Reading Joyce
A little progress through Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses
For the better part of the twentieth century, James Joyce haunted modern literature like a mythological figure, ensconced at the center of a labyrinth of difficulty. The encrypted majesty of his masterpiece, Ulysses, cast the alternately recondite and playful genius of his writing in a forbidding light (to say nothing of the maniacal experimentation of its successor, Finnegans Wake, one of the oddest and most impenetrable books ever penned). And yet, as a reader’s progress through the three works discussed below reveals, the high-mindedness of the author’s literary vocation was allied to a preternatural alertness to the tenor and texture of everyday life. As a result, Joyce’s calling to pursue the ambitions of ever-reaching young artists like his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, was tempered by a painstaking sympathy for the illusions and emotions of ordinary people.
Dubliners
Published in 1914, Dubliners, one of the most admired collections of short stories in world literature, was Joyce’s first book of prose. Although the fifteen stories follow different characters through disparate situations, the collection’s overarching unity of theme and imagery shapes an experiential itinerary through childhood, young adulthood, maturity, and public life. Many of the stories hinge on an “epiphany,” a telltale moment of illumination that Joyce defined as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.”
Born in Dublin, Joyce exiled himself from the city beginning in 1904, when he was twenty-two. In his writing, however, he never left — his imagination stayed firmly grounded in his native soil. The emphatically autobiographical Dubliners collectively relates events that take place in the city between 1894 and 1905. While Joyce’s attitude toward Ireland was harshly critical, he considered it part of his artistic mission to initiate “the spiritual liberation of my country.” (This adversarial stance, as manifested in the certain bleakness and alleged sordidness of some of the stories, led to a decade-long delay in the book’s publication.) Yet his severe regard is balanced by an intimate, almost secret empathy toward the undistinguished characters he dwells upon: the child viewing the corpse of Father Flynn in “The Sisters,” the boy in first pursuit of romantic disenchantment in “Araby,” the conflicted young woman too diffident to elope in “Eveline,” the political functionaries going about their business in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.”
Although several of Joyce’s stories are recognized as masterpieces of the genre, “The Dead,” the book’s longest and its final tale, must be singled out as one of the finest works of fiction in English; its concluding sentences concentrate the music and magic of our language into a breathtaking — and heartbreaking — spell. If you never read anything else by James Joyce, do not forsake “The Dead.”
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road . . .
Joyce’s first novel begins with an evocation of the sensations of infancy. Snatches of story and song and smell (for even the highest flights of this author’s aesthetic fancy are rooted in common realities) are summoned to the page. In this elemental welter of sound and sense, Joyce suggests, a writer’s education begins.
Stephen Dedalus is the writer in question, and the early portions of Joyce’s fiercely autobiographical coming-of-age novel show him growing up and then rebelling against his family, his country, and his religion, while never quite escaping his conflicted affection for each. The narrative proceeds in richly textured yet sometimes enigmatically unfolded episodes: a family Christmas dinner in which the spirit of the season is overthrown by political argument; Stephen’s first sexual experience and subsequent bouts of adolescent debauchery; a religious retreat that prompts a fervent but short-lived embrace of piety. Each episode represents a measure of Stephen’s emotional, educational, and cultural inheritance, a strand, if you will, of his imagination’s DNA. As he is on the verge of entering university, a liberating epiphany sets him firmly on the course of artistic aspiration, and a clutch of pages of enlightening theorizing on aesthetics and intellection follows; never has the thrill of cerebral exertion been so viscerally conveyed.
Although Stephen is a compelling figure, any reader past the prime of youth will recognize the egotism of his earnestness; emphasizing his hero’s self-involvement, Joyce subtly reminds us that this uncompromising young artist has not yet really set pen to paper. The author’s verbal magic, on the other hand, is everywhere apparent; the melodies he conjures in this mesmerizing and indelibly original portrait are transporting, from the simple observation of birds — “He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flash again, a dart aside, a curve, a flutter of wings” — to the expression of Stephen’s most eloquent temerity: “to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand — that is art.” Although those words may be presumptuous on the part of Stephen Dedalus, they capture with exactitude what his creator would achieve, triumphantly if often obscurely, in his next book.
Ulysses
Picking up Stephen Dedalus’s trail a few years on — his wings clipped, the fledgling artist has returned to Dublin from Paris no further along in the pursuit of his promise — Ulysses is perhaps the most famously difficult of all modern novels. Its difficulty, however, doesn’t lie in the story it tells, which, in its essentials, is quite simple: the book recounts certain events, most of them not in the least extraordinary, that occur in Dublin on June 16, 1904. The narrative focuses primarily on two men whose paths cross at various points during the day: Stephen, now twenty-two and a teacher, and Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged husband and father who makes his living selling advertising for a Dublin paper. Bloom’s wife, Molly, is the principal female character; the book ends with her celebrated soliloquy — and, despite the seven-hundred-odd pages of literary virtuosity that precede it, one can fairly say her concluding rhapsody steals the show.
What does make Ulysses more difficult than most novels is the manner of its telling. There are three major reasons for this. First, Joyce often uses a “stream of consciousness” technique that allows a character’s thoughts to speak directly, without the conventional mediation of the author, as when Bloom enters a restaurant: “Stink gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slop of greens. See the animals feed.” Readers who initially find the technique disorienting quickly grow accustomed to this type of eavesdropping. Second, as is suggested by the book’s title, the episodes in Ulysses correspond at many points to those in The Odyssey, Homer’s tale of the Greek hero’s long and winding journey home from the Trojan War. Not only did Joyce intend these parallels — he explained that he meant them to demonstrate the “epic” or “heroic” nature of everyday life — but he himself supplied them to the novel’s first commentators to aid their explications of its intricacy.
Third, there’s the challenge presented by Joyce’s sentences themselves. In few other books is the prose itself so much a character, changing in style from one chapter to the next, enacting what it describes rather than merely describing it. The stylistic richness and bravura of Ulysses are both daunting and exhilarating, often in the same line. The concentration of Joyce’s powers makes each passage a treasure to be excavated, each page its own Troy. (Sample Bloom window-shopping at a silk merchant — four short sentences in which the author later revealed he had invested a full day’s labor: “A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.”) Joyce’s embrace of sound and sense is all-encompassing, subsuming within his narrative a startling variety of tone: newspaper headlines, barroom slang, the languages of the law and of civil authority, catechism — all are given their turn on the stage.
Beneath all the complexity, Dublin remains the Muse, if not the real hero, of Joyce’s epic. No other work of literature had ever set out to replicate — and celebrate — the noise of urban life with such alertness, art, spite, and glee. Capturing the city he loved and despaired of in all its hunks and colors, grime and glory, grievances and yearnings, Joyce created a literary metropolis that hums, moans, shouts, and sings with the collective music of the human comedy. There is no other book like it.
