Subaltern Joyce?

When I was in school James Joyce was much feared by English majors. Without having read any of his books, I presumed that he was an affected, snobbish, Ezra-Poundish pedant leaching off the declining aristocracy. For this and other reasons, I didn't get very far in English and never did read Joyce until much later. English departments were odd places in those days too, but in a different way than today -- full of nostalgia for scholasticism, the knights of old, and the Confederate States of America. (I finally made up my mind to study something else when the Melville expert, while he in the process of explaining that Billy Budd really deserved to get his lovely neck snapped, started looking at me in a sort of funny way.)

It's a pity about Joyce though. I am a pedant myself now anyway, and I realize that I was all wrong. I still have read only so much of his stuff, but I haven't found any trace of the snobbery and right-wing sentiments that make many other authors of the period unappealing. His protagonist (and self-portrait) Stephen Dedalus is portrayed as a stiff, prickly sort, but not as a social-climbing snob or aesthete, and in any case Joyce's detached portrayal of the sometimes rather unappealing Stephen makes you suspect that he was not completely happy with his own younger self. In what I've read so far, Joyce's characters are all middle class or below, and while an air of enormous unfulfillment and anticlimax pervades what I've seen, it's not the kind of thing which would be alleviated by marrying a duchess, living in a castle, and having servants.

Joyce started as a realist and, amazingly, apparently an Ibsenist. All of his work, before Finnegans Wake anyway, kept to the realist program of portraying reality unsentimentally and as it really is. What was missing was Ibsenist reformism -- the belief of other Ibsenists, notably George Bernard Shaw, that an accurate portrayal of a situation might lead to its improvement. Joyce had no apparent right-wing sympathies and in his early life developed a sad and very thorough familiarity with the common people (from which he came), but he seemingly found no hope in politics of any kind.

Joyce's characters are snuffy and ordinary and their stories are sad and anti-climactic. In "Araby" a kid wants terribly to go to a fair but only gets there when everything's closing down. Nothing happens in "The Dead", except that the husband unexpectedly finds out that his wife of many years had never really loved him. In one story a singer has aspirations, but we know that it's already too late for her. In the Portrait Stephen's father vaguely hopes that Stephen will be a great half-miler, but no one really believes it. The dead Parnell is honored, but no one takes his place. Even if there is a bit of drama, it does not rise to tragedy but is just sort of awful (as the snotty young Stephen pointed out in a general philosophical way).

The oddest twist in the Joyce story is the third-world Joyce. Ireland was a British colony during most of Joyce's life, and Joyce accurately portrays the paradoxes of the dual economy. The English characters have property, and the Irish have debts. The English characters get what they pay for, and the Irish characters borrow.

Stephen's employer, Mr. Deasy: "Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth? .... I will tell you: 'I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life'....Can you say that?" Stephen then mentally counts up his debts to ten different people -- the largest to his friend Buck Mulligan (whom he dislikes intensely.) The Englishman Haines, a Celticist whom they sponge off of and mostly dislike, reminds them to pay the old woman who brings the milk every day. She keeps her accounts quaintly in her head: "Well it's seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling and one and two is two and two sir". They short her twopence and that's fine: "Time enough, she said, taking the coin". A debtor herself, she could only be indulgent to her fellows. Multiply it out, and you have a whole colony.

An central theme of Joyce's, unexpected by me at least, is love. The only character I've seen so far whom Joyce clearly despised is "Mr. James Duffy", a leftist-Nietszchean bachelor (George Bernard Shaw?) who, on general principles, rejects the love of the unhappily-married Mrs. Sinico, and we saw above that loss of love is also the theme of "The Dead". What Joyce found lacking in modern life, so it seems, was not elegance, nobility, drama, or excitement, but love.

Even at the beginning Joyce was tired of the traditional fictional ways. He writes what people see, hear, say, think and feel. You don't get the normal explanations, descriptions, and narrative setups. The stories barely have plots, aren't exciting, and don't wrap up tidily. You're reading about a world in which the characters themselves are having problems finding the meaning, and Stephen Dedalus's struggles in this respect are exhaustively portrayed. The author is just as present in Joyces's works as he is in stories which are more conventionally plotted and told, but what the author is telling us is far different.

Joyce's inability to engage himself in the kinds of stories written by earlier novelists (even Flaubert) is philosophical. Stephen's Thomist education tended to devalue particulars in the face of the philosophical and religious universals. Joyce's naturalistic modernism also tended to unfocus storytelling. Ultimately Joyce ended up folding everything he knew into one archetypal universal story, really a non-story, Finnegans Wake.

Originally I was going to insert a bit from Finnegans Wake here, along with my own moral ofthe story: "In the end Joyce lost it." But if you read it as the book of a sad, sweet, learned man who had lost all faith in the given meanings and was just farting around, Finnegans Wake isn't that bad: "Didn't you spot her in her windaug, wubbling up on an osiery chair, with a meusic before her all cunniform letters, pretending to ribble a reedy derg on a fiddle she bogan without a band on? Sure she can't fiddan a dee, with bow or abandon! Sure, she can't! Tista suck. Well, I never now heard the like of that! Tell me moher. Tell me moatst".

So anyway, it's a pity I didn't read Joyce long ago. I blame the teachers. Perhaps someone reading this will end up giving Joyce the second look he deserves.