James Joyce and Classical Modernism

Leah Culligan Flack

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350004115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

James Joyce and Classical Modernism contends that the classical world animated Joyce's defiant, innovative creativity and cannot be separated from what is now recognized as his modernist aesthetic. Responding to a long-standing critical paradigm that has viewed the classical world as a means of granting a coherent order, shape, and meaning to Joyce's modernist innovations, Leah Flack explores how and why Joyce's fiction deploys the classical as the language of the new. This study tracks Joyce's sensitive, on-going readings of classical literature from his earliest work at the turn of the twentieth century through to the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, the watershed year of high modernist writing. In these decades, Joyce read ancient and modern literature alongside one another to develop what Flack calls his classical modernist aesthetic, which treats the classical tradition as an ally to modernist innovation. This aesthetic first comes to full fruition in Ulysses, which self-consciously deploys the classical tradition to defend stylistic experimentation as a way to resist static, paralyzing notions of the past. Analysing Joyce's work through his career from his early essays, Flack ends by considering the rich afterlives of Joyce's classical modernist project, with particular attention to contemporary works by Alison Bechdel and Maya Lang.

1

Joyce’s Classical Passwords

In 1894–5, James Joyce and J.F. Byrne studied Latin in Father William Henry’s class at Belvedere College. Both Byrne and Father Henry ended up playing significant roles in Joyce’s fiction—Byrne is the biographical basis of Stephen’s friend Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Although Byrne dismissed his Belvedere teachers as being undeserving “of a high rating as a teacher,” Father Henry made a stronger impression on Joyce¹—he appears as Father Butler in “An Encounter” and as the unnamed rector in Portrait as the “representative of the powers which threaten to swallow Stephen’s individuality.”² In Father Henry’s Latin course, Joyce and Byrne translated Julius Caesar’s de Bello Gallico V, which appears at multiple pressure points in Joyce’s fiction. It also played a surprising role in Byrne’s future in a way that sheds light on the formative role of the classics in modernist innovation.

In 1918, two years after Joyce published Portrait, Byrne developed what he called the Chaocipher, a dynamic algorithm that he hoped eventually to sell to the US military. Over the years, he tried to lure code breakers and cryptologists into solving his Chaocipher. His most extensive attempt was his 1953 memoir, Silent Years: An Autobiography with Memoirs of James Joyce and Our Ireland, which was marketed as a reflection on his relationship with Joyce. However, the true ambition of the memoir becomes plain in its final chapters, which explain the history of the Chaocipher and offer a series of exhibits as examples. In his introduction to the Chaocipher, Byrne had, he notes, “discovered a method of doing something to the written word, in any language, which affected that written word so as to result in its chaotic disruption.”³ In a term that might be applied to Joyce’s late modernist work, particularly in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Byrne designated his cipher as the “chaotification of language.”⁴ He boasts that

In two respects my method for achieving the complete annihilation of order and design in written language is more noteworthy than the method for the disruption of the atom. First, because my method for splitting the word is so simple that it could be performed by any normal ten-year-old school child, and second, because, unlike any other process of explosion or disruption, my method of disrupting the written words is identical and simultaneous with the complete restoration of order and design in the same written words.⁵

Echoing Eliot’s description of Joyce’s mythical method as a “scientific discovery,” Byrne describes his method as both a disruption and a restoration of linguistic order and design.⁶ This code achieved a fundamental human ambition: to write a message “in such a way as to be wholly unintelligible to anyone except the person or persons to whom these thoughts were intended to be exclusively addressed.”⁷ The problem for Byrne was, no one ever solved his code, and the US military repeatedly declined to purchase his Chaocipher.

In the final years of his life, Byrne used his history with Joyce as a kind of lure to entice Joyce’s readers into trying to crack his code. His book ends with examples of the code—including a coded version of the Latin de Bello Gallico—and a promise of a $5,000 cash prize to anyone who solved it. In January 1947, he described his project to Constantine Curran in the following way: “I am doing a book, largely reminiscent, and including something about Jim Joyce. But the one real purpose I have in writing the book is to make one last effort to ‘put over’ my cipher system which I invented twenty-eight years ago.”⁸ One early reviewer picked up on Byrne’s intent and argued, “[h]e did see Joyce plain, but he keeps blocking the reader’s view of him, although the block maybe is as interesting as the view.”⁹ Taking Byrne’s work alongside Joyce’s reveals a curious byproduct of the classical education they both received—the disciplinary structure of institutional Latin propelled both toward becoming authors of classical codes that communities of code breakers, a century later, continue trying to solve. Joyce’s modernist writing and Byrne’s cipher emerge as different types of modernist classical codes.

As Byrne did, Joyce returns to his classical education to show the process by which he arrived at his own form of linguistic “chaotification.” Joyce’s scenes of classical pedagogy show how and why he arrived at the radical verbal and stylistic experimentation that is central to what we understand to be his particular brand of modernist innovation, one that depends on the classical tradition to enact both a disruption and a restoration of order. Joyce’s early scenes of classical learning show that his turn toward a modernist aesthetic was not an inevitability but rather resulted from an ongoing, intensive engagement with classical languages, literature, and culture and from his reaction to the enforcers of classical knowledge in modern Ireland, which he associated with the Catholic Church, the British Empire, and a repressive, disciplinary contemporary Irish society. Tracking Joyce’s depiction of classical education and his strategic deployment of Latin and Greek in his early fiction reveals the essential role the classical tradition played in his creation of an artistic agenda defined by aesthetic complexity, stylistic experimentation, and social rebellion.

Joyce’s fictional depictions of the classical pedagogical relationship anticipate the ways that the classical world offers a set of passwords that form interpretive communities in his era and our own. Joyce’s depiction of the disciplinary exclusivity of the classics may be viewed as part of a larger cultural trend in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where increasing social mobility endowed the classics, which had long served as a symbol of social status, with increased value for an aspirant class. Samuel Johnson identified this commodification of the classics when he wrote, “Greek … is like lace; every man gets as much of it as he can.”¹⁰ Joyce’s use of classical allusion subversively extends a process Kenneth Haynes identifies as central to the cultural deployment of allusions in Victorian literature, which serve as “passwords, code phrases, shibboleths to assert one’s membership in the class of gentlemen.”¹¹ As Paul Valéry noted of his classical education, “we only develop that which (according to the conventions) identifies a class and that which enables us to move and navigate within a restricted circle—as passwords, for Greek and Latin are no more than passwords. There’s no question of actually knowing them.”¹² Rather than demanding knowledge as a prerequisite to assert one’s class status, Joyce’s allusions seem to have the opposite effect: they demand that readers manage and respond to ambiguity and uncertainty. Joyce’s classical allusions serve as passwords that have the effect of creating a readerly community by inviting, if not demanding, a reading process that depends on both responding to open-ended classical riddles and engaging in dialogue with other readers about persistently indeterminate solutions. Although some readers have postulated that this indeterminacy signals Joyce’s deferral of meaning to a later, better audience, I agree with John Nash, that Joyce’s work addresses the problem of specific, local, contemporary audiences throughout his work.¹³ Extending Nash’s work to include Joyce’s reading and deployment of classics suggests that Joyce’s classical enigmas anticipated and scrutinized the reading practices of local, contemporary audiences.

Joyce’s scenes of classical education and representations of Jesuit Latin teachers scrutinize a system in which classical languages are passwords testifying to obedience to the edicts of a Roman Catholic community dominated by the British Empire. In what follows, I am interested in the ways in which Joyce’s early writings subversively reconfigure classical passwords to construct a community of rebellious critique of Catholic and imperial orders. Joyce’s fiction self-consciously depicts the formation of communities who are adept at navigating and deploying classical passwords as an expression of shared values. A resistance to closed, imposed value systems unites this interpretive community. As such, it anticipates its own reception. Consciously or not, twenty-first century Joyceans perpetuate Joyce’s classical passwords—students in courses studying Ulysses quickly become aware of their presence when they are instructed to read “Telemachus,” open their copy of Ulysses, and see no such chapter heading. By the end of their study of the novel, they demonstrate their fluency in this system of classical passwords by finishing not chapter 18 of Joyce’s novel, but rather “Penelope.”

Mimicry, Laughter, and Joyce’s Jesuits

Joyce’s scenes of classical pedagogy evaluate classical pedagogy as a framework for forming communities around a shared recognition of mutually repressed, transgressive knowledge. An anecdote from his schooldays illustrates this process. In January 1898, the fifteen-year-old Joyce was cast in the role of a schoolmaster in F. Anstey’s Vice Versa at Belvedere College. Deviating from his scripted role, he seized his moment on stage to burlesque Father William Henry, his Latin teacher. As Joyce’s classmate recalled, “he carried on, often for five minutes at a time, with the pet sayings of the Rector, imitating his gestures and mannerisms.”¹⁴ For example, Father Henry frequently called out students who could not confidently answer Roman history questions by name and made them stand. Joyce’s impersonation overshadowed the play—his classmates, his castmates, and even Father Henry all “received the performance with hysterical glee.”¹⁵ This schoolboy performance illustrates Joyce’s playfully subversive approach to his classical education—the performance of Vice Versa offered Joyce the occasion to inhabit and subvert the position of his Jesuit teacher in order to generate a kind of rebellious laughter that cut across power differences to unite his audience.

Joyce’s imitation of his teacher falls under the heading of what R.J. Schork has called “the parser’s revenge.” As Schork observes, Joyce spent much of his career thumbing his nose at the kinds of expertise enforced by his Catholic Latin teachers and he used his art to enact revenge:

A parser exacts his retribution when he is able to manipulate his use of Latin so well that even those with some facility in the ancient tongue begin to suspect that the arcane grammar and syntax are being cleverly turned against them. What was, in the classroom, touted as the linguistic instrument of logic has been transformed, in the artist’s forge, into a medium of subterfuge, burlesque and adroit vocabulary or structural legerdemain.¹⁶

This process of transformation is one crucial part of the radical and influential experimentation that defines Joyce’s art more generally. This process is not revenge for its own sake, a settling of scores years after the fact. Rather, his fiction suggests that subterfuge and manipulation could in fact erode power hierarchies to form communities of critique. Joyce’s readers join his classmates in a kind of usefully subversive laughter at the figure of the rigid, demanding Latin teacher.

This laughter anticipates the subversive, carnivalesque energy of Joyce’s later writing in its engagement with the classics. M.M. Bakhtin’s analysis of laughter offers helpful context:

Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it.¹⁷

Joyce’s mimicry and rewriting of the classics enlivens the analytic energy of his writing. Classical education serves as a useful target precisely because it serves as a medium of social, sexual, cultural, and religious regulation and domination. In this system, knowledge of the classics serves as a marker not only of cultural prestige but also of obedience to regulation. When Joyce moves from an analytic evaluation of the classical pedagogical relationship toward using classical figures and languages to subvert the system of regulation structured by that relationship, he moves into a more radically experimental aesthetic.

In Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce uses the figure of the Jesuit classics teacher to scrutinize both the explicit and latent sociocultural dimensions of the pedagogical relationship. This relationship appears on its surface to demand a mutual and strict disciplinary adherence to Catholic moral and social codes, but it actually unites teacher and student in a barely repressed reco...