JAMES JOYCE
FOR DUMMIES
A paper presented
by Stephen P. Thomas to The Chicago Literary Club at its Closing Meeting held on
May 23, 2005
The title of this
paper is directed at me; not at its audience. First a word about the
medical profession. You’ll see in a moment how it relates to James
Joyce. Prior to joining The Chicago Literary Club in 2000 I
had a very distorted sense of what doctors do with their spare time. I
had not known many doctors outside their offices, hospitals or clinics.
For that matter it still seems to me that doctors and lawyers don’t mix
very well or readily, socially. Perhaps that is because, when their
paths cross as professionals, they are often in conflict. If
I had to suggest prior to 2000 what I believed most physicians do with
their spare time, I would have said something like: “Well I imagine they spend
a fair amount of time on the golf course, or at the tennis club, also looking
over their investment portfolios, and then planning additions to their
already oversized suburban mansions.” Wrong. What I have
learned here is that the doctors, physicians and medical professionals in
this Chicago Literary Club are now, and throughout its history have been, among
its most prolific and talented members. I have learned that they
are also nice people.
I do
know a doctor, not yet a member of this Club, who was our neighbor in Hyde Park. He is now also our neighbor in Beverly where
we moved after we were evicted from Hyde Park. His name is Kevin
Fagan and he is a neurologist, which means he doesn’t spend much time chopping
people up or poisoning them with pills, but a lot of time looking at them and
listening to them or family members trying to figure our whether they are
really sick or just nuts. On Easter Sunday, 2004 we were
dinner guests of the Fagans, and although I had known Kevin for more than 10
years, I had never thought to ask about his interests. So I said --
“Kevin, what do you like to read?”
And he replied: “Mostly any of James Joyce, and then I spend some time
with W. B. Yeats. And then I come back to Joyce and start over
again. That’s pretty much it.” I
later learned that Joyce did once say, only partly in jest, “The only demand I
make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”
I was astounded by
Kevin’s reply. I had never heard a word
before from him about James Joyce. So I asked: “Isn’t his
work pretty much written in code so that you have to have a key to know what
you are reading?”
And he said: “Yes, to some extent, but it’s worth
digging into. And also there is some of Joyce which is very accessible –
such as Dubliners. Those are very
readable stories.”
This led me to observe: “At last year’s Coop book sale I bought a
well-worn copy of the Norton Anthology of Short
Fiction for twenty five cents. I have
read two Joyce stories from that collection, and you are correct. I
could follow the narrative fairly well.” Kevin asked what stories these
were, but I could not answer. This conversation planted a seed
which has led to this evening’s presentation and more. Please note the
irony. Here am I, a lawyer
and wordsmith by trade, being encouraged by a doctor
to take some time to look at an author I had considered to be largely
inaccessible except to professional literati. So I soon stumbled on
to Dubliners at the local Borders, a
large print edition, and read all the stories, quite carefully. Let me
talk to you about them for a bit.
Dubliners
There are fourteen short stories and one longer
one. They were begun in Dublin in 1904
and finished in Trieste in 1907. Dubliners was
finally published in 1914 after languishing for years in the hands of a
skittish Irish publisher who feared libel and sedition charges. They
progress through episodes of childhood, adolescence and maturity, looking at
ordinary life, politics and social conditions to the final story, The Dead. This story can be viewed as an account of living people
who are essentially dead and of a dead person who is very much alive.
There is not much plot to these narratives.
They emerged in part from what Joyce called epiphanies,
little vignettes of every day people and events which he wrote down as he
observed and experienced them.
The word pictures in these stories are intense, cinematic,
even stereophonic. Here is an
excerpt from the opening lines of Araby.
Note the personification of the geography:
North
Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when
the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of
two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a
square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within
them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.
In another story, An Encounter,
three boys resolve to ditch school for a day and take a ferryboat out to see a
place along Wharf Road called the Pigeon House. Along the way, as they lounge
on a bank by a deserted field, a man silently walks by, and then turns back in
their direction. He comments on the weather, school and books, and asks
whether they have sweethearts.
Every
boy, he said, has a little sweetheart. . . . He began to speak to
us about girls, saying what nice soft hair they had and how soft their hands
were and how all girls were not so good as they seemed to be if one only knew.
The man leaves again only
to return a second time. One of the two boys leaves to chase a cat. Our
narrator is left to converse with what his companion has already termed “a
queer old josser.” Now the subject turns to the proper punishment of
errant boys, as he says:
. . . when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and
well whipped. . . . A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no good: what he
wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. . . . and if a boy had a girl for a
sweetheart and told lies about it then he would give him such a whipping as no
boy ever got in this world.
The boys soon
call to each other by their prearranged code names and escape from this encounter without harm, and without visiting
the Pigeon House. Before 1914 a few of the Dubliners
stories had already been published in a magazine called the Irish Homestead,
a kind of mix between the Saturday
Evening Post and the Prairie Farmer
to name two publications from my own youth. The editor soon enjoined
Joyce – no more of your stories. They are depressing and do not give a
true picture to our complaining readers of life in Ireland. I guess
we have to accept the much later statements of Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus,
that he and James were the two boys in the Encounter story
and that this was a fairly straightforward account of a homosexual encounter
they had experienced. That was one of the many grounds on which Joyce’s
Irish publisher sat on the manuscript as part of the Dubliners collection.
In The Dead two elderly sisters
are entertaining friends and family at a festive annual dinner and dance party
in their home. Actually, the home consists of several upstairs rooms the
sisters have occupied for more than thirty years in a building which includes
the offices of a corn merchant on the ground floor. This story is the
subject of a well-received 1987 film of the same name, the last to be directed
by John Huston before his death. Here are Joyce’s opening lines:
Lily,
the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she
brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground
floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy halldoor bell
clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another
guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies
also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted
the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss
Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other
to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to
Lily to ask her who had come.
Pretty cinegenic, right? Cinegenic?
One thing I have learned from Joyce. If the right word doesn’t exist, or
even if it does, invent your own. Use it and move on. Yes, cinematic might work as well, but then
would you also say photomatic?
Here’s Joyce’s word for being serious and flippant at the same time – jocoseriously. Joyce
and the love of words and language, sometimes just for the sound and flow of them,
go hand in hand.
This winter I enrolled in a course in Joyce’s Ulysses
at the University of Chicago. It was a graduate level course in a
master’s degree program. I had to find out whether I had any real clue
about what I had been reading for the past several months. The result – yes, … and no. Early on a debate which lasted for more than
three weeks started in class over whether it was or was not correct to refer to
members of the Anglican Church (sometimes called Episcopalians) as protestants. In the end the heads of
the departments of theology and of European history at the University had to be
consulted and were drawn in this debate before Professor Lisa Ruddick called a
halt to further discussion. It had settled down only to flare up two or
three times. Want to hear about the Eucharist and the concept of
transubstantiation? Body and blood. Real or representational.
Catholic or protestant or Anglican? Joyce would have loved it.
In The Dead it falls to Gabriel Conroy to
give the dinner toast. He has fretted over this assignment his entire
time at the party. How to strike just the right note. Make everyone
feel welcome and cheerful without being verbose. It’s kind of like being
asked to deliver the closing paper at the end of a year of The Chicago Literary
Club. Gabriel gives it his best. There is singing and dancing, and
some drinking. In the late evening a snowfall commences. Gabriel
and his wife Gretta are to spend the night at a nearby hotel. The singing
continues as their carriage leaves the party. It is a sort of
second honeymoon adventure for them. They soon arrive at the hotel. Something is clearly bothering Gretta.
She says she is tired. She is morose. Then she embraces
Gabriel. He is relieved. Still she looks very sad. What is
it? Finally she says “ O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim.” Pressed, she
tells Gabriel that years ago in Galway a young boy with whom she took walks
used to sing that song to her. Michael Furey. He is dead.
Gabriel is now understandably also very agitated. He must hear
details of Michael Furey’s life and death.
You can read all about it in The Dead, but please start at the beginning.
There are other levels of life and death in The Dead but here
is what puts it in Joycean context. Joyce’s
wife, Nora, admitted to Joyce years after they first met that she had once known
a young man in Galway who was now dead. His name was Michael Bodkin.
Joyce felt betrayed. He was furious.
It took some time before he could again think of Nora as his
alone. When Joyce visited Ireland for the last time in 1912 with his
young son, he traveled to Galway, met members of Nora’s family, and insisted on
seeing the gravesite of Michael Bodkin.
A Personal Note
I
was born in the low birth rate year of 1938, a year of scarcity near the end of
the great depression and wedged between two huge world conflicts.
Although my life may extend a few years into the future, that is mostly beyond
my control. For the past several years I have been trying to project my
life (or my understanding) in the other direction, back to the early decades of
the last century – or from 1900 forward. It makes me a kind of instant
centenarian, enjoying largely psychic privileges for which ordinary senior
citizens do not qualify. I have done this mostly through the perceptions
and expressions of two writers, one American and one European. Each wrote
primarily and intensely about his own life during these early 20th
century decades.
They are Thomas Wolfe and James Joyce. I thought
Thomas Wolfe held the key after I read Look
Homeward Angel [originally titled O Lost], much more intently than anything
I had read before. It takes Wolfe up to about 1920 and is such a thinly
disguised and frank autobiographical work that he was regarded with contempt by
his own family and was not welcome in Asheville, North Carolina for many
years. By 1938 he was dead, at age thirty-eight. So Thomas Wolfe (not Tom Wolf) served as my
key to the past until I stumbled into James Joyce with help from my friend,
Kevin Fagan.
Early
Years of James Joyce
Let’s start in
the middle with Joyce. In late 1912 James Augustine Joyce of Dublin, Ireland
was thirty years old. In 1912 the Titanic went down on its maiden
voyage in the Atlantic and Poetry
Magazine was launched in Chicago.
Joyce could not know that his life was already more than half over. He
was a self-proclaimed writer and artist whose body of published work then consisted of a slim
volume of poetry (which he rightly felt was of little literary merit) and a few
essays, feature articles, short stories and polemics which had found their way
into print, some self-published. Joyce was living in Trieste, a seaport
in northern Italy. He had not lived in Ireland for ten years, living since
1902 in self-imposed exile in Paris, Rome and Trieste, mostly Trieste.
He had returned to Ireland three times since leaving in
1902 to attend to compelling family or business matters. He was
determined never again to return to Ireland, and he did not. Even so, the
life, politics and culture of Ireland, and especially of Dublin, were to remain
the central focus of his work and thought. He tutored students in English
– otherwise he was unemployed. He had been living in Europe with Nora
Barnacle of Galway, Ireland since 1904. They were not married. They
had two children, Giorgio, born in 1905, and Lucia, born in 1907. Joyce
was indebted to anyone he could persuade to lend money to him. Friends,
family, casual associates, total strangers. It didn’t matter. His health,
particularly his eyesight, was precarious.
You may say that Joyce could probably depend on his family for support.
Not really. It’s true that his younger brother Stanislaus had come to
Trieste in 1905 at James’ bidding and shared his meager income with James and
Nora, sometimes living with them. James’ mother, Mary Jane “May” Murray,
had died of cancer in 1903. James returned from Paris at his
father’s bidding to share her last days. As she lay dying he resolutely
refused her request that he pray at her bedside. May was a devout
Catholic. Although the product of a superb Jesuit education, James was
estranged from the Church. In fact he held the Irish clergy (excepting
his Jesuit teachers) in the same contempt as he did the Crown and the English
masters and owners of Ireland.
At the death of May
Joyce at age forty four there were ten surviving brothers and sisters, all
living at home, ranging in age from twenty one to ten. James’ father, John Stanislaus Joyce, fifty four
in 1903, was an imposing, handsome, charming, talented, well-educated, cultivated,
unemployed, nearly bankrupt alcoholic who could be either loving and endearing
or abusive and repugnant depending on his mood, the time of day and how much he
had to drink. His singing voice, like that of his first son, James, was
widely admired. Picture a thirsty Irish tenor who at will could break out
in song in a pub and never want for a drink.
The Joyce family fortunes had spiraled downward from a peak
in the 1870s when John Joyce inherited substantial sums from his father and
grandfather to an essentially impoverished state by the time of May’s death.
It would get worse. There was little to eat and no one to look after the
children except themselves. James
Joyce’s solution to the situation at home in 1903 was to move out shortly
following his mother’s death, staying with extended family and friends in the
Dublin area, including for a time with friends at Martello Tower at
Sandycove. This was an early 19th
century fortification and shoreline observation post which is now a museum.
You will hear later what John Joyce thought about these
friends as depicted in Ulysses. James soon returned to Europe, this time with
Nora Barnacle, a hotel maid from Galway whom he had met in Dublin.
Joyce’s father felt his son’s companion (hearing of her Galway antecedents) was of an inferior sort, and
learning her name observed – “She’ll never leave him.” She never did.
It is possible from Joyce’s writings, letters and the recollections of
contemporaries to judge his general state of mind after these first ten years
of voluntary exile, that ‘life is unfair’ and Ireland has been so
corrupted by the Crown and clergy that it remains an unfit place to
live. But he was resolute. He would not give up. He
would not compromise. He would press on. He would find a way to get
his way, to realize his vision of artistic pursuit and accomplishment.
And he did.
Fast forward ten years from 1912 to 1922. His collection of short stories
– Dubliners – was published in
1914 after a great struggle over libel issues; his mainly autobiographical work
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man - was published
in 1916, taking Joyce to about age twenty, as he was in 1902. His most
influential work – Ulysses – was
published on his fortieth anniversary in 1922, a good year all around
considering that it was the year of publication of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland and Sinclair Lewis’ Babbit.
Joyce had become neither wealthy nor universally admired by
1922, but enough people had taken note of his talent that they took careful
note of much of what he said and did from that time forward. Soon they
were also poking around in his past. He managed to make the transition
from a ‘nobody’ to a ‘somebody’ relying entirely on his own skill, persistence
and talent, and with more than a little help from his friends. Friends
like: Ezra Pound who provided both encouragement and contacts with publishers; Sylvia
Beach, the American-born Paris bookstore owner (modestly named Shakespeare and
Company) who assisted with the publication of Ulysses; and
Harriet Shaw Weaver, an English feminist and communist who provided moral
support, editorial backing and, most critically, cash.
In 1917 several of
his poems even appeared in Chicago’s Poetry Magazine mentioned
above. The three major works I mentioned above have never been out of
print, and not because they are included in anthologies. You can walk
into many bookstores today and buy new copies of all three. You can also print
and read them in their entirety without cost from the Internet. What’s in these
books? We have already talked about Dubliners.
Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man
In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man we follow
Joyce through his school years and youth in Ireland to about age twenty.
His education, under Jesuit teachers throughout, starts in 1888 at age six at
Clongowes Wood College, the best preparatory boarding school in
Ireland. It continues, as family fortunes falter, at Dublin’s
Belvedere College from 1893 to 1898. Lastly he studies modern languages
at University College Dublin (founded by Cardinal Neumann in 1854),
graduating in 1902. The other place, Trinity
College Dublin, was for Protestants.
Remember them? Joyce’s degree was in modern languages, and he had a
special facility in French and Italian and also some German. He had learned Latin well as a
boy. To his lifelong regret, he never learned Greek. We can be
grateful for this gap. Had Joyce also known Greek another layer of
complexity would have been added to the work of a writer already destined to
generate prose so densely layered that scholars have not yet (as Joyce
predicted) reached bedrock.
There are three main themes in Portrait and
several subordinate ones. Theme one. Joyce concludes, after a fairly
pious start, that Catholicism and the priesthood are not to be his
future. Theme two. His destiny is in the arts, most likely as a
writer. Theme three. Ireland is rotten to the core and he should
plan to live his life elsewhere, as an exile. Distance provides
perspective and separates the observer from the observed, or does it? What
did he object to in Catholicism and the priesthood? For starters, the
permissible contact between priests and women was too distanced for his
taste. Second, the Church not only stood in opposition to traditional Irish culture,
custom and life, it also served as a handmaiden to the British Colonial rulers,
taking no active role in the Irish independence movement.
Here is Exhibit A on the Church and politics. Charles Stewart Parnell
(1846-1891) was as great a social and political hero to Joyce as Ibsen was a
literary role model. Parnell’s brilliant political career (he had been an
Irish member of the British Parliament and nearly brokered a deal for the
emancipation of Ireland thirty years before the Act of Settlement in 1922) came
to an abrupt end with a divorce proceeding in 1889. Parnell, at one
time the employer of Joyce’s father, had for ten years been a public and
private companion of Kathleen ‘Kitty’ O’Shea. Her husband sued for divorce on
grounds of adultery, naming Parnell as co-respondent. Scandal. He
was denounced from the pulpit. Parnell
resigned from public life and died within two years. In an early
chapter in Portrait young Stephen
Dedalus (that’s really James Joyce) is home from College attending a
family Christmas dinner when the subject of Parnell results in heated
discussion. The conflict has flared more than once before we enter. They are now at the dinner table. Listen:
We are
an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will
be till the end of the chapter. [That’s Joyce’s father
speaking.] . . . A priestridden Godforsaken
race! . . . [Dante Riordan, a lady, joins the fray.] If we are a priestridden race we ought to be proud of
it!. They are the apple of
God’s eye. . . .God and religion before everything. God and religion before the world ! [Another
guest, Mr. Casey, brings a clinched fist down on the table with a crash.]
Very well then, [he shouted
hoarsely], if it comes to that, no God for
Ireland! . . . We have too much God in Ireland! Away with God! [Now Dante is back,
screaming.] Blasphemer Devil! [She moves her chair
violently aside, leaves the table and turns at the door to say:] Devil out of Hell! We won! We crushed him[Parnell] to death! Fiend!
[She slams the door shut. Mr. Casey bows his head on his hands in
pain.] Poor Parnell! My dead
king! [Stephen is terror-stricken and sees that his father’s
eyes are full of tears.]
You can see that these are people who take politics and religion
seriously. In Portrait
Joyce tells us this is the Church he
does not wish to be part of, and this is the shattered political culture
in which he sees no future. It is neither the theology nor the Christian
teaching of the Church to which he objects. It is the role of the Church in society and the cultural despair of
the Irish under British rule. He wants out. He leaves.
Ulysses
We now leave the literary foothills and venture toward
higher ground. Here’s the executive
summary of Ulysses. Two guys wake up and
wander around town all day – nothing happens.
The two guys are Stephen Dedalus,
remember him, -- from Portrait, and Leopold Bloom.
Stephen (James Joyce in thin disguise) is now about twenty two, still
shaken by his mother’s recent death, Leopold
Bloom has no precise counterpart in the actual life of Joyce. He is a thirty eight year old mild mannered, peace loving, advertising solicitor
married to a stage vocalist (I hesitate to say ‘diva’) named Molly Bloom, age
thirty three. That’s it. All the rest are minor figures, and there are
many, who wander on and off the stage of Ulysses. It’s a big stage: eighteen ‘episodes’ and 650 pages.
The total word count in Ulysses is around
350,000, including about 33,000 different words, of which some 16,000 are used
only once.
A few words about Molly Bloom. She seems to spend a lot of time in bed. When we first meet her, Bloom is bringing up
her morning tea. Nearly twenty four
hours later she is still in bed, and her interior monologue, eight giant
sentences, some 19,000 words, are the entire final chapter. If she has been out of bed at all in the meantime,
it was only to let her stage manager, impresario and gentlemen friend, Blazes
Boylan, in for their afternoon appointment.
But Bloom loves Molly and Molly loves Bloom. They are just caught up in a difficult
decade in their relationship. Both remain
hopeful of better times ahead.
The voice and language style in Ulysses
change frequently. Sometimes the account is carried by the
familiar omniscient, external, unnamed narrator common to much fiction. But often, Stephen or Leopold carry the narrative
in their own internal thoughts or monologues, also termed “stream of
consciousness.” Here is an example. Bloom is attending a funeral service, riding
to the cemetery in a carriage with several casual acquaintances, including
Simon, Stephen’s father. Bloom sees young
Stephen, whom he hardly knows, outside
the carriage window and observes to Simon:
There’s a friend of yours gone by. . .. Your son and heir.
Simon is not impressed. He’s in with a lowdown
crowd. . . . That Mulligan is a contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all
accounts. His name stinks all over
Dublin. . . I’ll . . . write a letter one of these days to his mother or
his aunt . . . that will open her eye as wide as a gate. I’ll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me.
Bloom
glances around the carriage at Simon and the others and thinks: Noisy selfwilled man. Full of his son. He is right.
Something to hand on. If little
Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly
in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be. From me.
Just a chance. Must have been
that morning in Raymond terrace she was at the window watching the two dogs at
it by the wall . . .. And the sergeant
grinning up. She had that cream gown on
with the rip she never stitched. Give us
a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for
it. How life begins. Got big then.
Had to refuse the Greystones concert.
My son inside her. I could have
helped him on in life. I could. Make him independent. Learn German too.
But little Rudy lived only eleven days, and that was eleven years ago,
and things have never been the same between Leopold Bloom and Molly. They have a daughter, Milly, whom Bloom dearly loves. But he has no heir.
All of Ulysses takes place
in Dublin on June 16, 1904. June 16 is
known the world over as Bloomsday. That
is the only question which will be on the quiz for this lecture. Bloomsday, June 16. Last year was the centennial. The account is complex, filled with motifs
and symbols. As Bloom’s dying father says to him: Every
word counts. The chapters or episodes are not
numbered. Instead they have been named
by Joyce and others for corresponding or correlative episodes in Homer’s epic,
beginning with Telemachus and ending with Molly
Bloom’s soliloquy in Penelope. The title reflects Joyce’s reliance on the
Latin, not the Greek version of Homer.
So we have Ulysses, not Odysseus.
Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are the flawed, wandering heroes.
That’s just a taste of Ulysses.
Stephen Dedalus is a youthful fallen Catholic, convinced that his destiny is to
be a great artist, but probably not in Ireland. Leopold Bloom is a nonobservant
Jew, a peace-loving man without an heir, and, effectively, without a wife. Both Stephen and Bloom are outsiders, exiles
in the country of their birth. Stephen
is an exile by choice feeling betrayed by Ireland. Bloom is an outsider by circumstance, an
Irish patriot not accepted as such by his countrymen because he is in their
view something alien. I’m not going to
speak more about Ulysses except to say that it is
more accessible than its reputation suggests.
And there are excellent, almost indispensable, publications to help
guide the way, in particular Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated and Blamire’s The New Bloomsday Book. I must also pay tribute to Joyce’s principal
biographer, Richard Ellmann. His superb biography of Joyce was first
published in 1959 with a revised edition issued in 1982 by Oxford University
Press. Joyce wrote and received so many
letters which have survived that it is possible to feel pretty confident about
the documentation of his life and work.
Also, during the 1950s Ellmann interviewed many people who were then
still alive and could give first-hand accounts of what they knew, suspected, or
had heard about Joyce.
Finnegans Wake
We have said that Ulysses was
published in 1922. Joyce started almost
immediately on his next great work, Finnegans Wake. Don’t even think of using an apostrophe in the title or Joyce will
pursue you from his grave. This work was
published in completed form in 1939.
Over the preceding years it had been partially published in fragments as
Work in Progress. Despite the
huge effort Joyce invested in Finnegans Wake, it was neither a critical nor a commercial
success. He was deeply
disappointed. Ulysses
had changed the world. The Wake seemed to be just another confusing entry in the
lexicon. It is set in Ireland and is
highly allegorical and symbolic. The
names, ages and personalities of the characters are in flux. Some feel it is not a narrative as much as a
dream sequence. In short, Finnegans Wake is not for
dummies. I have read about one third of
it. Getting a firmer grip on the Wake is one of my projects-in-waiting.
Later Years and a Final Word
Joyce’s eyesight and general health were never good after Ulysses emerged in 1922.
His daughter, Lucia, mentally very unstable, lived with Joyce and Nora
through much of her adult life. Parts of
the Wake were written by Joyce in a darkened
study with Lucia by his side in the dim light. Joyce and Nora were married in 1931. This was in his father’s absence, but on his
birthday. Giorgio and Lucia were thereby
legitimized and became lawful heirs in the Joyce line. In 1940 the Joyces left France seeking refuge
in Switzerland from World War II (just as they had during World War I). In 1941 Joyce died in Zurich of complications
following surgery for a ruptured ulcer.
He is buried there. Harriet Weaver paid for the funeral. For a man who was both poor and extravagant
during his entire life, James Joyce’s
portrait and the opening lines from of Finnegans Wake now appear on the Irish ten pound note. As for a legacy for others, Ulysses and the Wake have now
supported three generations of scholars and scholarship with no end in sight.
You can think of the increasing complexity of expression
and style in Joyce’s four major works in mathematical terms as a linear
extension of numbers, but it must be an exponential extension. Thus, if Dubliners is a two, then Portrait is a four; and Ulysses is four
squared to sixteen, which, once again squared for
the Wake, makes 256. Joyce then ran out of time.
From my perspective the works of Joyce can be characterized
as constituting the greatest party held in the 20th century at which
the guest of honor was the English language.
At the end of the party it can be agreed that everyone had a good time,
and also that the guest of honor, our beloved language, was not only properly honored
but forever enriched and enlarged.
© 2005 by Stephen P.
Thomas
Chicago, Illinois
CH1 3241296v.1