A Preface to James Joyce

Second Edition

Sydney Bolt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582437616
• eBook ISBN: 9781317874454
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This new edition includes material on Joyce's distinctive view of femininity and a greatly expanded treatment of Finnegan's Wake. The first section outlines the biographical and cultural background, the second offers a detailed critical survey of three major works, including Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the third section provides valuable reference material.

Part One

The Writer and His Setting

Chronological table

	JOYCE’S LIFE	BACKGROUND EVENTS
1882	Born Dublin	Henrick Ibsen, An Enemy of the People
1884	Birth of Stanislaus Joyce	Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
1885		Emile Zola, Germinal Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean
1886		A. Rimbaud, Les Illuminations
1888	Enrolled in Clongowes Wood College	Death of Matthew Arnold
1890		Fall of Parnell
1891	Withdrawn from Clongowes Wood	Gauguin settles in Tahiti
1892		Death of Tennyson
1893	Joyce family moves to Dublin
1894		George Moore, Esther Waters
1895		W. B. Yeats, Poems
1896		Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
1898	Enters University College, Dublin	Death of Stéphane Mallarmé
1899		The Boer War
1900	Article, ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, in the Fortnightly Review	Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams Death of Oscar Wilde
1901	‘The Day of the Rabblement’	W. B. Yeats, George Russell et al., Ideals in Ireland Death of Queen Victoria
1902	Goes to study in Paris	End of the Boer War André Gide, L’Immoraliste
1903	Returns to Dublin Death of his mother	Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh Henry James, The Ambassadors G. B. Shaw, Man and Superman
1904	The Holy Office Elopement to Europe with Nora Barnacle	Joseph Conrad, Nostromo Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard Abbey Theatre founded
1905	Moves to Trieste Joined by Stanislaus Birth of son, George (Giorgio)	H. G. Wells, Kipps
1906	Moves to Rome
1907	Returns to Trieste Chamber Music published	Synge, The Playboy of the Western World Cubist Exhibition in Paris
1908	Birth of daughter, Lucia Anna	Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale
1909	Visits Dublin twice
1910	Returns to Trieste	The Futurist Manifesto
1912	Last visit to Dublin Gas from a Burner
1913	Contacted by Ezra Pound	Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
1914	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins serial publication in The Egoist Dubliners published Work started on Ulysses	Outbreak of First World War
1915	Moves to Zürich	Ezra Pound, Cathay
1916	Publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	Dadaist movement started in Zürich
1917	First eye operation	The Russian Revolution T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations
1918	Exiles published Ulysses starts serialisation in the Little Review	The Armistice Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
1919	Returns to Trieste
1920	Moves to Paris Little Review restrained from publishing Ulysses	Paul Valéry, Le Cimetière Marin
1922	Ulysses published in Paris	T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
1923		R. M. Rilke, The Duino Elegies
1924		E. M. Forster, A Passage to India André Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
1925		F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Franz Kafka, The Trial Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock J. Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
1926		T. Dreiser, An American Tragedy
1927	transition begins serial publication of Work in Progress Pomes Penyeach
1928		Death of Thomas Hardy W. B. Yeats, The Tower
1929	Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress	William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
1930	Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’	Death of D. H. Lawrence
1931	Marriage Death of his father
1932	Birth of his grandson Stephen	W. H. Auden, The Orators W. B. Yeats, The Winding Stair
1933	Ulysses permitted publication in USA
1934	Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’
1935		Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains
1937		Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée
1939	Finnegans Wake published	Outbreak of Second World War Death of W. B. Yeats
1940	Moves to Zürich
1941	Death in Zürich

1 Biographical background

Family

For the harassed individual James Joyce, art supplied a means of getting outside himself. After a placid early childhood he had to learn to escape distress by the deliberate employment of detachment. Distress entered his life in 1891, when he was nine years old and his father removed him from the expensive boarding school of Clongowes Wood. The following year, as a further economy, the family moved from the fashionable neighbourhood of Bray, where they had been living comfortably, into Dublin, where they were to live in increasing squalor. This was only the first of many such moves, each marking in its turn a further descent. The descent, however, was never regarded by John Joyce, the father, as social. He never ceased to have a high regard for himself as a gentleman, and James, his eldest son, inherited this hauteur.

Furthermore, the decline of the family fortunes was incorporated into the myth of Parnell, the haughty national leader with whose downfall it coincided. John Joyce had considerable private means, but the bulk of his income had been his salary from a lucrative although undemanding post in local government to which he had been appointed in 1880 in recognition of services to the Liberal Party. It was as a nationalist that he had rendered these services, and when his post was abolished he found it natural to associate his misfortune with the simultaneous martyrdom of Parnell.

John Joyce remained a staunch supporter of Parnell when the scandal of the leader’s adultery with Kitty O’Shea lost him the support of most of his followers. The theme of betrayal was thus frequently sounded in the Joyce household. Young James himself wrote a poem on the subject – ‘Et tu Healey’ – and did not fail to learn the lesson that heroes are stabbed in the back, a fate which he was too apt, if not even eager, himself to expect in later life. But he also derived from the same experience the more fruitful lesson that heroes have clay feet. The heroes of his fiction are anti-heroes, even when they are modelled on himself.

From then on the family atmosphere was clouded by anxieties about rents, loans, mortgages, sales and repayments; chilled by poverty; and poisoned by the moody temper of the father whose awareness of his family responsibilities led him to resent them rather than fulfil them. Never again to be permanently employed, he was still always ready to buy a drink. On one memorable occasion when his father came home drunk, James had to jump on his back to prevent him from attacking his mother. The latter’s patient suffering affected the boy ambiguously. It fostered disgust at the religion which demanded such self-sacrifice, together with a distrust of women as willing victims and instruments of bigotry. At the same time, however, it fostered a belief in mother love. As an adolescent he informed his brother that the only two constants in human nature were mother love in the female and in the male an ability to think well of himself. This view of men and women as cocks and hens remained with him from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. Implying as it does that the two sexes are non-comparable (although complementary), it complicates any attempt to claim Joyce’s support for feminism. This latter belief proved perfectly compatible with a belief in male superiority, as also in the existence of a totally different sort of female, the faithless temptress. This view of the untrustworthiness of women may have originated in the experience of a first-born who found his position as mother’s darling usurped by no less than nine successors (not counting three miscarriages).

Despite this early invitation to self pity and misery, Joyce’s ultimate view of the general process of decline and fall was comic. That this was so was due to the strange conjunction in his temperament of vitality with equanimity. His family nickname was ‘Sunny Jim’, and he had little (although he did have some) of the priggishness with which he endowed his fictional representative, Stephen Dedalus. The inflexibility belonged rather to his young brother, Stanislaus, whose moral view was consistently black and white. ‘I wish I could see now, or could have seen then,’ Stanislaus later protested, in My Brother’s Keeper, ‘the funny side of such happenings, as my brother did.’ (The happening in this instance was their father stopping on his drunken way home to play a barrel-organ in the street, an incident which James found entertaining.) Although noted for his aloof coldness, Joyce was popular at school and college, where he played a prominent role. His detachment did not quell his high spirits. Here again a comparison with Stephen in A Portrait is surprising. In the second chapter of the novel, a cunning schoolfellow tries to lure Stephen into mimicking the headmaster in the school play. In real life the young James Joyce seized the opportunity to do just that, as was afterwards recalled by one of those present.

Joyce, who was cast for the part of a master in the school play, ignored the role allotted to him and impersonated Father Henry. He carried on, often for five minutes at a time, with the pet sayings of the Rector, imitating his gestures and mannerisms. The other members of the cast collapsed with laughter on the stage – completely missing their cues and forgetting their parts – and the schoolboy audience received the performance with hysterical glee.

(U. O’Connor (ed.) The Joyce We Knew, Mercier 1967)

His uproarious laughter was notorious, and he was in demand at parties for his songs and his clowning.

Nor did he view his father simply as a figure of fun, much less as an object of contempt, as Stephen Dedalus regards his father in the novel. Once again, in this respect he had endowed his fictional counterpart with his brother’s traits. The scapegrace father was also a wit, a gifted storyteller and a singer. His eldest son appreciated these accomplishments no less than his cronies did in Dublin bars. To those who might censure him in his reduced circumstances John Joyce’s response was ironical mockery which reduced them in their turn. His stance was that of one who, having lived among heroes, was in a position to give you the lowdown on their puny successors. This view – that to get at the truth means to expose a sham – was central to the literary art of his son. Hostility to the smug, contempt for the respected, and a sceptical realism are postures readily adopted in a family that has come down in the world. In Stanislaus this attitude led to aggressive anti-clericalism and radicalism. As regards politics, James retained an interest in socialism at least until the 1914 war, but his fundamental principle was one of self-centredness. He was interested in the truth more because he believed it would set his mind free, than because it could be used as a weapon against the enemies of the people. As for Christianity and the Church, his attitude to both was always more appreciative than hostile, although totally sceptical – in keeping, indeed, with his attitude to most things. (The youthful refusal to go to Mass at Easter, attributed to Stephen in A Portrait, was in fact a gesture of Stanislaus, which his elder brother advised against in the interest of peace and quiet.)

The most marked characteristic of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait is his isolation. Self-centred though he undoubtedly was, Joyce himself was well supplied with companions, both as a boy and as a young man, and his family was not excluded from intimacy with him. It is impossible to imagine the young man in the novel trying to share his literary enthusiasms with his mother, or submitting a play he had written to his father’s approval, but Joyce did both. Stanislaus was an eager participant in his development, half proud, half resentful of his role as ‘whetstone’, on which the elder brother (whom he already admired as a genius), sharpened new ideas before using them to dazzle peers and rivals. Although he feared it, Joyce’s sense of the family bond was deep and keen. In 1902 he broke free and went to Paris, only to rush home the following year at the news of his mother’s fatal illness. Beside the deathbed, when she was already unconscious, James and his brother refused to obey a command to kneel, but another incident shows that his heart was too tender to put principle before sympathy. Finding his nine-year-old sister in tears he sat on the stairs with his arm round her, and told her that as their mother was now in heaven watching them it was a mistake to spoil her happiness by crying, while it would please her if one prayed.

If Joyce failed the family he was born into, it was not in feeling but in action. As the eldest son and brightest hope, he might have been expected to shoulder the responsibilities his father could not bear. For several years, however, it had become increasingly clear that he was not aiming at a recognised career. At school he had been a prize pupil, but at university, although he did not fail his courses, he concentrated his studies on those writers – some modern and little known, others ancient and barely remembered – who served his idiosyncratic interests. When he left university as a poet, author of several prose pieces, and inventor of an aesthetic theory, he had already decided that his sole duty was to his art. In 1904, at the age of 22, he again left Ireland and this time, except for three brief and unsatisfactory interludes, his exile was to be permanent. Even so, the break with his family was more apparent than real. Before long he sent for Stanislaus to join him, and, a little later, invited a sister as well.

More significantly, he had abandoned one family only to set up anothe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One The Writer and His Setting
• Part Two Critical Survey
• Part Three Reference Section
• Bibliography
• Index