The chapter continues with the children possibly seeing the father’s erection: “What do you show on? I show because I must see before my misfortune so a stark pointing pole” (566). Later, we get a narrative of utter indecency proposed by a “procurator Interrogarius” who presents a family caught up in degenerate behavior that includes “unnatural coits” and possibly incest, “Honophrius , Felicia, Eugenius and Jeremias are consanguineous to the lowest degree” (572). These are only imputations, not actual reports, and can therefore be construed as psychoanalytic fears or fantasies, since the parents appear to remain protective of their sleeping children, “While hovering dreamwings, folding around, will hide from fears my wee wee mannikin” and “guard my bairn” (576). The chapter continues for many more pages before ending with a “Tableau final” (590).
Book IV
Book IV consists of only a single chapter, the last one in the Wake, and is in some ways reminiscent of the last chapter of Ulysses, ending as it does with a woman’s lyrical voice.
It begins with what appears to be a bright and sunny morning after an intense and difficult night, and with an invocation that reminds us of the beginning of the “Oxen of the Sun” episode in Ulysses, which is set in a maternity hospital and features a birth or beginning. The opening words “Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!” intone a Sanskrit prayer as well as the “Sanctus, Santus, Sanctus” of the Catholic mass. “The smog is lofting,” we are told, there is a fine sun, “Sonne feine,” and we hear a wake-up call, “Quake up, dim dusky.” Dawn will bring a resurrection, “Array! Surrection” (593), after a night we might consider troubling, although later a voice asks “You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep?” and is answered, “You may so.” The temperature has returned to normal and “Humid nature is feeling itself freely at ease with the all fresco” (597).
The horizon of this chapter appears greatly enlarged in the beginning, picturing a diverse Irish landscape and geography, and reintroducing figures—now also enlarged— that echo Earwicker family members, with the sons assuming mythic proportions as the ancient Irish saints Kevin and Patrick. Kevin is introduced as still admired by maidens—“A dweam of dose innocent dirly dirls. Keavn! Keavn!”—although they are here enumerated as a group of female saints. A reference to a “Kathlins” (601) may also allude to an incident in the life of the historical or mythical St. Kevin, who was allegedly admired by a maiden named Kathleen. “What does Coemghen?” (602) a narrative voice asks, invoking St. Kevin’s Irish name of “Coemgen.” A page or two later, it begins to narrate the story of “St. Kevin’s bed,” a period in the life of the saint when, wanting to live as an ascetic hermit, he made his home in a cave in Glendalough. In the Wake, St. Kevin builds a “rubric penitential honeybeehivehut in whose enclosure to live in fortitude” (605). He also excavated a space filled with water to function as a “hanbathtub” into which he immersed himself and experienced “with seraphic ardour the primal sacrament of baptism” (606).
However, we are reminded that this may still be part of the night’s dream—“From sleep we are passing. Three. Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing” (608), and soon we are back with the quarreling brothers reminiscent of Mutt and Jute in the first chapter. They are now given the Latin names Muta and Juva (609), and once again bring up a conflict between two men, this time a “fella Balkelly,” perhaps an allusion to the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, and his opponent, “his mister guest Patholic,” perhaps Saint Patrick (611). Their debate ends with the cry “God save Ireland,” or rather “Good safe firelamp! hailed the heliots. Goldselforelump!” (613).
We are approaching the end of the chapter, and the end of the book, so it is reasonable to ask “How it ends?” (614). Not surprisingly, we will once more first get a letter seemingly found in a dump, like the earlier one, and once again written in the voice of ALP and addressed to “Dear. And we go on to Dirtdump. Reverend. May we add majesty?” and promising “Yon clouds will soon disappear looking forwards at a fine day” (615). Later she will announce an impending funeral, “The grand fooneral will now shortly occur. Remember. The remains must be removed before eaght hours shorp” (617). When the letter ends, she signs it “Alma Luvia, Pollabella” (619).
Her letter ended, ALP now begins her monologue, of sorts, first speaking seemingly to herself, “Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing,” but then addressing a figure, her husband we assume, who does not appear capable of answering her. “Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!” she tells him, and urges him to get dressed, “Here is your shirt, the day one, come back. The stock, your collar. Also your double brogues” (619). “And stand up tall!” she tells him, “I want to see you looking fine for me” (620).
We might think this is an elderly couple, but when she says “The childher are still fast. There is no school today. Them boys is so contrairy” she suggests that this is either still a younger family with the twin sons we’ve encountered before, “one of him sighs or one of him cries,” or a memory evoked from a past. And there is a girl as well, perhaps not as bright as her mother, “If she had only more matcher’s wit” (620). Soon the couple is ready to go out, and although it is still very early, ALP thinks: “We’ve light enough. I won’t take our laddy’s lampern” (621). As they begin to walk, she takes his hand, “Come! Give me your great bearspaw,” and now alludes to the fact that he appears unable to speak although he does respond to her, “But you understood, nodst? I always know by your brights and shades.” Something is wrong with him, perhaps that fall from a ladder that we heard about in the early chapters, “[a]nd people thinks you missed the scaffold. Of fell design” (621).
As they go, she points out birds taking off, and soon they appear to be in the country, perhaps Howth, as Rose and O’Hanlon suggest (317), where they might visit the castle. “We might call on the Old Lord, what do you say? There’s something tells me. He’s a fine sport,” she says, but warns her husband to “[r]emember to take off your white hat,” while she too will remember to “drop my graciast kertssey” (623). She suggests that the Lord might even knight her husband or make him a magistrate, “He might knight you an Armor elsor daub you the first cheap magyerstrape,” an idea that sounds more like fantasy than possibility. If this walk in the country can be thought to take place on Howth hill, then it very much harks back to Molly Bloom’s last memory of the picnic on Howth on the day Leopold Bloom proposed to her, surrounded by nature in the country. ALP also remembers her husband’s proposal, “How you said how you’d give me the keys of me heart. And we’d be married till delth to uspart.” But then something happens and she says “But you’re changing, acoolsha, you’re changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is?” (626).
And she is indeed changing as she appears to be coming to the end of her life. Soon she says, “I am passing out. O bitter ending!” And now her last journey begins, “And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father” (627-8). For a moment she wishes she were a child again, “Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!”
The end is approaching, for ALP, and in the real world for James Joyce, who died less than three years after finishing his work. “End here. Us then. Finn, again!” and so Finnegans Wake ends with the words “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” and its last word is “the” (628).
6
Joyce’s Legacy
What effect has Joyce’s life and career had on our culture after his death and in our present day? It has been so huge that a comprehensive survey would require its own book. But I will begin with his influence on other writers, and then go on to consider films, music, journals, conferences, blogs and other evidence showing that Joyce continues to have a considerable impact on art and culture in the 21st century. These lists are partial at best, but they offer at least a glimpse of Joyce’s enduring legacy.
The personal and literary footprint that Joy
ce had on writers he met or befriended is well known in the case of such figures as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway, but it extended to other writers as well. Although she had both complimentary and unflattering things to say about Joyce’s work, critics have noted that Virginia Woolf’s 1925 Mrs. Dalloway recalls the narrative structure of Ulysses, with events set on a single day, and reflected in the language of interior monologues. Critic Morris Beja also found significant parallels in the experimental strategies of Woolf’s 1931 novel, The Waves (“A World without Ulysses” 21). He also reported that William Faulkner was so in awe of Joyce that he was too nervous to speak to him when he saw him once on a trip to Europe in the 1920s. And F. Scott Fitzgerald “offered in Joyce’s presence to jump out of a high window to show his reverence.”
Some later writers cited or alluded to Joyce’s work fairly explicitly. Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, published an introduction to Joyce’s work now available under the title Re Joyce, as well as a 1973 guide to Finnegans Wake titled Joysprick. He also wrote Blooms of Dublin, an operetta based on Ulysses, which aired on BBC radio to celebrate the centenary of Joyce’s birth in 1982. The British playwright Tom Stoppard wrote a play in 1974 called Travesties, set in Zurich in 1917 when Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Lenin were all living there. Joyce also appeared as a fictional figure in Flann O’Brien’s 1964 book, The Dalkey Archive, in which Joyce claimed that he had “published little.” And allusions to a long black coat and a “Latin Quarter” hat reinforce the assumption of a Joyce reference in Samuel Beckett’s 1980 “playlet” Ohio Impromptu.
Joyce’s literary influence has continued into the 21st century. In 2003 the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee published a novel titled Elizabeth Costello, whose protagonist writes a book called The House on Eccles Street which retells the story of Ulysses from Molly Bloom’s perspective. Critic Beja mentioned over 40 prominent authors who, in one way or another, had been influenced by Joyce’s work. The list includes Jorge Luis Borges, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Salman Rushdie, and Vladimir Nabokov, who taught Ulysses during his tenure as a professor of Russian and European Literature at Cornell in the 1950s. The theorist Jacques Derrida wrote an essay about the significance of “Yes” in Ulysses. Finally, Joyce’s work also had a surprising effect in the realm of physics. The physicist Murray Gell-Mann was scanning Joyce’s Finnegans Wake when he ran across the word “quark” (“Three quarks for Muster Mark” 383). He subsequently used the term “quark” to identify an elementary particle that is a basic constituent of matter.
Given Joyce’s efforts in 1909 to open Dublin’s first movie house, the Volta Theatre, the transposition of his works into film is not at all surprising. Joyce even had a meeting with the famous film director Sergei Eisenstein in Paris in 1929, who drew comparisons between his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin and Ulysses. In 1967, the American filmmaker Joseph Strick released a black-and-white film titled Ulysses, starring Milo O’Shea and Barbara Jefford as Leopold and Molly Bloom. The movie was nominated for a Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967, where it ran into a surprising censorship problem which caused Strick to withdraw it from the competition (Margot Norris, Ulysses 27). Strick went on to make a film of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1977. Fionulla Flanagan, the actress who portrayed Gerty MacDowell in the 1967 Strick film, went on to make a movie called James Joyce’s Women in 1983. A few years later, in 1987, the famous director John Huston made a movie based on Joyce’s short story, “The Dead.” It was his last film, and starred his daughter Anjelica Huston in the role of Gretta Conroy. In 2003, the Irish film-maker Sean Walsh also made a film of Ulysses, which was filmed in color and released with the title Bloom. It starred Stephen Rea in the role of Leopold Bloom. And Pat Murphy produced a film titled Nora in 2000, which focused on Joyce’s wife and starred Ewan McGregor as Joyce. But the most famous connection between Joyce and the world of cinema may be photographer Eve Arnold’s iconic 1955 picture of Marilyn Monroe in a bathing suit at a playground, reading Ulysses. Arnold made it clear that this was not a stunt, and that Monroe apparently kept a copy of the book in her car and read it when she had time because “she loved the sound of it.”
Music played a major role in all of Joyce’s works. He had a beautiful voice and shared the stage of Dublin’s Antient Concert Rooms with the tenor John McCormack (Beja 104), and in his later years, he promoted the career of another tenor, John Sullivan. It is therefore not surprising that Joyce’s books have many allusions to music, beginning with the poems of “Chamber Music.” Irish ballads also abound in his works, including the title of Finnegans Wake, based on an old Celtic folk song. Several of the stories in Dubliners—including “Clay,” “A Mother,” and “The Dead”—feature musical performances. The chapter “Sirens” in Ulysses is set in the Ormond Hotel, where there is singing and piano music in the background. And, of course, Molly Bloom is a singer about to go on a concert tour with her impresario and now lover, Hugh Boylan. In the course of these works a large number of songs are mentioned, which have come to play a significant role not only at Joyce conferences and special events on his birthday and on Bloomsday, but also in the cultural ambiance of Irish art. Author Zack Bowen published his Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce in 1974, noting that an earlier publication by Matthew Hodgart and Mabel Worthington “listed over 1000 songs in Joyce’s works” (3). Many have been recorded and can now be downloaded on Amazon or heard on YouTube and Spotify Classical Playlists. They include a performance by tenor Kevin McDermott and pianist Ralph Richey titled Music from the Works of James Joyce. In 1991, Timothy Martin published Joyce and Wagner, in which he traces Joyce’s interest in the composer’s music, and adds an appendix of “Allusions to Wagner in Joyce’s Work” (Joyce and Wagner 185-221). Critic Beja noted that Joyce also made his way into popular music. Bob Dylan’s song “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” contains the line “I’ve been reading James Joyce” (24). And the rock groups “Two Gallants” and “The Wading Girl” may have derived their names from Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait.
Academic interest in Joyce’s work has always been strong and continues to grow and expand internationally. A number of journals offer regular publications of essays and notes on Joyce’s work, as well as reviews of new publications and Joyce conferences. The University of Tulsa began publishing the James Joyce Quarterly in 1963, with Thomas F. Staley as its founder, and is currently edited by Sean Latham. In 2009, the University College Dublin Joyce Research Center and the National Library of Ireland began publishing the Dublin James Joyce Journal under the editorship of Luca Crispi and Anne Fogarty. Publications that focus chiefly on reviews include the James Joyce Broadsheet, published by the University of Leeds with Pieter Bekker, Richard Brown, and Alistair Stead as its editors. The University of Miami in Florida also publishes reviews in its issues of the James Joyce Literary Supplement, with Patrick McCarthy as its editor.
New York houses one of the oldest Joyce organizations in the country. Originally located in the Gotham Book Mart, the James Joyce Society opened in 1947, and its website claims T. S. Eliot as one of its first members. Other centers devoted to the study of Joyce have opened in various countries over the years. One of the most famous is the Zurich Joyce Foundation, operated by Fritz Senn, which opened in 1985. It has an extensive library of Joyce works, offers weekly discussion groups, as well as guest lectures. The James Joyce Italian Foundation began in 2008 and sponsors an Annual General Meeting in Rome in February. Also in Italy, the University of Trieste holds an annual Trieste Joyce School in the summer offering an array of speakers. There is an active James Joyce Society of Sweden and Finland, and Budapest in Hungary has also sponsored Joyce events in honor of Leopold Bloom’s fictional ancestry. Joyce’s work has received attention in Japan, Korea, and China. Scholar Eishiro Ito noted that an article on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in a Japanese literary magazine in 1918, and Japanese translations of Ulysses began
appearing in the early 1930s. The James Joyce Society of Japan is located at Tokoha University. Korea also has a James Joyce Society of Korea sponsored by Kookmin University, and Joyce’s works, including Finnegans Wake, have been translated into Korean. A Chinese translation of Ulysses was produced in 1995, and a February 2013 issue of the Guardian published an article announcing the translation of Finnegans Wake into Chinese. “Bloomsday” celebrations in the week of June 16 are held, often annually, in many cities in the United States and Canada. Celebrations at the James Joyce Centre in Victoria, British Columbia have included a Bloomsday Photo contest, a digital publishing initiative involving Ulysses, and always much Guinness ale. In recent years events of this kind have also been held in such cities as Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Spokane, and Montreal, as well as in Oslo, Madrid, Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Of course, “Bloomsday” is a major annual event in Dublin, with lectures, musical and theatrical events, and tours around the city which trace the fictional journeys of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom on June 16, 1904. Finally, James Joyce Pubs can be found in cities around the world, including Athens, Madrid, Calgary, Lyon, and Istanbul.
The preceding list of Joyce’s impact on writers, films, music, journals, translations, and literary societies is inevitably incomplete but points, nevertheless, to his influence on contemporary culture. An even more copious discussion of the popular legacy of Ulysses, in particular, can be found in Jonathan Goldman’s piece titled “Afterlife” in The Cambridge Companion to ‘Ulysses.’ Additional venues for study and celebration can be found on weblogs or blogs, as they are now known, and there are a number that promote discussion of Joyce and his work. The James Joyce Quarterly sponsors an Academic Journal Blog, and The Guardian offers frequent articles on his work on its Books Blog. The New York Public Library blog posted a series of reviews of new books on Joyce on his birthday, February 2, 2016. In honor of Bloomsday, the “Scientific American” posted a piece titled “Ulysses by James Joyce, Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever” in 2013. The site titled “My Journey with James Joyce” presented an interesting discussion of “James Joyce on Management” in April of 2013, and Frank Delaney’s site offers a podcast titled “Re: Joyce.” On August 19, 2009, Richard Lewis posted a playful discussion titled “Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses for the First Time.” And “Ulysses on Tuesdays” offers quite detailed discussions of the work supplemented with images and links.
Simply Joyce Page 17
