James Joyce and Modern Literature

W. J. McCormack, Alistair Stead, W. J. McCormack, Alistair Stead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317287285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection, first published in 1982, brings together thirteen writers from a wide variety of critical traditions to take a fresh look at Joyce and his crucial position not only in English literature but in modern literature as a whole. Comparative views of his work include reflections on his relations to Shakespeare, Blake, MacDiarmid, and the Anglo-Irish revival.

Essays, story and poems all combine to celebrate the major constituents of Joyce's work – his imagination and comedy, his exuberant use of language, his relation to the history of his country and his age, and his passionate commitment to 'a more veritably human tradition'. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

1 JOYCE'S ‘DUBLINERS’ AND THE FUTILITY OF MODERNISM

William A. Johnsen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315643861-2

Yeats says that [Swift] made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as himself. [¹]

James Joyce's quarrel with Grant Richards over the publication of ‘Dubliners’ has been well documented; [²] if the year from April 1906 through the following summer which saw the completion of The Dead became for Joyce a period of increasing frustration, for Joyce critics it plots the circumstances which forced Joyce to defend and finally reconsider his intentions, spelled out in the year-long series of letters to Richards and his brother Stanislaus Joyce. Over a period of two years, ‘Dubliners’ had grown from a projected series of ten ‘epicleti’ in August 1904 (‘Letters’, I, p. 55) through the twelve stories first submitted to Richards in late 1905, to the fourteen-story collection that Joyce began defending against Richards's censures on 26 April 1906 (‘Letters’, I, pp. 60–1), without essentially altering Joyce's conception of the book's overall pattern. Thus the oft-quoted [³] 5 May 1906 letter to Richards mainly consolidates earlier statements about the shape and motive of ‘Dubliners’: its style of scrupulous meanness and fourfold division into childhood, adolescence, mature and public life (‘Letters’, II, p. 134). Most readings of ‘Dubliners’ count heavily on these letters, but it is not easy to rationalise Joyce's addition, a year after these letters, of a story which replaces Grace to become a new ending to the collection, [⁴] written in a style not scrupulously mean. While all readers recognise Gabriel's kinship to earlier Dubliners, there is no real consensus about the meaning of Gabriel's ‘journey westward’ for ‘Dubliners’ as a whole. Although many infer the motive for The Dead in Joyce's remorseful remark to Stanislaus (25 September 1906) that he had not reproduced in his stories Ireland's ‘ingenous insularity’ and ‘hospitality (‘Letters’, II, p. 166), Joyce himself conceded in that same letter that the perverse devil of his literary conscience wouldn’t allow him to write in any other way.

Yet these letters, followed closely, adumbrate the rethinking of ‘Dubliners’ enacted in the addition of The Dead. Further, the shift from the attitude embodied in a style of scrupulous meanness, to the attitude worked out in the composition of The Dead, enabled Joyce to begin immediately the revision of ‘Stephen Hero’ into ‘A Portrait’ which, one might say, remembering how Pound used ‘A Portrait’ to ‘make’ Joyce, made Joyce possible for modern art. We might also argue that this is the moment of modernism, when Joyce modernised himself.

But the postmodern rejection of the ideology of modernism requires all of us who honour the fine and sensitive work of Yeats, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot and Joyce, to adopt a more critical regard for the modern tradition.

Flaubert is the great prototype of self-modernisation. His friends censured his early work as passé romanticism, derivative (the worst sin in nineteenth-century France is to imitate), and urged him to modernise his style with an ironic portrait of a sordid provincial adulteress. Inadvertently, they crystallised Flaubert's critical understanding of the untenable situation of the ‘modern’ writer, who must remodernise himself over and over again by deconstructing his previous styles. The narrator of ‘Madame Bovary’ is in a double bind, torn between two opposed choices: to sympathise with Emma's futile romanticism, which is recognised as self-destructive by anyone who has learned the bitter discipline of modernisation, or to regard her ironically, from a distance, and therefore keep companv with those masters of style – Rodolphe, Lheureux, and Homais.[⁵] As I have argued elsewhere, the great modern writers understood critically the ideology of modernism. [⁶]

In fact, we will come to identify Joyce's earlier style of scrupulous meanness, of satire, as one of two poles of modernism understood as a system of futile oppositions: an interminable process of regressive purifications, alternating with a series of increasingly sentimental and remorseful surrenders to impurity. Dear dirty Dublin. Joyce's writing of The Dead, and the revision of ‘Stephen Hero’ into ‘A Portrait’, reveal to us how Joyce, like the other major modern writers, worked his way out of the futility of modernism.

On 19 July 1905, Joyce speculated to Stanislaus about what Irish readers would see in his stories:

The Dublin papers will object to my stories as to a caricature of Dublin life. Do you think there is any truth in this? At times the spirit directing my pen seems to me so plainly mischievous that I am almost prepared to let the Dublin critics have their way. All these pros and cons I must for the nonce lock up in my bosom. Of course do not think that I consider contemporary Irish writing anything but ill-written, morally obtuse formless caricature. (‘Letters’, II, p. 99)

The word caricature performs a double service in this letter, representing on the one hand the failure of moral and artistic understanding, which becomes a mockery of true morality and art. On the other hand, caricature is one form that the spirit which directs Joyce's pen can take to mock obtuse morality and the formlessness of contemporary Irish writing: a caricature of a caricature. The pros and cons of caricature are locked up for the moment, but this uncertainty about the form and motive of the stories reveals itself throughout Joyce's letters to Grant Richards, beginning later, in 1905.

On 15 October 1905 Joyce captiously drew Richards's attention to ‘the special odour of corruption which, I hope, floats over my stories’ (‘Letters’, II, p. 123), but six months later retreated in the face of Richards's growing alarm to defend a book written ‘with considerable care’, ‘in accordance with what I understand to be the classical tradition of my art’ (‘Letters’, I, p. 60). Thus on 5 May 1906, Joyce carefully defended the organisation, style, and motive of ‘Dubliners’:

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. (‘Letters’, II, p. 134)

Joyce contrasts the uncompromising discipline of his work with Irish paralysis, and his intention to write a chapter of moral history, with the indifference of the general public. Further, Joyce now defends the sordidness of subject and style as realistic truth: meanness is the character and quality of Dublin life. Yet we can hear reservations in this letter also, which echo more loudly when we hear them repeated in later letters. Every sentence but one is qualified: ‘my intention was’, ‘that city seemed to me’, ‘I have tried to present,’ ‘for the most part written’ (my underlining).

Joyce's higher argument is crossed by reservations throughout his correspondence. On 20 May he emphasised again to Richards the moral commitment behind his diagnosis of Dublin (and, in the next sentence, gave it away):

in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step toward the spiritual liberation of my country. Reflect for a moment on the history of the literature of Ireland as it stands at present written in the English language before you condemn this genial illusion of mine which, after all, has at least served me in the office of a candlestick during the writing of the book. (‘Letters’, I, pp. 62–3)

Taken by themselves, each reservation seems proper self-deprecation. Read in sequence, these apparently playful self-mockeries spell out Joyce's unresolved reservations about ‘Dubliners’. On 26 June 1906, Joyce defended once again to Richards the sordidness of the book, but now it is clear that he stresses a self-critical awareness of the narrative technique of Stephen Daedalus, ‘author’ of The Sisters, Eveline, After the Race, and ironic hero of the autobiographical novel he is writing at the same time:

I send you a Dublin paper by this post. It is the leading satirical paper of the Celtic nations, corresponding to Punch or Pasquino. I send it to you that you may see how witty the Irish are as all the world knows. The style of the caricaturist will show you how artistic they are: and you will see for yourself that the Irish are the most spiritual race on the face of the earth. Perhaps this may reconcile you to Dubliners. It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass. (‘Letters’, I, pp. 63–4)

Joyce first hoped in October that this odour floated over his stories, but now, eight months later, he pleads innocence by reason of general paralysis of the Irish. He no longer argues that a sordid subject requires a sordid style. The sordidness of Irish life infects the style of the caricaturist as well. Now, Joyce admits the kinship of the narrator to the paralysed citizens of Dublin in general, with the single distinction that he would offer the Irish a good look at themselves in the scrupulously polished looking-glass (the style which he first defended as the agent of moral judgment of the Irish) wherein he has ultimately recognised his own paralysis. Joyce's stories are admittedly imbued with the odour of ashpits, old weeds, and offal because the narrative point of view, the style of ‘Dubliners’ embodies (even as it tries to purge itself of) the sordidness it depicts.

Joyce satirically suggests to Richards that he would better understand ‘Dub liners’ in relation to Irish satire. We have already looked at Joyce's fear that his pen is directed to caricature. It is likely that The Sisters began as a satire on the story A.E. (Russell) sent to Joyce as a model submission to the ‘Irish Homestead’: something ‘simple … so as not to shock the readers’ (‘Letters’, II, p. 43). Eveline is probably a satiric warning to Nora, who left Ireland with Joyce less than a month after the story was published. According to Stanislaus's diary, ‘Stephen Hero’ began as a family exercise in caricature: ‘the title, like the book, is satirical’.[⁷] Elsewhere in the diary, Stanislaus considers satire as an Irish birthright. [⁸] The author of ‘Et tu, Healy’ and ‘The Holy Office’ was steeped in the furious Dean of Satire. It is not, I think, extravagant, to hear behind Joyce's defence of his nicely polished looking-glass for the Irish, Swift's definition of satire as ‘a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body's Face but their Own’.[⁹]

Swift knew that readers will regard satire as a transparent medium, peering through the surface of the work to identify the satiric content within. Swift manipulates the reader's compulsion to read deeply. Each of his satires allows the reader to regard the work as transparent, to read it for content, only to have the glass suddenly change to a mirror, leaving the reader confronted with his own image, righteous, solemn, disdainful. ‘A Modest Proposal’ lures the reader into a rational approach to the population problem in Ireland, only to give the reader a good look at himself when the narrator logically concludes in cannibalism. Similarly, ‘Gulliver's Travels’ persuades the reader to Gulliver's point of view: man is petty (A Voyage to Lilliput), gross (A Voyage to Brobdingnag), foolish (A Voyage to Laputa), and obscene, excremental (A Voyage to the Houyhnhms). Led by Gulliver, the reader is progressively separated from other men, until only the smell of the stable is congenial. Glass becomes mirror: the absurdity of Gulliver reflects to the reader the absurdity of his own disdainful scrupulous regard, which has made him Gulliver's stablemate.

It is more than time to turn to the stories themselves. How does the fourteen-story collection recognise the narrator's kinship to the corruption he depicts, and how can this glass become mirror for the reader as well? The 1906 version of ‘Dubliners’ is an epiphany of a closed environment, a labyrinth without issue. Each character holds himself scrupulously above the crowd only to display, in a sudden revelation, his (or her) disengagement as a more perfect repetition of that sordid paralysis each tries to escape. Fastidious withdrawal, or remorseful attempts to put aside fastidiousness, establish his kinship to all Dubliners living and dead. The narrator, in turn, apparently withdraws in disdain from these victims of spiritual paralysis. In the first three stories, he disdains his own past selves; in the next eleven, he disdains others. As Yeats said of Swift, according to Stanislaus's Dublin diary, he makes a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as himself.

Yet this narrator also reveals a longing to return, to be nearer to paralysis, to look again upon its deadly work. The narrator's sin is his pride in his power of choice; he can put aside his purity, and he can purify himself again. The distance between narrator and subject is fictional: he adopts a style that assumes narrative distance in order to close more safely with every nuance of corruption, to map the distinctive features of the general paralysis of the insane. The first three stories, where first-person narration identifies the narrator as the protagonist, establish the kinship of the narrator with other Dubliners, and prepare the reader to see himself ‘seeing’ in Joyce's looking-glass.

The Sisters introduces ‘Dubliners’ recurrent pattern of ingenious entrapment. The young narrator was coached in the commercial culture of Dublin by Old Cotter. ‘When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery’ (‘Dubliners’, p. 10). Father Flynn has seduced the boy from the simple pleasures of childhood and the spectacle of Dublin's commerce by special tutoring in the complexities of the Mass and correct pronunciation of Latin. He encourages the boy to feel that he is intellectually and spiritually set apart from the others. The boy's progressively disdainful aloofness from Old Cotter, his aunt and uncle, is chronicled in his shift of pronouns: ‘We once found him interesting, but I soon grew tired.’

Father Flynn's death abruptly returns the boy to the common crowd. He can no longer serve as surrogate altar-boy; now he must remain outside the sanctuary in the street, reading the card announcing Father Flynn's death in the low company of two poor women and a telegram boy. When he accompanies his aunt to view the corpse, he passively submits to the commonplace pieties of the sisters. ‘My aunt took me …. Nannie received us … beckoned us ….began to beckon me’ (‘Dubliners’, p. 14). ‘We waited respectfully for [Eliza] to break the silence’ (‘Dubliners’, p. 17). ‘I declined [crackers] because I thought I would make too much noise eating them’ (‘Dubliners’, p. 15). ‘I approached the table and tasted my sherry and then turned quietly to my chair in the corner’ (‘Dubliners’, p. 17).

Critics have generally followed Marvin Magalaner's early reading that the boy denies the Church by refusing Eliza's symbolic Mass of cream sherry and crackers; [¹⁰] more shrewdly, Edward Brandabur has distinguished Eliza's Mass of conventional experience from Father Flynn's perverse Mass – the boy refuses Eliza because he prefers perversity over conventionality. [¹¹] Yet the boy himself does not recognise the crackers and sherry as ritual Mass – he refuses the crackers because he does not want to call attention to himself. This meal, contrast...