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

         

 

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