The period during which Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake, 1923 to 1939, was a time of growing success and fame, but also of difficulty and familial tragedy. Writers began to write memoirs and studies of Joyce’s work, with Herbert Gorman’s James Joyce: His First Forty Years appearing in 1924 and Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ in 1934. The support of Harriet Shaw Weaver allowed the Joyce family to live very comfortably, eating out most evenings at fine restaurants and enjoying pleasant vacations at handsome hotels. New friendships were forged, including one with the young writer, Samuel Beckett. The children seemed to be doing well for a time, given their relocation to three different countries during their youth, which required them to learn Italian, German, and French, even as the family spoke English and Italian at home.
The writing of Finnegans Wake posed an immense challenge to Joyce because the work, initially titled Work in Progress, was highly experimental, both in its content with an array of characters with constantly fluctuating identities and events—and its style, which included words constantly inflected from English by multiple meanings and by other languages. Critic John Bishop reports that Joyce claimed he wanted “to write this book about the night” (Joyce’s Book of the Dark 4), and critic Vincent Cheng takes this notion even further in discussing the Wake as “the construct of a dream, the perfect vehicle for repeated motifs and variations, for everything happening at once, for all possibilities and all history in the course of a night’s dream” (Shakespeare and Joyce 19). Unfortunately, early responses to this new work were more discouraging than encouraging. Ezra Pound, his enthusiastic early supporter, was not impressed, and told Joyce in a letter that “Nothing so far as I can make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization” (Spinks 39). In 1929, hoping to attract attention to his ambitious new work and give it some elucidation, Joyce enlisted the help of a dozen friends and colleagues to write a series of essays on Work in Progress, which were published under the Wakean title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. The book included essays by Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, and Frank Budgen, among others.
The work on the Wake was compounded by other difficulties. Joyce continued to have severe eye problems that required frequent surgeries that diminished his eyesight. His children’s lives moved on, with Giorgio marrying in 1930, an event that Morris Beja suggests may have prompted Joyce and Nora to decide to marry in order to legitimize their children’s right to any inheritances; they subsequently wed in England in 1931. A year later, Giorgio’s wife Helen gave birth to Joyce’s grandson who was given the name Stephen, harking back to Joyce’s early figure of the artist in his work. Joyce was so touched by his grandson’s birth, following the recent death of his father, that he wrote the poem “Ecce Puer” to commemorate it. At around the same time, his daughter Lucia began exhibiting erratic behavior that was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia, requiring periods of institutionalization, much to Joyce’s worry and grief. Lucia had hoped to become a dancer and appeared in a number of recitals in Paris in the later 1920s, and had also taken up drawing. But none of these enterprises proved to hold long-range promise for her. Nor was she successful in finding a partner, and her hope that her father’s friend, Samuel Beckett, might take a romantic interest in her also led to disappointment. Morris Beja reports that on February 2, 1932, the day of “Joyce’s fiftieth birthday, she became violent and threw a chair at Nora” (114). One of the family’s efforts to help Lucia took them to Switzerland in 1934, to seek the professional advice of the psychiatrist Carl Jung. But neither visits to psychiatric doctors nor stays with Joyce’s friends, including Harriet Shaw Weaver, helped her condition in any productive way. In March of 1936, Lucia was finally admitted to a mental institution in Ivry in France. Critic Carol Loeb Shloss offers a complex account of the painful events leading up to this institutionalization (Lucia Joyce 376-380), and notes that a weekly visitor to Lucia during her stay there was Samuel Beckett. Giorgio’s wife Helen also suffered a serious nervous breakdown in 1939 which ended their marriage, and Helen moved back to the United States.
Although these assorted problems caused Joyce to interrupt work on Finnegans Wake, he finally came to the end and finished it late in 1938. Every effort was made to have it published on his February 2 birthday, and although it was still in page proofs and not actually in print until a few months later, Joyce did indeed receive the first copy of Finnegans Wake on his 57th birthday in 1939. Morris Beja refers to the book as “one of the most amazing and formidable works in all of literary history” (121).
By this time Europe was in turmoil with the approach of World War II. Joyce was keenly aware of the situation and “gave concrete assistance to a number of Jews attempting to flee from German control,” according to Beja (122). The Joyce family began to worry about remaining in Paris with the threat of an invasion by German forces, and in December 1939 they moved to a French village where their friend Maria Jolas had a home. They stayed there until near the end of 1940 when they once again moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where they had spent the years of World War I. Joyce, who had been suffering from severe stomach pains for some time felt his condition become more extreme in Zurich. This was not surprising, given his anxiety for the safety of his daughter Lucia, who had been moved to another hospital but remained institutionalized in France. Early in January, Joyce suffered such severe pain that he was taken to a Zurich hospital where his condition was diagnosed as a perforated ulcer. Surgery was performed, but on January 13, 1941, just weeks shy of his 58th birthday, James Joyce died. He was buried in a Zurich cemetery. All other members of Joyce’s family survived the war, and his wife Nora was eventually buried next to him.
Joyce’s death ended an extraordinary literary career, whose output will be examined in careful detail in the following chapters, with detailed descriptions and discussion of the stories of Dubliners, his early novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the landmark Ulysses, and his last work, Finnegans Wake.
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Dubliners
Ulysses would not be Joyce’s first work to run into censorship problems. Dubliners was published in 1914 after a long and difficult effort: editors and printers objected to references in the text and demanded alterations often not amenable to Joyce. Later Joyce claimed that over a period of nine years, 40 publishers had rejected this work.
The volume consists of 15 stories set in Dublin at the turn of the 20th century, each representing the relatively ordinary lives of its residents. Their stories are told in a chronological sequence from the experiences of childhood, to those of adolescence, followed by adulthood and maturity. In a number of letters, Joyce made it clear that he intended the collection to offer “a moral history of my country.” He set it in Dublin, which seemed to him “the centre of paralysis.” One device for having the stories achieve this goal was to imbue them with those moments Joyce called “epiphany,” the sudden insight or understanding of something significant revealed in an ordinary event, encounter, or experience. Some of the stories are grounded in Joyce’s own biographical experience. The story “An Encounter,” for example, is based on his memory of playing hooky with his brother Stanislaus and running into a strange man in a meadow. Many of Dublin’s actual locations are either mentioned or can be inferred from the narrative, including the house that is the setting for “The Dead,” the last story in the collection; the 15 Usher’s Island address is now a Dublin landmark. These features of both factual and thematic content in the stories are complemented by complications in the way many of the stories are told.
The first three stories of childhood appear to be told in a kind of double narration, a first person account that may be either a child speaking of his experiences or an adult recounting childhood events. In addition, many of the stories appear to have gaps or mysteries embedded in them. We are given events, but it is not always entirely clear what happened and o
ften difficult to determine what they mean. In “Two Gallants” for example, a man goes on a date with a young servant woman, and afterward, she runs into the home where she works and comes out with a gold coin that she gives him. We are not told where she gets the money, why she gives it to him, or why he might have asked her for it. This element of ambiguity and mystery makes the stories intriguing, but requires the reader to reconstruct the scenarios and speculate about what is going on and what an occurrence might mean. Therefore, the “epiphany” or moment of insight is the reader’s rather than a character’s, and is often required to be earned by interpretation rather than offered by the narration.
I will now turn to each of the 15 stories in sequence and examine them from these various perspectives to explore not only their content but also their mode of telling.
“The Sisters”
The title of this story is puzzling because the sisters appear only in the last part, where they offer little more than a background for events whose foreground is held by a young boy and a priest. The story opens with a first-person narrator speaking in media res—that is, beginning in the middle—telling us “There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke” (Dubliners, 3). A few details suggest that the speaker is a boy concerned about a man who is dying: “He had often said to me: I am not long for this world.” The boy passes the man’s house every night for signs of a change, and says that “as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.” Paralysis is a common symptom of a stroke, but also a metaphor for the inability to act that Joyce appeared to attribute to Dublin’s moral stagnation as a city that “seemed to me the centre of paralysis.” The boy comes down to supper one evening to hear a conversation between a visitor named Cotter and the aunt and uncle whose home he shares. It now becomes clear that the dying man was a priest and the boy’s friend, and that he has indeed died. The boy appears not to like Cotter, and Cotter’s conversation is troublesome because it hints that there was something “queer” about Father Flynn that should make one wary of allowing him a friendship with a boy. “Tiresome old fool!” the boy thinks in response to this conversation, but as he drifts off to sleep, he imagines the priest’s face murmuring as if “it desired to confess something,” making his soul feel it is “receding into some pleasant and vicious region” (5). These various innuendoes suggest that the priest may have molested the boy in some way, but the boy’s thoughts never represent or concede such an assumption, and the reader, therefore, confronts a dilemma of moral judgment, trying to determine how to feel about the relationship as the narration represents it. The next day, the boy passes Father Flynn’s house and confirms that he has indeed died. He now revisits their relationship in his mind, the last days when the priest’s hands trembled so much that he spilled the loose snuff tobacco the boy had brought him, and the earlier days when the erudite man posed difficult questions that showed the boy “how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts” (6). This information adds to the complexity of the relationship which clearly served to inspire the boy with the confidence that allowed him to judge old Cotter as an imbecile. That evening the aunt takes the boy to Father Flynn’s house where his sisters Eliza and Nannie are holding a vigil by their brother’s coffin, and where Eliza describes his life as overburdened and “crossed” (10). She concludes with an incident of a fellow priest finding Father Flynn alone in the confessional of an empty chapel “laughing-like softly to himself” (11). The brief story has certainly conveyed a depth of feeling and caring by the boy and the sisters about a man whose troubled nature may have pushed against, or over, the edge of “moral stagnation,” as Joyce called it.
“An Encounter”
If the possibility of perverse behavior is left ambiguous and indefinite in “The Sisters,” the next story, “An Encounter,” makes it perfectly explicit. Two boys decide to skip school to play hooky, to go on a “day’s miching,” as Joyce’s brother Stanislaus described the biographical experience behind the story. At the end of their journey, they encounter a strange old man who engages one of them in a troublesome conversation about juvenile punishment. However, the story’s beginning offers no early clues or indications of how the boys’ adventure is going to unfold or how it is going to end. As a result, the ending produces a shock not only to the boys in the story but also to the reader as well.
This draws our attention to the fact that “An Encounter” opens with the subject of reading about adventure and the adventure of reading. “It was Joe Dillon who introduced the wild west to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel” (11). The boys are introduced not to the Wild West per se, but to popular literary representations in pieces like The Apache Chief that, in turn, inspire the boys to imitate what they read by fighting pitched “Indian battles” on the grass in their back gardens. But the boy narrator soon tires of what he terms this “mimic warfare” and decides that “I wanted real adventures to happen to myself” (13). And so he and a friend skip a day of school and head out to find some adventure without any sense of what that might be.
At first, it turns out to be a game with young Mahony playing an Indian by chasing some girls and mock fighting with their little friends. They do see barges and sailing vessels and cross the river on a ferry, and the narrator mysteriously hopes to find sailors with green eyes, although he refuses to explain why—“I had some confused notion ….” (16). This ellipsis obliges the reader to speculate on the meaning of this gap, and to consider such possibilities as that “green” may have referred to homosexuality in Joyce’s day. This occurs to the reader only in retrospect, after the boys encounter a man termed a “queer old josser,” and the narrator notices with surprise that the man has “bottlegreen eyes” (19). The man does not touch the boys physically; his molestation is verbal only and channeled through literature by first engaging with them about reading. “He asked us whether we had read the poetry of Thomas Moore or the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Lytton” (17). He then slyly turns the conversation to girls, and after Mahony takes off, to the subject of whipping. “He said that my friend was a very rough boy and asked did he get whipped often at school” (19). With this the monologue turns into a verbal expression of a sadistic bent, and the boy waits for a pause in the speech to make a getaway. “I went up the slope calmly but my heart was beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by the ankles” (19-20). The boys’ adventure has been a transition from children’s penny novels into pornography, and as critic R. B. Kershner points out, the boy has come to realize that fictions are “part of complex, embedded ideologies whose ramifications may be baffling or dangerous” (Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature, 46).
“Araby”
The beginning of the third story, “Araby,” appears to hark back to “The Sisters” for just a moment, conjuring up a house on North Richmond Street that had belonged to a priest before his death. The boy knows the priest only from a few things left behind, including some books and a rusty bicycle pump. But his narrative soon makes the quiet house in the quiet neighborhood come to life with the play of children, the odor of stables and music from the harness of horses, and the glow of streetlights. The name of one of his playmates conjures that of the 19th-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan, and in retrospect, we will find in the name the promise of romance under the glow of the Middle East that had also entranced the poet, as Joyce noted in a 1902 essay.
It is Mangan’s sister, who is never given a first name, who inspires what we would now call a “crush” in the boy narrator, and who tells him about a bazaar she cannot attend called “Araby.” The story is, therefore, a sad one, the tale of a young romantic whose descriptions of the life around him are intensely poetic and who is filled with sensitivity and longings for love and romance. But the boy will be defeated by the realities of ordinary life that bring him back down to an earth where uncles are drunken and forge
tful, and where bazaars are places of money, commerce, and workers rather than of oriental splendor.
There is little ambiguity about the boy’s feelings for Mangan’s sister. He watches her from under the blind of a parlor window and then follows her on the way to school, passing her so that she will notice that he has been behind her. One rainy night he goes into the drawing-room where the priest has died and pressing his trembling hands together, he murmurs “O love! O love! many times” (22). The reader can infer that the girl is not oblivious to the boy’s infatuation and that this is why she shares with him her disappointment at being obliged to miss Araby, which she assumes will be “a splendid bazaar.” He offers to mitigate her sadness by bringing her something from the bazaar, and we are now given the effects of his anticipation and planning for this event, which distracts him at school and casts “an eastern enchantment” over him (23). His Orientalism is inflected with the exotic and the aesthetic, and although he never hears the poem by Caroline Norton called The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed, which his uncle starts to recite to his aunt, we can imagine that its theme of nobility would have resonated with the boy.
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