Re Joyce in James Joyce Reading Group

Oct 17, 2017 Bob R Bogle rated it really liked it

Shelves: all-things-joyce

In RE JOYCE well-known James Joyce enthusiast Anthony Burgess (in his youth when ULYSSES was still banned he cut the book into pieces which he taped to his body under his clothing to smuggle it into England) enthuses at length about his literary hero. Nothing wrong with that. Burgess has acted upon an impulse shared with many a Joyce enthusiast. My first question about RE JOYCE is: Who is Burgess' intended audience? The answer is Burgess himself and, to a slightly lesser degree, others who are a In RE JOYCE well-known James Joyce enthusiast Anthony Burgess (in his youth when ULYSSES was still banned he cut the book into pieces which he taped to his body under his clothing to smuggle it into England) enthuses at length about his literary hero. Nothing wrong with that. Burgess has acted upon an impulse shared with many a Joyce enthusiast. My first question about RE JOYCE is: Who is Burgess' intended audience? The answer is Burgess himself and, to a slightly lesser degree, others who are already likewise committed enthusiasts. "My book," Burgess tells us, "does not pretend to scholarship, only to a desire to help the average reader who wants to know Joyce's work but has been scared off by the professors." I grant Burgess does not emphasize the literarity of Joyce's works, but frankly I've never encountered an "average reader" of ULYSSES or FINNEGANS WAKE, and I doubt that many Joyce enthusiasts anywhere would ever be deterred by even the most formidable pack of hydrophobic academicians; in truth, most either are or have been academicians themselves or at least are more than comfortable in the presence of same, even if only encountered in the printed pages continuously churned out by the Joyce criticism machine.

Excepting the opening and closing chapters, Burgess in RE JOYCE engages in charming confabulation about nearly all of Joyce's oeuvre, providing, from a devotee's perspective, an interpretive retelling of what happens in Joyce's fiction from DUBLINERS onward. A fresh-minted undergrad working on a class paper on DUBLINERS or A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN might crack open RE JOYCE in search of guidance to this famous Modern writer of naturalism. But as Joyceans are made by reading ULYSSES (only a small fraction of them going on to the WAKE), Burgess' readers will already be rather well-informed about much of the content of his book, this can't really be a guide for the general public. Fortunately, Burgess gives us much to think about.

Reflecting upon Joyce's painstaking meticulosity when sculpting in the Word, let's consider some of what Burgess has to say. Beginning with his conceptualization of epiphanies, Joyce forever labored to "manipulate the commonplaces of language into a new medium that should shock the reader into a new awareness" and so expose the numinous in its quotidian setting. The evolution of Joyce's textual voice on the way to ULYSSES, and the masterful level of artistic control required in its achievement, demonstrates that his kneading of style is not an affectation but a means to a desired artistic end. Citing a famous example, Burgess points out that, increasingly self-identifying in the last chapters of PORTRAIT with the fabulous artificer, Stephen Dedalus nevertheless skates out of that novel as more of a retrogressive Icarus in search of a father, conflating the mortal father-son relationship with the one of more pressing concern to the Church and pointing the way to Joyce's follow-up novel. Joyce assigned relevant bodily organs to most of the episodes of ULYSSES not to pile up allusive layers but to bring forth the equivalent of an ad hoc human body in his creative work, making him a Dr Frankenstein with a difference.

I'm grateful a few important points are raised in RE JOYCE that are seldom mentioned or recognized by self-signifying Joyceans. For one thing, although the Circe episode of ULYSSES is almost universally spoken of in terms of hallucinations, Burgess rightly observes that the visions "are coming from without, are summoned by the author's own magic . . . this huge dramatic exercise is not dramatic at all." Whose hallucinations? Bloom's? Stephen's? Joyce's. Concerning style, some who do not favor Joyce object to his use of symbolism, finding it far too pervasive and pretentious. Burgess allows that " . . . those critics who hate verbal ambiguities tend to love sharp visual images, and Joyce . . . has been repeatedly attacked for the low visibility of his writing." Inevitably this begs the question of whether Joyce's wrote more to appeal to the ear than to the eye as a consequence of his life-long poor vision. But even more than the ear, Joyce's writing appeals to the cerebral cortex, and his prose can seem particularly cold compared to that of other writers. If it is so, as Burgess says, that "the fundamental purpose of any work of art is to impose order on the chaos of life" (a more sustainable postulate, I think, than AE's vortical claim that "the supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring"), then Joyce's extensive use of weight-bearing symbols (or at least an intricately interlaced motif network) under his strata of naturalism is there for the glorification of his art: a view which we who are not naysayers and ruffians reflexively attacking verbal ambiguities embrace. A broader we, descendants of serial pop-culture generations no longer apprehending a distinction between art and entertainment, its vision atrophied to such a degree that it can only ask of an artistic or recreational exhibition: _What is this about?_ and not _How does this reflect the human condition?_, may accordingly leave vulgar, one-star reviews of Joyce at Amazon, frustrated by his copious verbal ambiguities instead of marveling over the limitless possibilities they open up for us. Of these ambiguities, of Joyce's insistence on loading words with multiple, often contradictory referents, Burgess reminds us that they are "all artistically legitimate . . . they all seem to aim at a mode of communication rather than a wanton muffling or quelling of sense." The mundane insistence on one word/one meaning locks us into a much smaller world than the one Joyce inhabited . . . and a world, one might add, easily exploited by sordid politicians and those with degrees in marketing.

What of FINNEGANS WAKE? Some, Burgess points out, "were inclined to desert him as a man who was going further than was either sane or decent." Indeed, it's often a challenge for even ULYSSES devotes to find the courage to take on the WAKE. Is the book explicable? Is it sane? The gulf separating Joyce's last two books is so grand that we have to make a leap of faith; that is to say, we have to ask ourselves whether Joyce has earned our trust in him to not waste our time as readers, to believe that the WAKE must indeed be sane and sensible despite the evidence that is manifestly to the contrary. No one, Burgess wisely points out, "writes a book of six hundred and twenty-eight pages (especially a man with Joyce's lack of sight, wealth and encouragement) for the sake of pure play and sheer irreverence." Hints of what's to come may be found retrospectively. In the conflict between angels and devils (Michael Furey and Gabriel Conroy) lurking beneath "The Dead" we detect the eternal brother battle between Shem and Shaun in the WAKE, and even "Grace" begins with a fall not wholly unlike that experienced repeatedly by HCE. Likewise, a clever Burgess detects manifestations of Shem, Shaun and Issy in the characters of Richard Rowan, Robert Hand and Bertha in EXILES. As Leopold Bloom finally succumbs to sleep with dissolving thoughts of Tinbad the Tailor and Sinbad the Sailor, we find in the WAKE the sailor who seeks a new suit of clothes from the tailor and ends up marrying his daughter. A great deal more of ULYSSES may be found in the WAKE as well, of course, because Joyce was always a writer who plowed under his previous works and experiences to fertilize his next crop of written words. Joyce "set himself the task of creating exact and inevitable language for the conceivable as well as the actual, and . . . FINNEGANS WAKE is an exercise in rendering the almost inconceivable."

Burgess' framing chapters are the best in the book. In the opening chapters before we get to DUBLINERS he informs us the popular novel didn't yet exist when Joyce was writing ULYSSES and puts Joyce in his proper time and proper perspective. We get a handy list of holidays Joyceans might celebrate. And Joyce's democratic subject matter is bound in a nutshell: "Ordinary people, living in an ordinary city, are invested in the riches of the ages, and these riches are enshrined in language, which is available to everybody." Such insights, and their expression, make Burgess a worthy read. And in the book's closing he says of Joyce: "when we have read him and absorbed even an iota of his substance, neither literature nor life can ever be quite the same again."

He is quite right.
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