music. Given his life-long love of music, it is not surprising that Joyce titled his first published collection of poetry “Chamber Music,” although this title by one account was inspired by his listening to the sound of urine tinkling into a chamber pot.
The musical theme appears in the opening lines of the first poem: “Strings in the earth and air/ Make music sweet;/ Strings by the river where/ The willows meet” (Collected Poems 9). The music appears to be produced by “Love,” a male figure wearing “Pale flowers on his mantle” and dark leaves in his hair, his head bent as his fingers are “straying/ Upon an instrument” (9). While Love plays a string instrument, a female figure in the next poem appears to be playing the “yellow keys” of an old piano, and in poem IV, there is the sound of singing:
When the shy star goes forth in heaven
All maidenly, disconsolate,
Hear you amid the drowsy even
One who is singing by your gate.
His song is softer than the dew
And he is come to visit you. (12)
In a surprising twist, the end of the poem asks “Who may this singer be,” and reveals that it is the speaker himself: “Know you by this, the lover’s chant,/ ‘Tis I that am your visitant” (12).
The language of this poem is deliberately archaic, and the scene is metaphorical rather than realistic, evocative of Romeo and Juliet only in its images of evening and night falling, of music and wooing. But in the next poem the figure of a Juliet becomes more explicit, and the mood lightens as the lover appears to hear her singing happily in response:
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair,
I heard you singing
A merry air. (13)
The lover is no longer at her gate wooing her, but in a room, reading, with the fireplace fire dancing its images on the floor, who puts his book aside to hear the merry voice singing in the evening gloom outdoors. If we wished to connect these poems to Joyce’s later fictions, we might recall a scene in Joyce’s story “The Dead,” in which Gabriel Conroy looks at his wife listening to a singer as she stands on a stair, and she later tells him about a delicate tubercular boy who used to sing, and who once stood under her window in the rain out of love for her. The poems derive their unusual tone from an intriguing intersection between the formality of the speaker whose voice projects an adult wisdom, but whose controlled diction cannot suppress the youthful and vibrant emotions it expresses.
As they progress, the moods of the poems of “Chamber Music” become much darker. The sounds of the penultimate poem XXXV are no longer musical and no longer reflect the joy of the beginning:
All day I hear the noise of waters
Making moan,
Sad as the sea-bird is, when going
Forth alone,
He hears the winds cry to the waters’
Monotone. (43)
The allusions to the sound of water predict the importance of rivers and the sea in Joyce’s later work. Stephen Dedalus, the young protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has a magical moment when he sees a young woman wading in a stream by the strand. He is captivated by her loveliness and, as he watches her stirring the water with her foot, the sound arrests him. “The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither” (Portrait 171). Many years later the sound of water still haunts Joyce’s writing, and one of the signature chapters of Finnegans Wake offers an image of two washerwomen doing laundry in the river Liffey, that is also identified with a female figure named “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” Joyce told friends that he wanted to evoke the sounds and rhythms of water in the words of that chapter, and on the night he finished it, he went to listen to the sounds of the river Seine in Paris, to make sure he captured it. He is said to have returned reassured that he did so.
But sound and music are not the only attributes of nature presented in the poems of “Chamber Music,” where light and color also play important roles. In the eighth poem a wooded area is described as illuminated by sunlight, “The ways of all the woodland/ Gleam with a soft and golden fire” (16). And light and color also illuminate evening scenes, as in the second poem, which begins with the lines “The twilight turns from amethyst/ To deep and deeper blue” (10). Remembering the evocative quality of such scenes in Joyce’s early poems helps us to anticipate the lyricism of his scenes of nature in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake many years later.
Joyce’s poems were not all lyrical, however. Although William Butler Yeats had been surprisingly kind to him, Joyce included him as a target in a satirical poem he wrote in 1904 called “The Holy Office,” that attacked some of the prominent Irish literary figures in his day. The complaint in the poem is that while these writers focus on producing aesthetic language and spiritual forays they are ignoring the realities of Irish life, which are left to a realist like Joyce to produce:
But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams. (Critical Writings 151)
His criticism of the Irish literary scene began even earlier. In a 1901 protest, Joyce accused the Irish Literary Theatre of abandoning its original plan to present some of the European plays that were revolutionizing drama in Scandinavia, Germany, and Russia in preference to staging more popular works to please a general public, or “the rabblement,” as he called
it. In “The Day of the Rabblement” Joyce argues that a “nation which never advanced so far as a miracle-play affords no literary model to the artist, and he must look abroad,” presumably to such Continental writers as “Ibsen, Tolstoy or Hauptmann” who were neglected by the Irish Literary Theatre (Critical Writings 70). Other early essays do praise Irish writers, however, including a 1902 piece on James Clarence Mangan. And one of Joyce’s most poignant essays, published in 1909, offers a highly sympathetic account of the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde. In “Oscar Wilde: The Poet of ‘Salomé’,” Joyce describes how Wilde, an Irish writer living in England, fashioned himself as an “Apostle of Beauty,” promoted aesthetic ideals in art, and became a “standard of elegance” in the metropolis of London. His success in becoming a celebrity is given some criticism: “In the tradition of the Irish writers of comedy that runs from the days of Sheridan and Goldsmith to Bernard Shaw, Wilde became, like them, court jester to the English” (Critical Writings 202). However, Joyce describes the persecution of Wilde that followed his conviction on charges of homosexuality as cruel. “His fall was greeted by a howl of puritanical joy. At the news of his condemnation, the crowd gathered outside the courtroom began to dance a pavane in the muddy street” (Critical Writings 203). The essay, written when Joyce lived in Trieste, displays a progressive political affinity coupled with critical skill in analyzing the ongoing vulnerability of Irish artists obliged to operate within a British framework. It thereby offers some insight into Joyce’s own decision to emigrate to the Continent rather than to England when he decided to leave Ireland in 1904.
Joyce’s later work, the curious 1914 prose poem Giacamo Joyce, generally receives little discussion because it was intended less as a literary production than a highly personal and intimate rumination on feelings inspired by an infatuation Joyce developed for one of his students in Trieste. But his 1918 drama Exiles is surprisingly intricate with a plot that entails the convoluted connections between four characters, and offers an echo of a biographical move in Joyce’s life. The play represents the relationship between two men and two women who have been friends for many years, and who become romantically entangled after one couple’s return from a sojourn in Rome, Italy. Joyce and his family had ventured from Trieste to live in Rome in 1906, where he took a job as a bank clerk. It was not a happy experience for him, but instead of returning to Ireland, like the figures in Exiles, Joyce took his wife and son back to Trieste after some months. Richard Rowan and his common-law wife and son lived in Rome for a number of years, and their little boy Archie still speaks a bit of Italian. While living in Rome, where Bertha was unhappy, Richard corresponded with a childhood friend named Beatrice Justice and developed some feelings for her. Beatrice has a long time relationship with a childhood friend named Robert Hand, to whom she was engaged for a time, and Robert, in turn, has begun to make advances to Bertha, Richard’s spouse. The play takes place over the course of two days, and presents a number of intense conversations between the men and women over their assorted relationships. The challenge Joyce meets in this play is to keep all the relationships uncertain and ambivalent, caring and loving, resenting and coming close to hating, trusting and distrusting, all voiced in dialogue. In the first conversation, Richard asks Beatrice “Do you think I have acted towards you—badly?” in reference to a recent conversation they held, and she answers that she asked herself that question but cannot answer it (Exiles 5). Richard tells her “You cannot give yourself freely and wholly” (8) and she agrees, with both of them suffering rather than gratified by the conversation. Richard’s wife Bertha’s own relationship with their friend Robert is more intimate and entails kisses, which Bertha then reports to her husband. “He kissed me.” “Long kisses?” Richard asks, and she answers “Yes, the last time” (27). Bertha appears to be indulging in a double betrayal here of both men, which is further complicated when Richard tells Robert that Bertha has told him all that goes on between them. If this play prefigures the adultery theme in Ulysses, it also allows us to see how Joyce managed to smooth it out in his later work, maintaining both a level of complexity in the relationship between Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and her lover Hugh Boylan, but with a far clearer establishment of causes and motivations and their potential resolutions.
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