Literature paper
The Work of James Joyce
On the Works of James Joyce Author: Susan V. Scaff From: James Joyce, Bloom's BioCritiques.
To read James Joyce is to enter into the colorful life of Dublin in the early twentieth century while at the same time savoring Joyce's revolutionary style and elaborate erudition. From his well known early work Dubliners, a collection of short stories, through his novella A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his monumental modernist novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Joyce constructs his tales of common Irish folk in increasingly experimental and poetic prose. Joyce, indeed, is the quintessential Irishman, raised in Dublin and fascinated by its inhabitants and locales. Living by choice in "exile" on the continent for most of his adult life, he draws his local pictures from afar; and after Dubliners he embeds the concrete details of Irish life in a radical new form of writing. Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style draws us into both the innermost recesses of the human mind and the broadest reaches of the western heritage—myth, theology, philosophy, aesthetics, literature, language, history. The richness of Joyce lies in this remarkable fusion of the tangible with the intangible, the graphically physical with sophisticated learning and the life of the mind.
Certain themes run through the Joyce opus. Joyce develops the theme of paralysis as early as Dubliners, describing scenes of fright, reticence, immobility and passive retreat into the safety of home and family. Joyce's central question for his disenchanted characters becomes, how do we revive and renew ourselves, whether in our family or our religious lives or in the grander theater of history? Do we take flight? Do we challenge the expectations imposed by parents, nation and religion? Do we indulge our fantasies? Can we break new boundaries? Joyce probes these questions in several life spheres. Inevitably the Catholic Church left its mark on the Irishman, its rigid mores producing in him an instinct to flee. Just as powerful is the influence of the nationalist movement seeking Irish freedom from British rule. Art figures centrally in Joyce's thinking as well, a creative outlet that provides a way to nurture oneself and grow spiritually. Equally important is Joyce's absorption in family life. Son in a large, chaotic and impoverished household, he experienced his early years fundamentally through his family, and he writes about the relations of man and wife, parent and child, family members and others in the community.
Joyce begins his treatment of these themes in traditional narrative prose. The first sentence of Dubliners reflects this unadorned approach: "There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke," the young narrator of "The Sisters" observes, signaling the death of his friend Father Flynn (9). The sentence is straightforward, giving information at the same time that it arouses curiosity. Yet within Dubliners Joyce also displays his evolving dexterity with language and penchant for depth and complexity. In the last sentence of the last story, "The Dead," Gabriel painfully realizes his wife's inattention in his moment of passionate desire: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead" (224). The enigma of the sentence lies in the meaning of "their." Is Gabriel referring to the snowflakes, or to his wife Gretta and her former lover Michael and perhaps to himself as well, or to "all the living and the dead"? The line suspends rational thought and the linear development of a single idea. It comprises a moment of penetrating yet elusive insight.
After Dubliners Joyce explores the deep psyche in ever more radical ways. Joyce lived during the time of the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Until the twentieth century most authors took their task for granted: to introduce characters and develop a plot in chrono-logical order, generally through an omniscient narrator. But by 1900, a turning point in cultural history with Freud's publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Joseph Conrad, for example, was experimenting with disruption of chronology by using flashbacks and forwards for the reader to piece together, much in the way Freud reconstructed a patient's life story from dream and other scattered psychic elements. It was an era when writers and intellectuals were searching for meaning below the surface of human emotions and exploring the mysteries of mental life. Joyce pushes this tendency far, delving deep to reveal the hidden conflicts and knowledge of his characters.
In A Portrait Joyce follows the shifting thought patterns of Stephen Dedalus, modulating the style from the early impressions of the young child to Stephen's pompous talk at university to sample entries in Stephen's diary. Through all of these shifts, in contrast to such predecessors as Fielding or Dickens, he records the flow of the hero's mind. Early in the book when Stephen overhears his schoolmates talking about the boys caught "smugging" with no notion that this means making homosexual advances, he mistakenly takes the remark as a joke. Then his mind wanders, first to one of the boys, Simon Moonan, who wears nice clothes and once showed Stephen "a ball of creamy sweets," then to another boy, Boyle, who once remarked that an elephant has two tuskers rather than two tusks (42-3). What are the associations in Stephen's mind? Perhaps the color of the creamy sweets makes him think of elephant tusks? Or has something funny sparked these memories from the tone of the smugging "joke"? Logical links are missing here, and we are left to track the baffling movement of Stephen's thoughts, as irregular as our own.
It is in Ulysses that Joyce fully develops the stream-of-consciousness style, also called interior monologue. To record the "stream of consciousness" is to take down the roving of the mind. Written in fragments and linked by free association, the stream-of-consciousness style presents the contents of the subject's mind in process. The effect is direct representation of the mind's flow. In fact, early commentators believed that in Ulysses Joyce eradicated the narrator, turning storytelling into drama of the moment. However, more sophisticated analysis, for example that of Hugh Kenner, reveals minimally two levels of narration—the verbal thoughts of the subject interspersed with the subject's perceptions rendered by the narrator in bits and pieces (passim). The reader is thus drawn away from the objective external world into the character's inner self so that the text, with its irrational associations and disruptions, may appear haphazard and incoherent. In the stream-of-consciousness style the author puts feelings, impressions and sensations into words along with snippets of verbal thought, attempting to grasp the whole of the character's consciousness in its flow.
Ulysses is set in Dublin, Ireland on a single day, June 16, 1904, called "Bloomsday" by Joyce's readers. The story is about Stephen Dedalus, a young poet, and Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Dubliner married to Molly Bloom. Bloom is in the advertising business, and Molly, who grew up in Spain, is a singer about to go on concert tour. Having lost a son, Rudy, in his infancy, the Blooms are left with a teenaged daughter, Milly, and many marriage problems, not the least of which is their abstinence since the loss of their son and Molly's pending affair with her concert manager, Blazes Boylan. Stephen Dedalus comes from a large and poor Catholic family. The story of Stephen's childhood is told in the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and at the end of that book Stephen, like Joyce, takes himself into "exile" abroad to become a writer. The paths of Bloom and Dedalus eventually cross in Ulysses, and the two characters meet in a mythical reunion of "father" and "son." The final episode of the novel takes us into the mind of Molly, recording her rambling thoughts about the day, her affair, her husband and her marriage.
This plot, as the title Ulysses suggests, is meant to evoke Homer's Odyssey. Dedalus is the Telemachus figure and Bloom is Odysseus, while Molly plays the part of Penelope. The action is divided into 18 episodes loosely linked to Telemachus's search for his father and to Odysseus's adventures on his way back from the Trojan War to Ithaca to reclaim his wife, defeat her suitors and reestablish himself on the throne. With his friend Stuart Gilbert Joyce worked out a chart to help readers follow the action; on this grid each episode is given a Homeric name, a time of day, and a bodily organ, art, color, symbol, and technique. Within this tight structure Joyce grants himself the latitude to explore the potential for heroism and love and devoted family life in the modern world, exploiting all the possibilities for irony and the comic that arise from this unlikely matrix of contemporary and mythical juxtapositions.
Stylistically Ulysses invites readers to immerse themselves in the moods, preoccupations and fantasies of the characters. Bloom is mature and thoughtful, absorbed with his wife's infidelity, recalling his love for her and imagining outlets for his despair. Catching a glimpse of an advertisement for investment land in Palestine, he allows himself a vision of escape: "To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel and construction.... Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered for life as owner in the book of the union" (4.190 ff). This would be a manly flight, bringing him profit and worldly success. His wife Molly's reverie is more familiar in tone, moving through a woman's thoughts about body and clothes, past loves, the trap of her marriage, and at last a rapturous memory of the first time that she and Bloom made love: "I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes" (18.1607 ff).
"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot... coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane" (3.1 ff). Stephen's thoughts here are those of a young intellectual showing off his knowledge even to himself. As he walks on the beach, he allows his mind to play on Jakob Boehme's theory of perception. Here, as Don Gifford tells us in his annotations to Ulysses, Stephen contemplates Boehme's claim that a thing can be understood only through the physical signature of its spiritual opposite (44). Stephen's thoughts shift from Boehme to Aristotle, "limits of the diaphane" referring to Aristotle's theory of vision (45). Yet for all his intellectuality Stephen is no freer than Bloom and Molly trapped in their dysfunctional marriage. A would-be poet without a job, he has no real prospects for nurturing his creativity, and the episode concludes with his glance at a "silent ship" (3.505).
A fair share of the rebellion that we encounter in Joyce's work is directed at the Catholic heritage, and if Joyce mutes his cynicism, he does so by reconfiguring religion in the extra-institutional realm of myth. Animosity to things Catholic is particularly marked in Stephen Dedalus, whose rigid Jesuit schooling leaves him disillusioned and angry. Stephen's struggle with the Church begins in A Portrait at Christmas, his first holiday home from school. In fact, his doubt about his faith might be said to start with the argument at Christmas dinner showing his family members divided over the sanctity of the Church. For Mrs. Riordan the priests are "the Lord's anointed. They are an honour to their country." But Mr. Dedalus retorts that priests are nothing but a "tub of guts," whereupon Mrs. Dedalus remonstrates, "you should not speak that way before Stephen. It's not right," and Mrs. Riordan puts in, Stephen will remember all his life this "language he heard against God and religion and priests in his own home" (34). Stephen is thus not the originator of his distrust of Catholic authority, but one who has seen his own family circle split over their views of sanctity.
If doubts about the priests' authority are modeled in Stephen's own home, they multiply during his school years. Stephen is flogged because the prefect does not believe he broke his glasses accidentally. Father Arnall is kind, explaining that Stephen will be excused from writing in the interim. But the punishment is cruel, and to make matters worse Stephen's "sin" is set against two others. Some boys were caught stealing the altar wine and taking money from the rector's room. When found out they ran away, but were caught. They were given a choice between being flogged and being expelled, yet Stephen is also flogged. The boys' offenses are serious and stand in contrast to the harsh repudiation of Stephen for a mere accident.
At the center of A Portrait Stephen hears a sermon on the topic of hell that terrifies him. Already shamed by his own adolescent sin of lust, he goes into the sermon with trepidation. Hell is described in vivid detail—its darkness, its stench, the torment of its fire. "The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves" (122). At last the preacher prays that no one present ever be consigned to this horror, but this is little comfort, and Stephen emerges with legs shaking and scalp trembling. Could it be that he has sinned so much that he may not be forgiven? Yes, he fears that he has (125). In a fragile soul like Stephen's the threat of eternal punishment does damage to his religious faith and trust in the Church.
Stephen, who once took pride in his righteousness and considered the priesthood, flees Ireland, and when he does return at the call that his mother is dying, he is unrepentant. It would be so simple to accede to her wish that he pray by her bedside, but Stephen will not yield. At the beginning of Ulysses he is even remonstrated by his sacrilegious friend Mulligan: "You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you.... There is something sinister in you" (1.91-4). Mrs. Dedalus will appear later in "Circe" in a hellish hallucination begging Stephen to repent as he fends her off. In his youthful determination Stephen violates not just the Church, but his dying mother's religious feelings, and he remains haunted by his own callousness.
Despite his adamant refusal "to serve," Stephen is too imbued with the Catholic heritage to disengage himself and, like Joyce himself, continues to occupy his mind with the intricacies of Catholic theology. Thus, recalling the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas as he strolls along the beach he muses: "A lex eterna stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial" (3.48-50). Here Stephen raises a point of doctrine disputed in Catholic history. Do Father, Son and Holy Ghost exist consubstantially, that is, sharing the same substance? Or as Arius, heretic of the fourth century, claimed, should consubstantiality be denied and the Father be more accurately conceived as over the Son and the Son over the Holy Spirit (3.50-2).? This theological conundrum flits into Stephen's mind later in the day too. Carousing with friends, he this time degrades the intellectual debate with a hint of bestial corruption in the Father's impregnation of Mary with the Son by means of the Holy Ghost (14.307-8). For Stephen as for Joyce, the Catholic heritage with all of its doctrinal intricacies pushes itself into consciousness with urgent questions about its legitimacy, purity and authority.
The obsession with the Catholic religion is never resolved in Joyce's writing. While Joyce cannot leave the subject alone, he continually treats Catholic lore with mockery, disdain and even blasphemy, as in the so-called "black mass" conducted in the Red Light district in "Circe." Irony and a satiric tone often mark Joyce's portrayal of the sacred. At the end of "Cyclops," the scene in which Bloom has intruded on the rowdy company of Irish rednecks in a bar, the narrator makes fun of certain biblical scenes. An outsider who is outspoken in his humanistic views, Bloom antagonizes the boisterous crowd. In the end he escapes from the bar like Odysseus from the Cyclops with a "boulder" (a cup) thrown after him. In this grand finale Bloom is jestingly apotheosized in a parody of Elijah's ascension to heaven in a chariot of fire (Kings II). The episode doubles as a satire on the transfiguration of Jesus in the moment that Moses and Elijah appear to him high on a mountain. Ranging from horror and fear to scoffing and sacrilege, Joyce's rendition of Catholic lore dominates his stories as though with a relentless presence.
In Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Joyce does mitigate the derision of religion by assimilating Catholic credo into an encompassing "humanist" myth of human life. There is irony in this gesture. In Ulysses Joyce makes Bloom a tongue-and-cheek Jesus figure, preaching and living the doctrine of love even as he displays his human frailties. In Finnegans Wake Joyce makes the Christian belief in death and resurrection the fundamental motif. In the beginning one H.C. Earwicker, bartender, gets drunk and falls down, and the novel recounts his dreams that night after his wife puts him to bed. The story is based on a raucous ballad about Tim Finnegan, hod carrier, who falls off a ladder and is deemed dead until the end of his wake when he suddenly awakens to carry on with his life as usual. Embodying the myth of rebirth in the concrete life and inner life of a man's mind, Joyce brings the intellectuality of Catholic doctrine down to earth in a "myth" of the everyday that is both a primordial and the Christian archetype of death and rebirth.
The fall of Finnegan / Earwicker is charged with symbolic meanings. In the words of Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson:
Finnegan's fall from the ladder is hugely symbolic: it is Lucifer's fall, Adam's fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash. It is Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the fall of Newton's apple. It is the irrigating shower of spring rain that falls on seeded fields. And it is every man's daily recurring fall from grace. (5)
Overdetermined by all of these traditions and phenomena, Finnegan's fall is the mythical tale of an amorphous Humpty Dumpty that may be "put back together again." In the natural realm it refers to a world gone barren in winter and brought back to life again in the springtime. In the human realm it points to lives reintegrated with new experience and a revival of self in love. In religious terms it suggests the myriad moments of feeling inexplicably blessed after angry frustration or deep despair, the Christian myth of grace and redemption.
Joyce renders this vast myth in cyclical terms, and the cycles bear multiple meanings. The story mimics the overarching pattern of the combined Old and New Testaments—creation, fall, life of sin, God's mercy and a return to the original state of grace. Joyce reinforces this eternal pattern of return by structuring it according to the four cycles of history outlined by Enlightenment philosopher Gaimbattista Vico. The stages move from the beginnings of perception and the ordering of things through the refinement of social and conceptual structures to an era of rigidity that renders those structures brittle. At this point the world breaks apart and returns to chaos, and the historical process begins anew. In accordance with this circular conception of time, the last sentence of Finnegans Wake returns to the beginning: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the"; "reverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay ... back to Howth Castle and Environs" (628, 3). In Finnegans Wake Joyce has reconstituted the Christian story and Catholic dogma in an inclusive and beneficent cyclical myth of human life and history.
Just as powerful an influence on Joyce's consciousness as the Catholic religion is the identity of Ireland and its people, and the cause of Irish nationhood presents itself to Stephen Dedalus as a trap akin to that of the Church. The turn of the century was a time when the British colonized Ireland, despite its long-standing tradition of Catholicism, and was celebrating its Celtic roots, language and lore and the celebrity of such deliberately Irish writers as Yeats and Synge. Bound by all of its strong traditions, the Irish rejected British oppression, and the cause of Home Rule, led in the latter part of the nineteenth century by Charles Stewart Parnell, drew an adamant following. Though a member of the Protestant minority rather than Catholic, Parnell united all the factions of the liberation movement and was revered by his diverse followers. It is Parnell, in fact, who sparks the family debate about Catholic priests in A Portrait. To the shock of Ireland Parnell was discovered in a romantic affair with a married woman, Kitty O'Shea, and once the moral disgrace was revealed, he never recovered his reputation and authority. At the Christmas dinner table Mr. Dedalus supports Parnell and lambastes the priests who are denouncing the lost hero, while Mrs. Riordan defends the priests but not Parnell. Mr. Casey sides with Mr. Dedalus, and Mrs. Dedalus refrains from committing herself on the sensitive topic of Parnell.
Joyce himself supported the movement for Irish independence, but believed that Parnell had gone too far in insisting upon a parliamentary form of government. He favored a different leader, Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein. Yet these are minor political differences within the overwrought clamoring for the nationalist cause, and overall Joyce had no patience for nationalistic fervor. He derides nationalist ideology, for example, through the rabid citizen in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses. Here in Kiernan's bar, filled with Kiernan's collection of memorabilia connected with crime, the Cyclops citizen holds forth on such urgent matters as the reinstitution of the Gaelic language, the importance of reviving Irish trade, the excessive punishment of sailors in the British Navy, and Sinn Fein. The citizen's bigotry is rampant, and gentle Leopold Bloom, having stepped in to look for Mr. Cunnigham, is out of his element in this loud group. In every way Bloom loses. Declining to drink and talking in his quiet way about love, "the opposite of hatred," Bloom is disparaged for his Jewish background and for calling himself an Irishman simply because "I was born here" (12.1485 and 1431). Tough-talking belligerence and rough handling make up Joyce's portrayal of the nationalist ideologue in "Cyclops."
Stephen Dedalus, a youthful version of Joyce, openly repudiates Irish nationalism. Stephen's mockery is colorfully captured toward the end of A Portrait in his disenchantment with his peasant friend Davin. Davin has learned Irish, joined the Irish league and enthralled himself with Irish myth. Yet even Davin has refused the peasant woman who tried to lure him to bed when he was out alone on the road. Davin could have been trapped by the woman Stephen describes as "a type of her race and his [Davin's] own, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness and, through the eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without guile, calling the stranger to her bed" (183). Here the Irish soul is conceived as a mysterious pre-rational source of danger. Stephen denies Davin's entreaty to him to remain among their own people, casting aspersions not just on their supposed menacing primordial soul, but also on their weakness in adversity. The Irish allowed the English to conquer them and force a foreign language on them, he argues, and he sees no point in fighting for the freedom of such a lot. He will flee to foreign soil instead to liberate himself from the temptation to Irishness.
Nevertheless, like most outraged rebels, Stephen does not hold the line absolutely. A certain fascination and fierce loyalty underlie his resistance, no doubt reflective of Joyce's own profound ambivalence toward Ireland. Resigning from his teaching job, he agrees to an errand on behalf of the homeland requested by Headmaster Deasy. Stephen will see to it that Deasy's letter on hoof and mouth disease, believed by Deasy to be a threat to the health of Irish cows, will be published in the newspaper. He takes this on despite his repugnance at Deasy's pro-Gaelic, anti-Semitic diatribe (2.320 and 413). Stephen, moreover, finding himself outside the newspaper office near Nelson's pillar, takes inspiration to fantasize a new Irish parable. Two old Dublin women ascend the monument and though feeling giddy at the top toss out pits from the plums they have been eating to the ground below. This gesture represents an urge to fertilize Irish soil despite English dominance symbolized by the staunch British hero Nelson. Stephen's thoughts are sympathetically with Ireland in these moments (7.923-36 and 1010-27).
But by the end of the novel Stephen's disdain for Irishism remains firm. When he and Bloom sit down for coffee late at night in the cabman's shelter, the "Eumaeus" episode, Bloom, advising Stephen as a father would a son, encourages him to make his country proud. Stephen's education is superlative. He has every opportunity to use his talents as a writer, and if he writes for newspapers, that is an important occupation worthy of Ireland: "You have every bit as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the peasant has. What? You both belong to Ireland, the brain and the brawn. Each is equally important." Yet Stephen resists. As self-centered as always he quips, Ireland must be important "because it belongs to me," and concludes, "We can't change the country. Let us change the subject" (16.1157-71).
Pressured to obey the Church and disillusioned by nationalist ideology, where might a young man turn to discover himself and maintain his integrity? In the world of James Joyce art, creativity, and the productive force provide the means to grow and fulfill oneself. Joyce's primary artist figure is Stephen Dedalus, and Stephen struggles to find his creative power. His purpose in leaving home is not just to escape his heritage, but to become an artist. Stephen has difficulty realizing his creativity, and his efforts provide Joyce with a way of exploring art as "salvation." Stephen talks about art as something sacred, with himself as its minister: "a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of evergiving life" (221). The creative act usurps the act of worship for Stephen, and his purpose in life becomes that of God, to make a sacred world in his work of art. Such an accomplishment would be his salvation.
To this end, academic Stephen turns to St. Thomas Aquinas for inspiration and develops a Thomist theory of art. Art is static, having the power to arrest the mind with its vision of eternal truth (205). It possesses "wholeness," "harmony" and "radiance" (209-13). By this Stephen means that the work is gleaned in a moment of illumination, just as God's universe may be grasped in a moment of sacred truth or epiphany. Furthermore, just as the divine cosmos is ordered and harmonious, so is the art object. Stephen explains: "You pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure" (212). The artist not only exerts the creative power of a god, but creates a beautifully ordered art object, mimicking God's handiwork.
This is high-flown stuff, and it does not represent Joyce's own mature view of the artist. Joyce in his youth toyed with erudite theories like Stephen's, but he knew that to be a practicing artist the maker must stay close to lived life in its concrete everydayness. Joyce does, it can be argued, formally construct the ordered whole that Stephen describes by balancing the tales of Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in a complex textual network of interrelated parts and motifs. In fact, the structure of Ulysses recalls the medieval world view articulated by Thomas Aquinas. The universe is a book within which objects refer to other objects, and every object refers to God, the ultimate ground of Truth. Indeed, every thing and word is completed only in its reference to God. From this perspective the tight yet inclusive structure of Ulysses fulfills Stephen's Thomist aesthetics. Joyce's epic novel could be said to stand as an incarnation of the universe, displaying cosmic wholeness, radiance and harmony.
But Joyce is also the grand recorder of vivid detail, whether colorful, vivacious, sobering or obscene; and he is relentlessly concrete and explicit, describing the acceptable and the unacceptable, the decent and the pornographic, for public view. Thus, along with his many mundane and fantastical thoughts throughout the day, Bloom is graphically portrayed relieving himself in the outhouse while reading Titbits: "He allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right" (4.505-10). He is also depicted giving himself pleasure while sitting on the beach, aroused by Gerty McDowell as though a seasoned masturbator and voyeur (13.824). And he is derided by his wife in her late night thoughts for setting her up, as she believes, to have sex that afternoon with Boylan and begin an extra-marital affair (18.1007 ff), certainly a plausible inference for Molly given what we know of Bloom's obsession with the tryst and refusal to intervene. Stephen's dignity is also compromised. He too is shown in private moments, picking his nose and urinating behind a rock on the beach in "Proteus," blaspheming motherhood and birth with his drunken friends in "Oxen of the Sun," and carousing and collapsing in nighttown in "Circe." These are hardly details that would befit the divine and radiant whole envisioned by Aquinas and Dedalus.
Stephen's maturity as an artist, like Joyce's, will come only with the cross fertilization of his intellectual understanding and his emotional and physical sensibility. His erudition in itself renders his art vacuous and contrived. His fancy theories deprive him of the ability to portray human experience in its extent and depth. Nor should Stephen indulge himself in rapturous romantic passion, an adolescent tendency he displays in his first poem, a clichéd outpouring of feeling for a youthful object of infatuation, Emma (A Portrait 70-1). Powerful art, as Joyce recognizes, neither resides in mental strategy nor disintegrates into overwrought emotion. Rather, it fuses the two, tempering both in the mature union of thought and feeling.
Overeducated Stephen must thus be reborn as an actual artist, not just an intended one, and birth imagery abounds in Ulysses. Stephen is resistant to this painful necessity. He derides the birth process in the most inappropriate location, the maternity hospital where he and friends have gathered along with Bloom to await the delivery of Mrs. Purefoy's new baby. Stephen's bawdy talk to friends shows the utmost disrespect for Mina Purefoy in her pain, and Bloom bemoans Stephen "for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and murdered his goods with whores" (14.275-6). Stephen will certainly not nurture his creativity by squandering himself this way. His own birth to maturity, or to growing maturity, must occur before he can perform any significant act of creation equal to that of the laboring mother. Stephen's symbolic rebirth occurs after his collapse into a drunken heap outside the brothel in nighttown. Here in Bloom's vision Stephen, fetus-like, reemerges in the figure of Bloom's dead son Rudy, "changeling, kidnapped," delicately dressed in a suit and holding a book which "he reads from right to left, inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page" (15.4940 ff). Rudy reborn, the changeling Stephen may write his own book to be read from right to left or left to right, a testimony of his creativity.
We watch Stephen depart at the end of Ulysses without knowing whether he will be able to make himself into a creative soul, but he now enjoys that prospect. Stephen leaves the Bloom house where Leopold has brought him from the cabman's shelter and as nurturing father encouraged him to spend the night. In fact, Bloom has also invited Stephen to become his wife's next lover, audaciously showing Stephen Molly's picture and dropping rude hints. Stephen does not stay in this new "home" and rejects the offer of nurturing wife-mother-mistress Molly. But in his contact with Leopold, and by suggestion also Molly, he has been opened up to life beyond the just plain naughty or the abstruse. For Bloom represents the whole human being, capable in his expansive personality of perversity as well as high mental understanding, but mostly just functioning as a well meaning, generous and caring human being in love with his wife and devoted to his family. Here is the engagement and love of life that could inspire Stephen's poetry. Reunited symbolically with his "parents," Leopold and Molly Bloom, Stephen might find the security and attachment in adulthood to let his own powers of creation bloom.
Whether an intellectual or a fool, artist or bartender, wife or mother or lover, Joyce's characters all bear the troubles and rewards of their lives within their families. Family relationships may of course bring about tension and misery, and Stephen at the end of A Portrait aims to escape his home as well as the fatherland and his church (247). Family dysfunction is everywhere to be found in Joyce's works. In Stephen's case an unruly set of siblings suffering from the effects of their father's bankruptcy pushes him to the limit of his tolerance. The noise, squalor and general bedlam of the home are too much for this young man aspiring to greatness (e.g., 162). The pressure to believe also contributes to his malaise, and the proud distance he feels from the rowdy household no doubt contributes to his resistance. By the opening of Ulysses Stephen has "lost" his father by ignoring him and betrayed his mother by refusing her dying wish. He has fled his family because he has determined at this point that he does not want them.
Nor does Leopold Bloom's family life offer a model for Stephen, for Leopold and Molly live with deep problems in their marriage. In this household fear has taken hold of both husband and wife. Though fascinated with each other—the thoughts of each revolve around the other throughout the day—neither can quite approach the other to request the intimacy both desire. The source of their distress is evidently the loss of infant Rudy eleven years earlier, for since that time they have never made love. The apprehension of having and losing another child may be the cause of this withdrawal, and if Bloom has set Molly up behind the scenes with Boylan, he has allowed his grief and fear to turn him into a desperately manipulative man. What does he expect? Will he enjoy Molly vicariously? Possibly he thinks the affair might divert her from his awkwardness, or he hopes that the liaison will break up his marriage since he has not been able to take the step himself. Bloom does consider leaving his wife during the course of the day, as she does him. In the case of this husband and wife, longing and devotion have combined with fear and despair to render a wholesome relationship impossible. After so many years of matrimony Leopold and Molly, unlike Odysseus and Penelope in their reunion, may love, but also dread and avoid each other.
If Molly and Leopold were able to move toward each other, they would break the stasis of their unhappy relationship. They would take initiative and assert themselves to bridge their gap in communication and reestablish physical along with emotional connection. Doing so, they would overturn Gabriel Conroy's failure to revive his marriage in "The Dead." For it was in Dubliners that Joyce first introduced his pervasive theme of paralysis. His purpose in these stories was to write a "moral history" of his country, focused, he said, on Dublin because the city was "the centre of paralysis." He would present this moral failing in its four life stages: "childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life" (Selected Joyce Letters 83). In all of these phases, it turns out, Joyce presents characters fixed in solitude or in their family relationships—those relationships most fundamental to love, life and morality.
Every character in Dubliners is paralyzed. Father Flynn, dead of a stroke in "The Sisters," is literally immobilized by rigor mortis. Eveline plans to flee home with her lover, but at the last moment finds flight "impossible" and, unable to move, can do no more than turn "her white face to him, passive like a helpless animal" (41). Polly drifts passively into pregnancy and allows her mother, owner of a boarding house, to set up her up in marriage with the father-boarder, an unpropitious match ("The Boarding House" 68-9). In "A Painful Case" James Duffy, solitary bachelor and lover of orderliness, is hesitantly approached by a smitten married lady, Mrs. Sinico. Duffy barely responds before firmly declining, only to read four years later of Mrs. Sinico's death in an "accident" when she stepped in front of a train. Duffy is stunned, but it is too late. Paralyzed by inner fear, he did not act in time on his attraction, and he is left hovering on the periphery of the woman's funeral: "No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast" (117).
Gabriel Conroy is decidedly cast out from the feast of life even though the occasion of "The Dead" is a formal dinner at which he gives a glorious speech. Of all of Joyce's "dead" figures, Gabriel is perhaps the most immobile. Writer of minor literary reviews for a conservative newspaper in Dublin, he is constrained within a middle-class society that provides no spiritual nourishment. His life has become routine and emotionally sterile and his behavior formulaic. Lost in himself, Gabriel over interprets his own importance and reputation while shutting himself off from others by talking too much and failing to listen. Only when his wife refuses him in his after-party surge of passion does he absorb what she is saying about her long lost lover, and the effect is deadening. In Gabriel Joyce has drawn the portrait of a man who is far too removed to connect in any significant way with his wife or with anyone else.
What is the hope for such a person, or for Eveline or Leopold or Molly? Joyce, as we have seen, describes all manner of entrapments and forms of flight—whether from church or nation or stultifying family ties—along with the impulse to retreat, like Eveline's back home or Duffy's to solitude or Molly's into bed or Gabriel's toward spiritual death. Art offers one path to personal salvation, but not everyone is a writer or painter, and Joyce has far more to convey about life than is illustrated by Stephen Dedalus' development as poet and author. How does one remake worn-out, burdensome relations into a meaningful life?
One answer lies in the underlying meaning of redemption, the overt theme of Finnegans Wake and the implicit subject of all of Joyce's writing. Certain characters like Gabriel Conroy appear to be lost, but others show movement, a sign that they are developing a personal form of creativity within their private and family lives. "Art," then, expands to become a way of life that is experimental and open to growth, and the reward of such engagement may be a break from the past, renewal of old bonds, or fulfillment in new relationships. Joyce literally moved away from the city of his birth creatively to process the components of his early life. Taking with him his lover and eventual wife, Nora, he "settled" in various foreign cities to make his own family and find his way beyond the vicious circles of his youth, though these remained his lifelong preoccupations.
Traveling this treacherous path does not always require formal exile. For Joyce and temporarily for Stephen Dedalus it is the way, but for H C Earwicker, "exile" occurs within the home and entails mystical exits and returns that expand the circle of experience. Earwicker heads up the archetypal family—father, mother, rival sons, and a daughter. Within this elastic family constellation anything is possible, from competition and rejection to fantasy and regrounding to reunion and regeneration. Thus, sons Kevin and Jerry fight to usurp their father's primacy, while daughter Isabel and mother-of-all Anna mirror each other's capacity for duplication. Isabel replicates herself in 28 like versions of the girl child, while Anna or Isabel-to-Be functions as the maternal source of life symbolized in the primordial flow of the river Liffey. Within this myth of eternal return, creativity and change are woven into the fabric of life in its negative and positive entirety.
But for the Blooms of the world, caught in the immediacy of personal crises, the attempts at a creative solution to a problem at hand generate uncertainty and apprehension. At the end of their long day Leopold and Molly contemplate the risk of giving and receiving. Accustomed to bringing Molly her breakfast in bed, Leopold asks her to bring him his breakfast the next morning. Caught off guard and unsure of the consequences, Molly ponders his request and decides to do it. With this shift possibilities open up for the Blooms. They could of course back off and retreat to their fixed positions in the marriage, but they might also reacquaint themselves and fall newly in love. With this recognition of the creative force, Joyce offers his blessing on our human capacity to invest ourselves in new life, captured in Molly's recollection of hers and Leopold's first lovemaking in the last words of the novel, "Yes I will yes."
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Text Citation: Scaff, Susan V. "The Work of James Joyce." In Bloom, Harold, ed. James Joyce, Bloom's BioCritiques. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2003. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= BCJJ03&SingleRecord=True (accessed March 7, 2012).
Record URL: http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= BCJJ03&SingleRecord=True.
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· Selected works by James Joyce
Entry 8 of 15
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